We’re off to Bangladesh tomorrow morning (via Dusseldorf and Dubai). What with internet access over there being less prolific than here, updates to this blog are a bit unlikely, though not out of the question. Back 14th of January, 2010. Also known as: The Future!

At the kunstindustrimuseet today we saw various beautiful designed objects by people like Arne Jacobsen and Charles Eames. There was also an interesting mini-show toward the end of the museum of fashion and other objects made out of “trash” (really just recycled materials). It may have been called “trashion,” or that may just be my imagination.

Above you can see a little toy horse made out of wooden road bars used to signal roadworks in Denmark, by a company called re:Something. Their stated objective is to make the future more sustainable by “creatively reusing discarded materials and thereby reducing the amount of waste.” A noble quest, indeed.

On the other hand, my immediate thought on seeing this was something along the lines of: yeah, nice idea, but also kind of scammy. I predicted a hefty price-tag for this little wooden horse, and I was not wrong. (It cost 500DKK or about $100 US). So, rich people buy these quaint objects and put them on their windowsills and in their bookcases (what kid would want to play with them, after all?).

In a way, this is a cunning, if painstaking, way of reducing waste: Store it in the homes of the wealthy!

Today’s comic, Freeze!, was a weird one in that it changed a great deal from the initial idea to the final execution. It started off being about the idea of a cop shouting out “Drop the gun! Slowly!” With the idea being that the criminal in question then manages to drop the gun so that it falls to the ground like a feather.

However, I fairly quickly established that drawing the comic with ‘real’ people and figures etc. just wasn’t working for me. So I started doodling and eventually ended up with a snowman holding a gun. And then a snowman holding a banana. Obviously.

Then, on drawing all the images, I found that I didn’t want the “Drop the gun!” line to actually be in the comic, because it broke everything up too much. So the comic didn’t even have that text. Rendering the entire joke kind of a goner in one way. And so the whole thing just becomes a weird kind of slapstick moment about a snowman dropping a banana as if it were a feather.

And that is how these things happen.