Looking back to last Fall when I lampooned good ol’ Dan Keene of Lamoille Valley Ford at the Vermont Vaudeville Fall Show:
I got to do four shows with the amazing Vermont Vaudeville crew, a weekend of wild fun that I will never forget.
If you’ve never heard one of Dan’s radio ads, you might not quite get the joke. He sells cars through relentless radio marketing, and he sounds kind of like this. As far as I know, he does not lead yoga classes.
I made some new designs for the construction company I used to work for in Morrisville, VT:
This was my first time using Adobe Illustrator, and I really enjoyed getting to know the program. Pretty different from Photoshop. Thank goodness for YouTube instructional videos! Learned about paths and live paint objects and in the end I’ve got the start of a custom font. I guess I’d call it “Freelance”. It’s based on Trader Joe’s “Tijuana” lager beer packaging.
The first time I chased a bunny was a half-hearted, stooping, grasping reach for Fern, our new doe. I wanted to hold her and pet her soft fur, but she kept hopping away from me. I followed her around the porch for a while until I finally gave up and settled for sitting down and watching her munch on an apple. Lately, chases have gotten more serious. I have cuts on my hands, bruises on my feet, and a significantly deforested cedar hedge. We have fourteen baby bunnies from two litters, and one little white bunny that has escaped the enclosure on three separate occasions—and so far only been recaptured twice.
Our rabbits live in an absolutely beautiful enclosure along the cedar hedge that borders our little parcel here in Craftsbury. They have a raised wire cage full of delicious hay, as many pellets as they can eat, and fresh water. The cage is roofed with steel, complete with overhangs, drip edge, and fascia boards. It is by far the nicest bunny house I have ever seen. The house sits inside a generous fenced enclosure, with grass to munch on and places to play in the stacks of hay underneath the house. Our doe, Fern, has free range of the place—she goes up and down the ramp, along the catwalk (or bunnywalk), up on top of the cage into the loft area, and up to the gate whenever we enter to see what sort of treat we brought. The buck, Bruce, unfortunately has to remain caged. His relentless sex drive necessitates separation from Fern. He seems to have accepted his lot and embraced a Zen lifestyle: he sits impassively, meditatively chewing or dozing. Fern visits often, lying beside him or touching noses. She likes knowing that her guy is there.
Fern has produced three lovely litters of “kits”. The first, a surprise, was discovered in early Spring in Vermont (read: Winter), when Fern and Bruce lived on our porch. She made a nest in a bale of hay, and while we were away on vacation, our house-sitter accidentally let Bruce out of his hutch for a few minutes. That’s all it took. There were seven babies—three albinos just like Bruce, and four brown just like Fern. We constructed an outdoor enclosure one weekend, eager to get the growing, pooping, peeing herd of rabbits off our porch and out of doors. Once their new home was ready, we got to practice our first serious rabbit-catching.
A new episode of the Painting Pictures Podcast for your listening pleasure: from Craftsbury, Vermont, a quick slipper of a bipper wherin beer, wine, refrigerators, and chicken stock are discussed.
Click here to download the episode and subscribe to Painting Pictures via iTunes – errr – Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/painting-pictures-with-gabriel-roberts/id846291943?mt=2
Here’s a permalink to the episode: http://gaberobertsart.com/podcast/?name=2019-04-15_beer_and_chicken_stock.mp3
Through the drifts of snow, plowing and shoveling we go! Winter snow grips Northern Vermont in November, and Gabe tries everything to keep his driveway clear. He makes a terrible mistake and must atone by baking cookies.
Click here to download the episode and subscribe to Painting Pictures via iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/painting-pictures-with-gabriel-roberts/id846291943?mt=2
Here’s a permalink to the episode:
As mentioned, here’s me performing as Dan Keene at Vermont Vaudeville in Hardwick, VT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqCjKTzPbwg
Yes, I am aware that the title of this post is grammatically incorrect. From scorchin-hot Craftsbury Vermont, a solo waxer about the new Star Wars movie Solo, some items that aren’t worth shipping back to Amazon, and a really dumb country song. Enjoy!
Click here to download the episode and subscribe to Painting Pictures via iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/painting-pictures-with-gabriel-roberts/id846291943?mt=2
Here’s a permalink to the episode:
http://gaberobertsart.com/podcast/index.php?name=2018-06-02_everybodys_talkin_bout_heaven.mp3
Love this from an article titled “Why Utah now has first ‘free range’ parenting law”
She said she first realised there was a disconnect between what parents want and what they actually do when she was brought on a popular US morning programme to discuss a viral blog post about allowing her nine-year-old son ride the subway alone.
The staff of the programme all remembered having similar freedoms as children, but confessed they wouldn’t allow their own children to do the same.
“We’re being hypocrites because we’re coming to the erroneous conclusion that any time a child is unsupervised they’re automatically in danger and it’s not true,” she says.
So what’s changed? “Parents’ perception of how dangerous the world is has changed over the years,” says Dr Gail Saltz, a professor of psychology at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Parental anxiety, Saltz says, is inflamed by a global, always-on news cycle, as well as increased connectivity on social media platforms, which recycles “over and over again” kidnappings, rape and other threatening incidents.
While violent crime has dropped sharply in the US in the past 25 years, Americans generally perceive crime rates are continuing to climb, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.
Saltz also says present-day parenting is less communal than it used to be and has turned into a “competitive sport” for many. This results in parents’ tendency to “helicopter” their children more often, Saltz says, to appear as though they’re “winning” against their peers.
Happy Easter and April and Spring! Below a new background that is miraculously on time. I think I even got the dates right!
This is a tempera and charcoal painting/drawing of the house across the street from us here in Craftsbury, VT.
Click one of the following links to download this free desktop calendar background (note: the largest file, 2880×1800, is slightly different, with some blank space on either side to pad out the image size):
2880×1800, 2560×1600, 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800
Do you think I’m insane? So begins Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk. Before I begin criticizing this stack of papers, I must ask you the same question: do you, dear reader, think I, Gabriel Roberts, am insane?
I want things to make sense, and I’m bothered when they don’t. For example, if somebody proclaims to hate garlic, and then, right before my eyes, eats a bowl of raw garlic, I would think to myself “that doesn’t make sense”. I would wonder why this individual claimed to hate garlic, and I would probably ask for an explanation: “I thought you hated garlic”, I might say.
Does this make me insane? Lately, my desire for things to make sense has not only felt crazy, it has been tried. Oh, how it has been tried! In movies, characters do things completely out of character just to bring about some desired outcome (like a nice burst of sex or violence or conflict). TV shows seem even more shoddily-constructed, with music, effects, and snappy editing taking the place of actual story-telling. Advertisements make me feel like a crazy person: “random” humor has become so popular that ad men actually strive for the incongruous and non-sensical. Worst of all, Wikipedia—seemingly the #1 source of information in the world—boasts articles that appear to be written by idiots, children, or robots.
We eat it up. We smile and repeat the nonsense we see on TV because it was on TV and all the bright lights were shining and it was said by a really famous person. We trust NPR and Wikipedia because we’re told that they are to be trusted. There’s no such thing as right or wrong, sense or nonsense. If you think something is wrong, you’re insensitive or uneducated. If you think something doesn’t make sense, you’re a conspiracy theorist.
I’m about to point out a whole lot of things that don’t make sense. These are things written down in a non-fiction book by a person who calls himself a “reporter” with “journalistic integrity”. I read them and allowed my brain to function and found them to be complete nonsense. Before you label me insane, here’s your chance to read the same things and allow your very own super-developed mass of brain tissue to function, and ask yourself the following oft-forgotten question: “does this make sense?”.
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