Going begging

Interesting to read in The Guardian that John Updike used to badger cartoonists for free artwork as a kid. All cartoonists get begging letters. But I don't think any of those that have written to me will go on to be acclaimed writers, because they usually say things like "i think you're stuffs cool. LOL. can u do me a cartoon i cant pay". The best part is always "it'll be good exposure".

Here's an idea

There's a live-action film of Thunderbirds coming out soon. Wouldn't it be great if in any close-ups of hands they used wooden puppet hands? It won't happen though, there's a limit to how many in-jokes they can put into these nostalgic remakes of old TV programmes because, as Peter Bradshaw points out in his Guardian review of Starsky and Hutch, all Hollywood films these days are aimed at children.

One for trivia fans

I just found out yesterday that the phrase "back to the drawing board" originally came from a cartoon. It was drawn by Peter Arno of The New Yorker in March 1941 and featured a military aircraft crashing into the ground. As the generals and medics rush to the scene, the engineer is heading the other way, cheerfully saying: "Well, back to the old drawing board". You can see it here. The only other example of a cartoon phrase entering the vocabulary, that I can think of off the top of my head, is "security blanket", from Charles Schulz's Peanuts cartoons, but I'm sure there must be many others.