Uggh. To be a cartoonist and to open up your morning newspaper and to look again at your work from the previous day only to discover a spelling mistake is a very dreadful thing. It's an immediate grouch maker. You feel stupid, and angry, and worthless, and thoroughly embarassed. I put an apostrophe in a word where it didn't belong. "It's" should've read "its". I caught the mistake this morning and I've been kicking myself ever since.

In other news... Yesterday's news of the government moving to restart the nuclear power plant at Chalk River in order to solve the shortage of medical isotopes inspired this cartoon.

I thought I'd pass this by a cousin I have who works at MIT in the area of Chemistry. Here's what he had to say:

That's great! I'm going to post this cartoon in my lab at MIT. My co-worker is from Edmonton so she'll at least get part of the joke.

Science gets such little exposure in popular culture that any attention whatsoever is nice to have.

McMaster has a small nuclear reactor - as do many university-affiliated hospitals - for making radio-isotopes for use in medicine. Some have extremely short half-lives - on the order of hours - so they must be made in-house and used immediately. The more long-lived isotopes, like those made at Chalk River - can be transported.

I work with isotopes on occasion - they have their uses- , but not the radioactive ones which require special training and equipment, not to mention disposal hazards. But there are some people in the labs downstairs who use them. That also might help explain why they are such weirdos. That, and the fact they work in the basement.

Ironically the molecules you've drawn our eminent PM as holding look like cyclobutane derivatives. They are quite unstable due to something we call ring strain - carbon doesn't like to make such small rings - and seeing those little pieces fly off reminds me of the times I've tried to build them with model kits and watched the pieces blow up in my hands as I bent them past the breaking point. I'd imagine that radioactive cyclobutanes would be even more unstable, so Isotope Man really has his work cut out for him.

And here it is, on exhibit at the world reknowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Know of any other place where my cartoons are on display? Send me your photos and I'll post 'em here.

Look who's strutting around and putting down successors and criticizing governments now debating and putting together new agreements on Climate Change and Global Warming... Jean Chretien. The former Prime Minister conveys how proud he is to call his signing on to the Kyoto Protocol as a defining chapter of his Legacy despite the lack of action which followed. It's all in this article:

TORONTO - What was intended as a feel-good gathering of prominent Liberals celebrating the legacy of one of their most illustrious leaders took a divisive turn Tuesday as Jean Chretien again took aim at his successor Paul Martin's track record as prime minister, this time for failing to meet Canada's obligations to stop climate change.

The duelling former prime ministers, whose bitter leadership rift seems to have spilled over into their retirement years, were among the Liberal heavyweights headlining the conference lauding Lester B. Pearson's contributions to global peace, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize 50 years ago.

Chretien's speech to the conference, hosted by Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, included harsh words for the Conservatives' stance on the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"I am not very pleased today to read what people are saying about Canada in Bali at this moment about the environment," he told the conference.

"I think it is an urgent problem and we should have been at the forefront. When we signed Kyoto, we knew very well when I was there what we were doing, and it should have been implemented. But now we will not meet the target because we lost four years."

But outside the hall, Chretien was quick to point the finger at Martin's government for dropping the ball on Kyoto after he left office.

"I don't know what happened, I was not there," he said. "I know that I was negotiating with the oil industry, and the oil industry pulled back from the table."

When asked why it took so long for Canada to get somewhere on Kyoto, Chretien replied, "Sometimes, when you lose four years, you lose four years. There's nothing I can do about it." But Chretien said he doesn't blame current Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, who was environment minister under Martin, for the failure to meet Canada's obligations under Kyoto, an international treaty that Chretien's government signed 10 years ago.

Dion had to cancel his scheduled appearance at the conference to attend an international climate change summit in Bali, Indonesia.

Martin, who delivered his speech two hours after Chretien left the building, defended his record on climate change, saying his government's policy was regarded as "the most comprehensive attack on climate change that we've ever seen in Canada."

Ten years ago papers were hammering Jean Chretien for having contributed nothing to help solve environmental issues. Here's an example:

Global warming: action or inertia?
Hamilton Spectator Editorial
October, 02 1997

Bill Clinton is demonstrating environmental leadership as he tries to rally American public opinion behind a global treaty cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The American president's willingness to put his prestige on the line stands in contrast to the political inertia shown by the Chretien government on the problem so far. If the Liberals are to achieve their stated goals in reducing the pollutants that are believed to produce artificial global warming, they must give the problem a much higher profile.

Clinton can't be accused of sleepwalking on the difficult, but urgent, greenhouse gas issue. He raised the stakes yesterday by gathering 100 weather forecasters on the White House lawn in support of stronger action to reduce the buildup of fumes and smoke in the Earth's fragile natural environment. Cynics dismissed the event as a public relations gimmick. But Clinton deserves marks for taking a stand that will almost certainly involve some lifestyle changes for American consumers and economic adjustment.

