Hal Robins is a wonderful cartoonist and a delightfully peculiar guy. He’s from the past and future, and the distant present all at once. I wish you could hear his grandiose speaking style and high pitched voice. He’s also got a new book out, The Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks, which John Shirley reviews in his blog.
Hal Robins (in the guise of Pedale) has discovered–and the very amusing, detailed drawings he’s put in this slim volume from North Atlantic Books illustrate–that while the mysterious appearance of Unknown Socks in your drier (and the mysterious disappearance of the socks you expected to find) may be conventionally explained, deeper, darker explanations can be found by looking farther than the interior of the drier mechanism: “It has long been thought that life must also exist on other planets. These life forms most likely have appendages for the purpose of locomotion. It follows then that such beings have a practical need to keep these appendages warm, hence alien footwear. . .As we employ rebellious machines, which from time to time squirt our stockings into the abyss of space, so do they. And as we receive theirs, it follows that their sock drawers must also receive ours. Even as you read these lines (relativistically speaking), some alien eye or eyes, perhaps set in chitinous, horny lids, are perplexedly scanning one of a pair of argyles which you lost last Tuesday. Some unthinkable thing may be fingering, with its spatulate claws, in the reddish light of a giant sun, a missing unit of your support hose…”
UPDATE: Simone sez: “Lovely to see Hal’s book boingboinged. . .you might also let your readers know that the utterly stupendous Ask Dr. Hal Show can be see every single solitary week (except when they don’t feel like it) at the Odeon Bar at Mission and Valencia (yes they do) in San Francisco.
Hal and Chicken sit up onstage and are bombarded with sealed envelopes containing questions from the audience. Chicken opens and reads the question, and Hal answers the question in his inimitable Hal way.
If the necessary honorarium included with the question is sufficient, the audience is treated to a Bardic Recitation of Hal’s Choice. Once someone gave fifty buck and Hal recited, in its entirety, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from memory, with all the voices, bringing the bar to a shrieking collapse upon his completion.
Anyhow the show is every wednesday around Nineish pm at The Odeon Bar; On the First Wednesday of every month Chicken gets the bus out and we all go bowling after the show. We pretty much just load the entire bar into the bus and take off for Daly City. It’s great.