As usual: Tuesday night. As usual: Sleeeeepy. As usual: Covered head to toe in biting flies. Or no! Not that one. I should count my blessings!
The annotations, hidden sneakily below, are kinda long this week, so let’s just get straightaway to the cartoon, shall we?
- I hate the paleontology curator at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and that’s what this cartoon is about. I won’t go into too much detail; suffice it to say, and to be but one example, the didactic panel next to the majestically predatory ‘Terror Bird’ skeleton there says what this cartoon’s first panel says, without the kittens. When I first read it, I panicked – I loved the Terror Birds, as predators – and I went and did a bunch of research. From this research, I learned that this ‘fruit and nuts’ hypothesis, presented by this museum as unvarnished truth, was held to by its paleontology curator, and basically no other paleontologist on Earth. Which makes sense, ’cause it’s a terrible hypothesis. So this is sort of my Woody Allen joke about the whole affair. Sort of.
- Stegron is a C-list Spider-Man villain, but he’s a stegosaurus-dude, and that makes him A-list with me. There was this one issue where he brought the dinosaurs at the museum to full, fleshy life, for havoc-wreaking purposes. Read it when I was a kid. Always stuck with me. Don’t remember, though, how he did it exactly; coulda been a ray, or a machine, or a magical rock. I just made the gun here up. Maybe it’s the 2.0 of the technology.
- The Terror Bird brought to life is loosely based on the Phororhacos from Ray Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island. Hail!