Bill Bryson! At the Royal Alberta Museum on October 31st! Tickets are $5, so if you're not halloweening, or working (like me) you can see one of the finest, funniest authors around. He'll read from The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid .

An Interview with Phil Carnehl, the Rebel Penguin



Last year I came across a gorgeous illustration of King Kong in a space suit, bashing UFOs rather than biplanes. I loved it, and knew I had found a brilliant artist I would be honored to work with. So I commissioned him to illustrate my poem "Robot's Cove" for when I read it at G-Arts last year. He promptly delivered a beautiful and perfect piece, with exactly the right quality of mystery and wonder I was trying for in the poem.



We collaborated again with the story from last night, about the Yeti and the Yak. I believe this young gentleman has a bright future, and I am pleased to present an interview with the artist.

First of all, who are you? I'm Phil Carnehl, a lifetime resident of California trying my best to make a living off of what i love to do.

Where does your screen name Rebel-Penguin come from? Um i'm sure these questions usually have funny answers but Rebel Penguin came about in my last term of college. Had some extra time left after completing my final animation and wanted to add a cool logo and made up company name to the beginning of it so i designed my current logo and came up with Rebel Penguin Productions. Always liked penguins and i got a lot of good response from the design so it stuck.

When (and how) did you get started in art? I've been drawing literally my whole life but never really pushed myself to go futher with it until after highschool. Found a great art college to go to and the teachers really inspired me to reach for the stars so i've been doing my best to improve ever since.

What tools or media do you use? I start off everything with the basic pencil and paper and from there ink and color it in Illustrator CS2. I've also been breaking into Photoshop and Flash a bit.



What inspires you? Other artists, nature, i like to make people laugh so anything i can make fun of without insulting anyone is always inspiring.

What do you do to get the creative juices flowing? I usually flip through comics, maybe read a few bible passages and of course pray, if asking God to help me in my work doesn't get the art flowing i usually assume that means He's got something else for me to do at the time.

What are some goals or dreams you have? I would love to work with Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack creator) or Butch Hartman (Fairly Odd Parents) or both someday. It would also be awesome to create a cartoon series of my own at some point in my life.

Any advice for other artists? I'm sure you've heard it before but never stop learning, take every opportunity you have to learn from artists around you and even more importantly never stop drawing, don't let a day go by without putting your pencil to paper and creating something, anything, if you love what you do don't let yourself ever run dry.

What artists do you admire and learn from? Again Genndy Tartakovsky and Butch Hartman are both big inspirations, both guys with big ideas who had the heart to press on and make things happen. I also enjoy the work of Ben Caldwell, Craig McCracken and Deviantart's very own Dapper Dan.

Are there any words of wisdom you live by? I'm not in any way perfect but i try to live by knowing putting faith in myself is pointless because alone i will always let myself down, but putting faith and trust in God, the one who made me who i am, is the only way to success and happiness.

Do you think there is such thing as yetis or sasquatches? Definitely, the thought that we've discovered every creature alive on this planet is ridiculous, i'm sure there's more out there just waiting to be found out.

Thanks Phil! By the way, he's open for commissions, so head on over to his deviantArt page for details. I'll leave you with Phil's newest piece, The Least Scary Dragon:

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
Tomorrow evening at 6PM I will be reading a brand-new children's story (by me) at the Gathering (15620 95 Avenue). It's about a bomible snowman. So if you live in the Edmonton area come on out, it will be a good time- aside from me, the current house band plays some great Irish-style church drinking songs. Here's a little teaser image of the story to hopefully get you curious.

I still have a face! And I feel fine. Hurts to eat, a bit, but otherwise I'm good. (Anyways I didn't even get a chance to eat today until 8 hours into the shift!) Not even a shiner to look scary with. I was lucky and it could have been a lot worse. Thanks for all your well-wishes! Turns out a bulldozer hit a pickup yesterday a few hours after I was hurt so they shut the whole pit down and delivered a stern talking-to about being more safe.
Which is fine but I can honestly say I had no intention of being unsafe yesterday. Things just happen.
Today we were all much safer but it still was not a fun day. I think I'm ready for a holiday, which I get at the start of October so I guess I can hold on a bit longer.
Ironically, there is a big safety slogan contest right now, and I even entered the day before yesterday- wanna hear my suggestion?
Safety: Because it sucks to be dead.

