Lion Edition

1 March 2026

March comes in a like a lion. The lion in this case would be the ones lyin’ around napping on the Savannah. I’m not sure which part of the world where this is supposed to apply, but it has been pretty mild here lately and I have seen buds on the cherry blossom trees.

Monday

Maybe I jinxed them by calling last week’s newsletter the Gold Medal edition, although I did not actually say they would win and I am not superstitious. Anyhow, it seems the US men’s team has been poisoned by their association with Trump. I don’t really follow hockey much any more so I did not even know who the goalie for the US was or that he plays for the Winnipeg Jets. Connor Hellebuyck. I only watched the highlights and he made some impressive saves. What is it about all these hockey players named Connor? It does seem kind of ridiculous to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Tuesday

Letting sleeping dogs lie. Maybe this is the lion I was talking about before. The old girl has always been good about taking naps. And I didn’t have any ideas for a comic, so I drew her as she was. She has been the subject of some veterinary interventions lately. which might have been triggered by other medications she had been on. We are going in to test for Cushing’s disease, which I had not heard of before, but hopefully it does not mean she ends up looking like Peter Cushing.

Wednesday

Fever Beach is a novel by Carl Hiaasen. Occasionally I would hear about crazy stuff happening in Florida, but apparently that is a regular occurrence. The right-wing extremism and widespread corruption described in the novel seems absurd in itself, but I saw a clip of Hiaasen say it was based on the news. Now I understand why Trump has his base there.

Thursday

I initially assumed I just had dry skin and would scratch my back with the end of bamboo chopstick. But because I couldn’t actually see my back, I had a vague recollection of a weird movie called How to Get Ahead in Advertising in which the Richard E. Grant character develops a sentient boil on his neck. After checking with Dr. YouTube, the psychosomatic hypothesis made sense. Nowadays it is hard to know what to believe. I’ll check with my actual doctor next time. But I managed to take a picture and I think it might be dry skin after all.

Friday

Duolingo gamifies language learning. I am not sure how useful it is for language learning, but I figured it might be marginally better than spending it on social media. I just started, but it was interesting to get a sense of its structure. I thought they would have gotten rid of some of the inconvenient bits like accents. Why don’t they just use a j instead of a g with an accent? I met a Japanese woman once who said her father studied Esperanto and her name was related to that.

Saturday

I got a hand me down ipad pro from my daughter who upgraded. She tries to use it like a laptop until she finds out she can’t. So the most important thing I use it for is drawing comics. I don’t think my comics have gotten any better, but I still like to draw them and thinking about them as a way to tell myself that I am a cartoonist. I like the process of making a comic and don’t want something else doing my thinking for me. But if a robot could pick up dog poop for me, I’d be okay with that.

Sunday

The latest instalment of my graphic memoir in progress Not Made in Japan, about my life studying marine ecology in southern Japan during the late 1980s. The latitude of Tomioka is about 32.5 N, which is in the ball park of New Mexico or Algeria, so pretty warm. In the winter, it only occasionally got below 0 C, but still, it could be kind of chilly indoors if you are too cheap to buy space heaters like me. I was young and had a higher metabolism then. I still have the hanten padded house coat I used to wear.

So that was my week. I hope I don’t jinx anything else. I hope you had a good one with a better one to come.