Heads up, and it’s on sale right now at Gelson’s!

I warn you, this is still very pricey, at an outrageous $4.99 a pint! Normal people shouldn’t have to pay this much. But I decided to splurge one evening, and now that I know it’s the best, I keep watching for sales, and hope they’ll get it in other stores at a more reasonable price.

Greek Gods Honey Pomegranate Pagoto Ice Krema.

The website says:

In the 4th century BC, it was well known that a favorite treat of Alexander the Great was snow ice mixed with honey and nectar.

Ok-ay! Everyone knows the benefits of pomegranate juice by now, a powerful antioxidant. I don’t think everyone knows how great honey is, though; it was used to cover wounds in the battlefield during WW 1, before antibiotics were invented. I myself remember clearly that when I was 8, I was so sick, lying on the couch while the grownups played cards, and my grandmother’s friends made me honey toast. I wasn’t even hungry, but I ate it and got well within the hour. Really. (I collect honey cookbooks and booklets, but I think it’s hard to bake with – it doesn’t have the same binding qualities as sugar, or some technical cooking thingie.)

Greek Gods decided the best kind of marketing is the kind with no available photos, so I uploaded this cheerful one from Fancy Flours, instead.

So this is good for you, as well as being good on your tongue.

This ice cream also contains mastic:

People in the Mediterranean region have used mastic as a medicine for gastrointestinal ailments for several thousand years.

Chowhound isn’t as crazy as I am about it, and says:

We also tried the Honey Pomegranate flavor, which is not as impressive: the flavoring is much more subtle and mainly the honey comes through.

But that’s exactly why I do love it! Ice cream is so cold, it’s a challenge to get the subtler flavors to come through when your tongue might not be as sensitive. You can actually smell the honey, too! It’s a great mauvy color – if I could make this color with watercolor, I’d use it more.

May I have some MORE, please? /Oliver Twist.

At least in the LA Times.

Hello, Dilbert, my old friend.

I know papers are trying to save money. The LA Times is laying off 150 more reporters this month. Really shameful. And haven’t I already been a victim from that?!

And so sometimes they shave a sliver off the page. I guess the columns just got skinnier, too, because a few months ago I noticed Dilbert, which runs in the Business section of the LA Times, was suddenly running vertically, instead of horizontally.

I think Dilbert is one of the funniest, if not the funniest, strips out there. Laugh out loud funny, which is rare for me. But I guess I can’t think in a North-South way, because I literally can’t understand it now. I keep looking at the shape, and then try to figure out the vertical action. ( It’s also compressed & distorted – I’m surprised you don’t have people throwing up when they try to read it, Times.) By the time I reach the bottom I forget what the premise was. And who wants to re-read a comic? This is not the way to showcase the biggest cartoonist in the US, editors.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to hear Wiley Miller, of Non-Sequiter, speak at a local cartoon group (CAPS). He was quite pleased with a solution he worked out with his syndicate. (He is really a single panel, but drawn as an annoying rectangle to fit in with the other strips. I’m talking about his older stuff, before he had characters.) Many Sunday papers didn’t have enough room to run him on Sundays, so he told his syndicate, ok, he’d just draw the Sunday strip vertically, to squeeze into available space that way! You’ll have to decide for yourself if this works. Or if it’s funny.

Diet vs. exercise cartoon

The Idea
This is from my Morbid & Sex file. (Yes, what does it say about me that I think these subjects are connected…and that this is my favorite file?) They’re not always easy to sell. But so necessary to do.

This seems like an obvious idea: diets are a life or death issue for women, and there is always the big question: which one is most effective to lose weight?? And there’s that whole annoying mystery about it, as doctors continually change their minds on what and why or why not something will help with weight loss.

I myself like exercising better, because I just hate denying myself food to eat. I tried not to make the exercise guy show my bias, but I do have a weakness for blonds…and notice that he is a smidgen taller than the other guy!

I like the power a gun could give me. I guess I like guns. I’ve only held one once, when I dated an ex-Mafia guy; it felt and smelled like an expensive, non-digital, high-end Nikon. Yum.

The Drawing

I think weight loss is more of a woman’s obsession, but you can’t have two women shooting at each other. Maybe in vid games, or Latino gang fights, but not in cartoons. So these two fellows volunteered to be my characters.

I decided against a watching crowd, even though most duels seem to have them. I don’t always succeed, but I like fewer lines: clear, balanced, and in your face. Note that the men are moving in opposite directions to the cocked, deadly black guns. This shootout will not be pretty.

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