Brief Update

I’ve not done a lot of traveling of late but that’s not all bad. (Huppy is of course gallivanting about the Caribbean again.) I’ve been busy building up a client base here in southwest Wisconsin. Two of them have kept me more than a little busy.

First, the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, MN needed an annual report a brochure and some posters.

And second, and the biggest deal, was a project for the Hillview Urban Agriculture Center here in La Crosse. I started working on designs for the thing back in May and the final product was finally printed a few weeks ago. It’s a fundraising magazine for Hillview and is all about the local food system here; it’s history, what Hillview and others provide for the community and where they hope to take it all into the future.  Give it a looksee. (Hint: You’ll want to move here after you see it.)

I finally get back to my computer to do what I want to do and what’s the first thing I crank out? This!

CHENEY_FIRE

(You might recognize the original drawing from the set of tarot cards I did. I really felt that Mr. Cheney need an update, based on the recent release of the torture report and his “defense” of it. Uff da. Why aren’t any of those bozos incarcerated?)

Dave vs. Obamacare

This story neither supports nor vilifies the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare.” Though, as a backdrop for a crazy story, you couldn’t ask for anything better. I mean, it’s a law that was ostensibly passed to give millions of Americans access to affordable healthcare, something every other country on the planet already has. Unfortunately, what Americans actually got was another massive bureaucracy with a comically messy rollout, a bungling mishigas of code and, thus far, a lot of empty promises. It’s an awesome allegory, a brilliant metaphor, a wonderfully parallel story arc, or whatever the writers are calling such things these days.

Another important aspect of this story is the main character, Dave. Dave is an obsessive, compulsive guy. We’re not talking about someone who just checks the stove a few times before he can leave the house. But we’re also not talking about someone who can’t stop checking the oven and can never leave the house. He’s somewhere in the middle of the obsessive, compulsive spectrum. His worst problem is he tends to get bogged down in minutia. Anything from buying vegetables to sorting the post-it notes on his desk will occupy him for much longer than it should. So what happens when an obsessive, compulsive guy interacts with a byzantine government program? A really good story is what happens, especially if that guy is Dave.

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