Me too

From xkcd

I wonder which answer sounds more odd?

Q: Do you have a mobile number you could give me?
A: No, I don't

OR

Q: Do you have a mobile number you could give me?
A: Well, I do have one - but it's never switched on ...

Both, of course, followed by 'but you can contact me on my landline.'

I am an oddity, I know :-)

Coming soon to a classroom near you

This would be so much easier if I actually knew the muscles and didn't need reference for absolutely everything.

I'm not a Luddite

I am, for example, quite happy to buy stuff online.

However, when I go into a brick and mortar shop, I want to be served by a flesh and blood person. Someone who I can say hello and thank you to and will do the same to me. We might smile at each other - even enjoy a brief joke or some other form of human communication.

Self-service checkouts are fine for those who want to use them. Choice is good. But my personal choice is to stand in the queue and wait. Please don't require your employees to try to cajole me to do otherwise.

Thank you.

Abraham

I wrote this a while back and never posted it:

I'm about to start a new series of illustrations on Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I'm trying to design the characters properly, as I did the 12 disciples a while back. However, I'm finding it a lot more difficult to get a sense of these characters. It's hard to nail them down.

I think one reason may be that it's a different kind of writing. The gospels were written by people close to the events - by the disciples themselves, by people who knew them, or by people who knew people who knew them. Genesis is different: Moses was writing six or seven hundred years after the events (presumably based on early written or oral sources, but there's still not the same immediacy).

Perhaps partly because of this, the two types of writing have a very different feel. Genesis - particularly the story of Abraham - is epic. You get the sense of long distances travelled, sweeping views, vast starry skies, heroic battles. We are rarely in a city or even a village. Although you know there are a lot of people around (Abraham has a large entourage, including a private army of 318 trained men!) you get more of a feeling of a solitary hero.

The gospels are much more homely in feel - village life, city streets, jostling crowds, ordinary people. Although some of the travel is similarly extensive, even over some of the same territory, it feels much smaller and more enclosed.

And you know, that makes sense. When God chose a man, he made him great. But when God himself came to earth, he didn't come as a respected tribal chief with great wealth, many servants and a private army. He came as an average working class man from an unimportant town.


(You can see the pictures I ended up with here - click on buttons:)