A customer I sketched in the Summertown Costa this morning, inspired by Charlie Stross's blog posting about how news is bad for you, PSA: Ignore the news.
A heavyset fifty-ish man sitting in an armchair reading the Daily Mirror. No sign of enjoyment is visible in his grim expression.
(8 April 2013: Margaret Thatcher dies.)
In the foreground are the gates and walls of Heaven. From behind one wall come the words "And sort out your overmanning! You do not need a Father, a Son, AND a Holy Ghost!"
A handbag bearing the initials M.T. can just be seen being swung, accompanied by the sound "WHAP!"
An angel looks down at the scene from a cloud, frowning.
I drew this for someone who was leaving their job in a local café to work in an opticians.
A customer is standing in an opticians, in front of the desk. The optician, behind the desk, is holding a pair of glasses and saying "And these ones make the tiny cups of coffee sold by expensive cafés look big!"
A tiny take-away cup of coffee stands on the desk, and can be seen greatly magnified in one of the lenses.
(12 February 2013: "Horsemeat scandal: Tesco reveals 60% content in dish. Some Tesco Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese contains 60% horsemeat, DNA tests by the retailer have found.".)
A customer is standing at a Tesco checkout in front of the drinks shelves. He is holding a pack of Tesco Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese, and asking the checkout assistant "What wine goes with horse?"
(7 February 2013: "Findus beef lasagne contained up to 100% horsemeat, FSA says".)
A policeman is standing on the pavement outside a Findus factory, taking notes from a lady who is holding a photo of a cat. He is asking "And when did you last see your cat?
"
This was inspired by some work once done for the Oxford Pain Research Unit. I'd been working out correlations between two independent ways of measuring pain. One such correlation came to 79%, and a colleague commented that this was "about as good as it is likely to get in any biological system (unless you count death and absence of heartbeat, perhaps)". The language used for the analysis is a stats language called R, by the way.
Two researchers are looking at a cross-tabulation of hospital patients output by the statistics language R. It tabulates their state HAS HEARTBEAT / HAS NO HEARTBEAT versus DEAD / NOT DEAD. The tabulation shows a fair number of patients who are dead but have a heartbeat, or who are not dead but have no heartbeat. One researcher is saying "I think your tabulation has programming errors"
. The other replies "Naaaah! Biological data never yields perfect correlations!"
.
By the way, the R window reads:
R version 2.19.5 (2013-6-13) -- "Statistician's Heaven"
Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
> tabulate.my.data()
CROSS TABULATION OF DEATH VERSUS PRESENCE OF HEARTBEAT IN A
SAMPLE OF HOSPITAL PATIENTS
TOTAL PATIENTS IN TABLE: 96
|
| WITH HEARTBEAT | WITHOUT HEARTBEAT |
-----------|-------------------------|-------------------------|
NOT DEAD | 601 | 368 |
-----------|-------------------------|-------------------------|
DEAD | 268 | 648 |
-----------|-------------------------|-------------------------|
(17 January 2013: Horsemeat in Tesco burgers prompts apology in UK papers".)
A Tesco factory stands on a hill, at night, under a crescent moon with a dead tree nearby. Two men are staring fearfully at it from lower down the hill. One is saying: "And on quiet nights, 'tis said, you can hear the sound of ghostly hoofbeats."
(27 December 2012: The women's minister Jo Swinson announced that magazine "miracle" diets should be "dropped".)
A slim young girl labelled ECONOMY and wearing leggings and a skimpy top sits in a modelling agency. She is holding a newspaper bearing the headline "BAN MIRACLE DIETS", SAYS MINISTER'. Propped by her feet is a book titled THE AUSTERITY DIET. There is a question mark over her head.
Santa is sitting at his desk gazing at a list which reads
I want:He looks sad, and is thinking[Signed] Santa
- A nuclear-powered sleigh.
- An A-Z of the world for 2013.
- New long johns.
- A good thermos.
"But who can I ask?"
The shop front is that of Unicorn Clothes in Ship Street in Oxford. Crammed with vintage clothes, it's a lovely place to hire stuff for parties, or to buy high-quality, colourful, and unusual clothes. Some of the jackets have lasted for seventy years, and look so well made that they'd last for another seventy.
Santa is emerging from a second-hand clothes shop. Its window display includes a pair of worn-looking trousers and a T-shirt bearing the legend
VICTORIA REGINA. He is wearing a tatty and patched suit and hat, and muttering "Damn spending cuts!"
.