*Sigh* I was hurt at work again today. Nothing too serious, though it feels bad, and it looks, well, actually kinda cool. I was hit in the face by a big metal pothead. A pothead in mining terminology has nothing to do with Cheech-and-Chong-like-shenanigans, it is the metal collar that connects power cables to each other or to equipment. They're big, heavy and hurt like hell when they come flying up out of a pickup truck and smash you in the face.
So, my cheek, temple, nose, jaw and teeth all hurt, and there's a goodly bruise right below my sideburn, as well as other cuts on my nose and temple. It hurts to eat. Doctor said nothing was broke or seriously damaged. On the plus side I got to come home a little early.
I'd take a picture and post it but I don't have my USB cable for my camera here. So instead you can use your imagination and come up with WAAAAAY better visuals than the truth anyways. Imagine I'm a zombie with one eye! And no teeth! Yeah! And green brains oozing out of my temple. You know, because I was smashed in the face with a giant metal Tommy Chong robot.

I have notebook pages full of ideas of things to write- some are completely sketched out in my head, it's just a matter of being disciplined enough to write them down. Others are just vague concepts that need fleshing out before they are ready to see the light of day. Some are mostly ready, but the needs of the story are perhaps a little beyond where I'm at as a writer, and so they stay inside, ripening.

According to Orson Scott Card, "Good stories don't come from trying to write a story the moment I think of a good idea." He goes on to say that it takes years between lightbulb-going-on and finished version. Which is kind of true, in my experience, but not quite the whole story (of course, Card is a successful Hugo-winning writer and I am Homie Bear, so . . . ) I think if you were to take those words too seriously, it might paralyze you, make you think you needn't bother to write anything for the next couple of years.

Writing is not that different from drawing- artists sketch to get the juices flowing, and then ideas come and pretty soon they're ready to do a finished piece. I see it on deviantArt all the time. Blogging is a great way to sketch, for a writer. Which is not to say that you should "scribble" all over your blog and expect readers to stay interested. I like to put polished pieces of writing here, though they are stories about bears fighting zombies which don't have much of a market. But that's okay, for me it's all about the fun.

Now and then an idea or image pops into my brain, and it doesn't take much effort to nurse it into a finished piece. One of my favorite poems that I've written came from an image of brains growing in a field- and then I followed that through to develop a whole twisted ecosystem based on that one image, and not too long after that first inspiration, I had the finished piece. I can say the same thing about short stories I've written.

On the other hand, there have been ideas that have taken years from first glimmer to actual story. The other night at work I got an interesting idea in my head, but I know it will take a lot of thinking and research to make something workable out of it. And last year I was finally able to write a children's story after the initial idea had been floating around in my head for years. I had a character name, but nothing for him to do. Then a second idea came to me and within a week the thing was finished. I'll be reading it next week at the Gathering if you want to hear it- it's about an abominable snowman. I don't want to say too much about it, but I promise it will be a good time- I've collaborated with a couple of other artists to make something pretty cool.

I wish I could snap my fingers and conjure a great idea out of nothing. But if it were that easy, it wouldn't be worth doing, would it?

The best birthday present this year was a bag of springrolls. It was from a coworker I'll call Mario Andretti, not because he's Italian- he's Philipino- but because he drives his rock truck really really fast all the time. Even in total whiteout conditions like last night. But back to the springrolls.
On Monday, Mario asked me how I was. I said I's okay, considering it was only the first shift, it was my birthday, and I would rather be home with my wife.
The next night, on the bus, Mario patted his seat, inviting me to sit with him. Then he surreptitously handed me a plastic bag with a brown bag inside it- and inside the brown bag were warm springrolls. Nice! He didn't want me to have to share them, hence the sneakiness. But I shared some anyways- have to spread the good vibes around, right?
A little character sketch is in order here. Mario is around 55, and though he has been here for 25 years, he still has a nearly-impenetrable accent. And I'm not convinced he finds our accents totally comprehensable, either. I remember my first shift back after my honeymoon last year, when Mario was still a fairly new driver. I had just settled into the operator's chair on shovel 8, getting into a groove. I heard a loud thump, which I didn't really pay much attention to. But in my peripheral vision I saw the big orange box of a rock truck much closer than you ever want to see one.
"I think he hit me!" I said to Vic, the operator. So I honked him out and got up to investigate. But Mario just pulled ahead and started reversing for a second try- right back where he was. I lay on the horn again, and call him on the radio to hold it there. He pulls up, and again the backup lights come on as he backs up again. Honnnnnkkkkk! Thinking he finally got the message, Vic and I get up and were just exiting the cab to check the damage, when here he comes one more time! I had to literally dive over the seat, grab my radio mic, where I yell into it, loud as I can "STOP! JUST STOP!" The entire minesite came to a dead stop. Turns out the damage was fairly minor, so no big deal other than a couple of tense moments.
Fast forward to six months later, and he hit me again! This time I was in shovel 10, the new one, and again, I didn't really notice (which gives you an idea of how big these machines are), I just heard a thud. Later on my subconscious kind of nudged me, and I started thinking to myself, "What was that thud, exactly?" So on the bus going home that night, I asked him, "Mario, did you run into me again today?"
Looking like a kid caught in the cookie jar, he sort of jumps, and says, "Just a little bit."
Despite his repeated attempts at crushing me beneath his 12-foot tires, Mario and I are good friends. Who couldn't love a sweet, kindly old fellow who crashes his motorcycle, comes to work wearing a red bandana beneath a skewed baseball cap, gangbanger-style, and gives me springrolls for my birthday?

