Picture This

This is going to be a quick entry, because I've stayed up far too late again.

Picture This

Despite last night's photo manipulation, the fact remains that it's often rather tough to come up with a picture of a literary character. Unlike Pat (DesLily), I'm pretty bad at drawing, so my own characters are either sketched by a professional (my friend Sherlock, a.k.a. Sherry Watson) or based on photos of real people (all right: me). In a few cases I've altered one of Sherlock's sketches to come up with a different image from the one originally intended. That's why Joshua Wander looks like a white version of Rani Fost. His picture is a slightly redrawn and photo-edited version of an early draft of the Rani illustration.

So tonight, as I thought about Wikipedia articles I wanted to write about a couple of Madeleine L'Engle characters, I had to face the issue of how to illustrate them. Images aren't mandatory for Wikipedia articles, but most people seem to feel that any decent-sized article is incomplete without one. But where could I get a picture of Canon Tallis or Adam Eddington? Neither one is depicted on the cover of any of the books in which they appear. Zachary Gray, is on the cover of the hardback for An Acceptable Time, and the paperback cover for A House Like a Lotus, but I had something else in mind for him as well.

Adam and Zach are both in a L'Engle book called A Ring of Endless Light, which Disney made into a tv movie several years ago. I've ranted before about what a good adaptation it's not, so we'll skip that aspect of it tonight. Nevertheless, it does have the advantage of providing pictures of these characters. Here are screen captures I made tonight of Vicky Austin's two "small screen" boyfriends:


Wholesome Adam Eddington, played by Ryan Merriman, gets up close and personal with a dolphin.


Charming, troubled Zachary Gray, played by Jared Padalecki‎, tries to pick up old girlfriend Vicky - literally.

Okay, so that's those two taken care of for photos. But what about Canon Tallis? There are no screen adaptations of any of the four novels in which he appears, and he's not on any book covers. Tallis is based on a real person, Canon Edward Nason West, but I've never seen a photo of West (and it probably would be copyrighted, anyway).

So which of the three did I write the article on tonight? You guessed it: Canon Tallis. My first draft didn't illustrate the article at all. In subsequent edits, I threw in a book cover, even though it only shows a starfish, and a picture of the real Cathedral where both the real and the fictional Canon worked. But I still don't have a picture of Tallis himself. Too bad: he'd be interesting to look at, being completely bald with no eyebrows.

Doing Our Homework

John and I are gearing up for Election Day, studying the propositions and local races. I printed a bunch of editorials about the propositions, and know how I'll vote on all but one of them. There are two pairs of competing props, 105 and 106 about pubic lands, and 201 and 206 about banning smoking in public places. A common problem seems to be that whenever a worthwhile Proposition heads for the ballot, someone else comes up with a similar one to try to confuse the voters into either going for the alternate one or turning them both down. I'm happy to say that this sedom seems to work. In the case of the smoking ones, 206 is sponsored by R.J. Reynolds, allows bar owners to keep their bar open to smoking, and provides no tax money for enforcement or education. I'll be very surprised if that's the one that passes. And on the local races, the paper endorsed a Republican I've voted for in the past as Clerk of Court. I wrote her name down to vote for her, and then crossed it out after reading that there is serious dissatisfaction among the people who actually work with her, and with good reason. So it's back to the democrat on that one. However, I think I still have two Republicans on my list of people I'll be voting for - and I'm not yet done with my research.

Not Quite Sisyphus

After Halloween and post-Halloween indiscretions with candy and "pumpkin anything, " John and I got back on track tonight, literally. We had salads for an early dinner, and later went back to the gym together for the first time in nearly a week. The treadmill didn't work me as hard this time, perhaps because the heart rate monitor cut out several times. Still, I don't seem to have lost much ground in the long climb to fitness. Speaking of which, remember my mentioning a few weeks back that I got a score of zero on the treadmill's fitness test? Well, tonight John got a 70 on the same test. Good for him, but bad for me! We'll both take the test again in a few weeks.

Karen

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