The Legacy of the One-Minute Cartoon

About 18 years ago, I worked as an audio-video technician for a large Canadian university. Looking back now, I have to admit it was one of the best jobs I've had: the work was diverse and interesting, my co-workers were all superfun drinking pals, and the environment was quite casual.

I would kick off many a shift with a one-minute cartoon. I did this purely to entertain myself and several of my co-workers when we gathered at Master Control to organize our equipment deliveries for the shift. Each doodle was drawn with a black Sharpie on a 4" x 5" piece of scrap paper, and was always created in one minute or less. Sometimes my colleagues would give me a topic, sometimes not, but they were always juvenile, silly, and very crudely drawn. Each finished drawing was tacked to the wall of the control room until it eventually evolved into a sort of patchwork quilt wallpaper. Of course, I assumed they were torn down and tossed out after I moved on to a different job.

Then last week I bumped into Tony, a cherished friend of many years and the Master of Master Control, still employed with the University. We went for a few pints and he told me he would e-mail me some jokes that I'd really enjoy. A few days later, I received a series of scanned illustrations -- Tony had in fact saved the one-minute cartoons from extinction and had scanned them for posterity! I'm very grateful to him for having the foresight to preserve a little piece of our work-art history. Some of them are dated and a bit cliché almost 2 decades later, but they really cracked us up back then.

click each image to enlarge

When Squirrels Attack!!

7:18 Pm - I was walking through my neighbourhood park on the way home from work, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, a grey squirrel attacked me.

A quickly moving blur caught the corner of my eye, momentarily paralyzing me with shock. I reacted in cinematic slow motion as the blur leapt out at me from atop a nearby fence post. It landed on my shoulder, skidded across my back, and used my head as a springboard to launch itself skyward into a nearby low-hanging branch. This sent me into a fit of hysterical shrieking and arm-flailing, which did not go unnoticed by my old nemeses: The Dogwalkers Who Think They Own The Fucking Park.

Don't send hate mail: I actually love dogs. And dog owners. And other people who love dogs and dog owners. But these particularly self-righteous knobs give an evil face to the otherwise innocent and pleasurable hobby of Dog Ownership. The Dogwalkers let their freakyhyper hounds run lose so they can molest me with their grubby noses, and some of the dogs are rather aggressive in the crotch-smelling and leg-humping categories. Nice doggy, please stop fucking me! No lady, I don't think it's cute or precious. Call off your slutty mutt. RIGHT NOW.

Many of The Dogwalkers don't bother to scoop, littering the park with special little gifts from their special little friends -- something everyone can enjoy! And now they were laughing and pointing at me, armed with a good dinner-table story for the folks at home: "you'll never guess what I just saw in the dog park!" Not one of them asked if I was okay.

The squirrel will probably deny the attack. I'm sure it will maintain that it was merely using me as temporary transport location to get from point A to point B. It didn't bite me or cause serious harm, save for a near-coronary and an interesting new hairstyle -- which I kept, by the way. Just another commuter's badge of honour.