What a great weekend- my friend Travis, who I've known for at least 29 years, got all married up! I was honored to be a groomsman, returning the favour he did me last year when it was my turn. He married the lovely Leila, who, among other things, is my chiropractor.
As if that wasn't excitement enough, I am holding in my hands the brand new, minted-ten-minutes-ago Seven Devil Fix CD. Michelle is sleeping, which is the only thing preventing me from playing it seven times louder than I am now. Some of you know that 7DF is Blu's and Gotthammer Mike's (who officiated at my wedding, speaking of) kickass band. You can listen to some of the tracks on their Myspace page.
Well, I'm off to the coalmine for some nightshifts. Happy birthday to me. Last year I was working nights on this day too, and actually I didn't even remember it was my birthday until like 3:30 in the morning, but it was cool because there were some pretty great Northern Lights.

Last night on Sonic, Adam Thompson mentioned that the Royal Canadian Mint is having a contest to name the polar bear on the toonie! Except, it turns out that they already have a bunch of names and all you get to do is vote. So "Son of Homie Bear", "UR-515", and "Agent H, Ultra-Top Secret Bear of Kungfu Death and Kicking Ass" are not options. Instead you have to choose between "Wilbert", "Plouf" and "Sacha", among others. On the plus side, you can enter a contest to go to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears.
Did you know that octopi are amazingly smart? It's true- they've been known to walk across the seafloor holding a shell over their heads for camouflage, and they are notorious for busting out of aquariums (only to drown, so . . . yeah. Smrt! ). The other thing they can do is kill sharks! I think they should have a contest to name the octopus in this video- I vote for "Agent O, Ultra-Top Secret Octopus of Kungfu Death and Kicking Ass." (For best results don't listen to the audio, it's annoying.)
Sadly, there was no such octopus watching out for the Crocodile Hunter. Here is a DeviantArt tribute to Steve Irwin:


Steve by =snapesnogger on deviantART

From A History of Robotics, Third Edition by Wei MeiDe, © 2074, 2081 Puffin Books, New York:

As we saw in the previous chapters, the Americans pioneered many of the foundational technologies that led to the rise of modern robotics. The Japanese refined and expanded on those technologies, so much so that by the early 21st century they were the world leaders in the field by a wide and inarguable margin. Thus it shocked the entire world when the first truly autonomous and sentient robot was built, not by the Japanese, the Americans or even the emerging Chinese powerhouse, but by bears.
The story is familiar to schoolchildren everywhere, so that we forget how truly singular and amazing it was when the first robot bear materialized out of the woods of the Canadian Rockies. In retrospect it is easy to villify the authorities who panicked and overreacted- the implications of which are perhaps better suited for a political science textbook than this humble history. Regardless, we now know that the UR-515 unit was initially built for a variety of purposes. It was given the capability, which long eluded its builders, of opening bear-proof garbage containers, and of using the garbage obtained therein for power. Having no need to hibernate, they were able to give bears year-round security.
Of course, its primary programming concerned scientific exploration and surveillance, as the grizzlys then were very concerned with their diminishing habitat. But as time wore on, we learned that it also possessed the more ominous ability of dealing with problem humans. Whenever such a person encroached on grizzly territory, they were targeted by a UR-515 sonic stunner, rendered unconscious, tagged with a satellite tracker (the PAN-da 2 SpySat launched from China the previous year was thought to have been created by the Chinese government but we now suspect it was built by the Wolong Sanctuary pandas. Of course their current crisis makes verification impossible) and released into the wild- usually a city hundreds of kilometers from the human's home.
It remains the holy grail of robot researchers to obtain an UR-515 for study, but we have never been able to, though there have been several ill-fated attempts to capture one. Human technology has never been able to attain the prowess of the robot bears, and perhaps never will.
It is small consolation that the bears' technological supremacy was only finally surpassed when British Colombian beavers engineered a rigorous nanotech industry.
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Special thanks to Shane Cheffins, the R3dEyeJedi, for doing such a great job with the robot bear you see to your right. Check out his Kraftworld site for more ninja/robot/alien goodness!