The president faces stiff opposition from powerful politicians, industrialists and union leaders, who are reluctant to act even though the U.S. is a major polluter. America lags behind other countries in pledging itself to targets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The U.S. Senate has said it will reject specific greenhouse gas cuts unless they're matched by targets for developing countries. The U.S. can do much better than that. So can Canada, which has the second-highest per capita greenhouse emission rate among industrialized countries.

The Chretien government should be front and centre with a strategy in advance of international negotiations on a treaty in Japan in December. Instead, it's making no visible attempt to focus attention on the problem, and how to implement realistic, achievable and cost-effective solutions. The government has relied on a voluntary emissions reduction program that hasn't done the job.

The outlook isn't likely to improve if the debate, such as it is, is dominated by the likes of Alberta Premier Ralph Klein. He maintains that binding emission reduction targets will penalize his province unfairly. Klein appears to oppose even modest reductions. He should be more open to compromise. A failure by all industrial nations to take effective action now runs the major risk of precipitating an future environmental crisis that would require drastic economic and lifestyle changes. Critics of controls cite potential job losses in moving to a more sustainable economy, but they often overlook the potential employment from improving energy efficiency in offices and homes; developing super-efficient, environmentally-friendly cars and trucks; and investing in renewable energy projects.

It's time for the Chretien government to follow Clinton's lead and come out of the closet with a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Few problems are as pressing as the need to better protect the planet from choking in man-made gases.

Chretien was in his fifth year of office as Prime Minister by time the above editorial was written. It was my first year as a cartoonist when I drew the (rather crude)cartoon below for the October 2, 1997 edition of the paper, for which I chose to draw on the environment, an issue that Chretien was completely unconcerned with at the time:

Buried beneath the weight of all the news over Karlheinz Schreiber's tedious performance before the House of Commons Ethics Committee was the announcement of another probe by Parliament into allegations of price fixing by Canada's largest chocolate making companies.  It's been reported that the Canadian divisions of Nestle, Cadbury, Hershey and Mars are under investigation by regulators over alleged price fixing of chocolate bars. The Competition Bureau of Canada has requested that the companies hand over documents related to their pricing arrangements. It is understood that no charges have yet been made and that there is no solid evidence of any wrongdoing. Well, I thought it warranted a cartoon, even though I'm probably the only cartoonist who bothered with this story:

It's a big event in Canadian politics when the Speaker of the House summons a prisoner to appear before a committee to talk about his dealings with a former Prime Minister. One expert predicted the event will turn into a "gong show", which made me think of the above sketch. Then I realized I'd just be illustrating and idea already done, besides, I really didn't feel up to drawing one of those really complex drawings that would keep me in the office well into dinnertime. So I came up with some depiction of theatre with Karlheinz Schreiber being the guy in the spotlight...

Leading up to the testimony I'm siding with some of the columnists in this morning's papers who say the hearing will be nothing more than theatre, delaying the extradition of an accused criminal whose been granted the powers of Parliamentary immunity. He can say what he wants and will say whatever he wants in order to avoid ending up in a German prison to whatever fate he has in that country.

Occasionally I get my cartoons to run in the Toronto Star, which naturally increases the exposure of my work quite significantly. Here's some analysis of the above cartoon from a snotty* 26 year old Toronto based blogger who describes herself this way: "Remember that weird kid in school who never talked? This is what's going through her head..."

I'm trying to figure out if I'm reading today's Toronto Star editorial cartoon right. (Yes, that's the Hamilton Spectator cartoonist - that's what the Star printed today.)

I'm seeing in that cartoon the passing the torch symbolism from In Flanders Fields, but it seems to be endorsing that passing of the torch. The characters might be smiling, and at any rate they certainly don't look particularly grim about it. Because they're all soldiers and only soldiers, and because they're all labelled as wars, it really looks to me like the poppy is symbolizing warfare itself. But then he passes it on to a child? With what looks like a smile on his face? Without hesitating or questioning why he's doing so? So they're essentially declaring warfare inevitable without questioning that declaration, or even bothering to look grim while they do it? I don't think that's what my great-grandfathers had in mind when they were sitting in muddy shitty rat-infested holes shooting at each other.*

The text to the right doesn't give a clear interpretation (I think it's a newspaper article, not the artist's own commentary), but it certainly doesn't do anything to make me think my interpretation is wrong.

(On a purely artistic note, the transition from sepia to b&w to colour is particularly good.)

Well, at least I'm glad the sepia to b&w to colour effect was easy to figure out.

* I call her snotty based on a previous posts where she exposes some typically ignorant Toronto-is-the-centre-of-the-universe comments, such as: I've decided the answer to "Why don't you just buy a small house in Hamilton?" (or some other place with cheap housing and a huge-ass commute) is going to be "For the same reason you aren't buying a dairy farm in Kazakhstan."