Tuesday, November 14, 2006


Here is the finished version of the sign posted two days ago.
More of this kind of work can be seen at www.finestkindsign.com

Today I'll be carving a pair of signs for a real estate office. The artwork isn't very exciting, but I'm going to photograph the job step by step and post it here, to show you what is involved in this kind of sign.

Thursday, November 09, 2006



Time to stop being political and get back to signs. This job is more interesting than most;
the client had seen another sign I did a few years ago with a marbleized finish, and asked for a similar look. Marbleing can be fun. The background color is laid down, and while its still wet, I stippled in another tint with a rag, then went over it with a ragged pigeon feather to make the pale green veining. If you don't quite remember exactly what green Traventine marble is supposed to look like, it's not a bad immitation. The frame is plastic molding, and the corner rosettes are pine, sprayed with metallic-copper spray paint, allof which came from Home Depot for about $2o. The copy you see was hand- lettered - because I can, dammit - and will be outlined with gold metallic paint. There's also some copy in white vynull pesch to go underneath (gotta make the plotter earn its keep). I'll post the finished job...well...when its finished.

So... The Democrats won control of Congress, and that slimy socialist powermongering left-wing cunt Nancy Pelosi will become the next Speaker of the House. What's that you say?...I'm being nasty? This is the woman who publicly called the President of the United States "stupid, dangerous, and incompetent". Now if she and lots of other Dems can say that, I feel perfectly within my rights to call her a screeching shit-brained twat. And anyone who thinks this collection of self-important clowns is going to give up the name-calling and shit-slinging in the name of "bipartisan cooperation" is as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad the Dems won. If any political organization needed a sound thrap between the eyes it was the current gang of buttfucks that calls itself the Republican Party. Maybe now they can take a short break from spreading their pimply cheeks for corporate lobbyists and all those greasy, half-wit, Jesus-screeching pulpit pounders, and try to remember what it used to mean to be a Republican. Start with remembering that those of us with real jobs and real-life responsiblities don't give a thirty-second fuck about gay marriage, partial-birth abortions, and theories of creation that would embarrass a neanderthal. In other words, stop grubbing for votes from Nascar Nation, the vast semi-illiterate hordes of the southern cotton-mill class. These people are an embarassment to Republicanism, a nitwit mob of pentacostal howler monkeys and semi-reformed Kluxers, barely a generation removed from lynching and cross-burning. When the Republican Party went trolling for votes among people who have a close ratio of inbred children to functioning teeth, they forgot the central truth of politics that has existed since the Confederacy, namely, that stupid people are natural Democrats, and that no matter how far they may wander, the party of the Braying Jackass will always, sooner or later, call them home. Counting on rednecks to reliably vote Republican is like dressing a gorilla in a tuxedo; sooner or later the suit will get ruined and the ape won't give a shit one way or the other. The only way to keep this breed of voter in line is to swim in the same revelation-reading, race-baiting intellectual gutter, to pander to their atavistic religious superstitions and their deep-seated hatred of anyone that they suspect may be smarter than they are, which, believe me, is not a stretch.

The natural function of the Republicans has been to keep these people away from the levers of power, not hand the damn things over to them. Allowing government to be run by Mississippi Baptists is to be ruled by people with the intellectual sophistication and religious subtleties of Haitians, Hottentots, or 12th-century Albanians; sooner or later, intelligent people whose education doesn't begin and end with memorizing the King James Bible are going to recoil in disgust and throw them out. Which pretty much describes what happened on Tuesday. It's a sad, nay, pitiful state of affairs when people think of Democrats as the party for people of taste, intellectual curiousity, and modern dental hygiene.