It’s been quite a day and tonight we’re watching Ed Wood with Johnny Depp.  Lee has seen it but she’s seen now catching me up on all the films I missed when I went back to school in my latter years.  I’m 56 now and went back to school on and off through my forties to early 50’s; at times, full-time.  Much more fun in one’s youth. LOL.  I wish I’d paid more attention my first time in school in my late teens but I guess I forgot to pay attention after forgetting to listen to my dear late mom (who had a degree in education) say, “Pay attention!!!”.

Since my first job selling records at Pal’s Music Company in downtown Hattiesburg, Ms at age 12 in 1966 until the early 2000’s, I had so many odd jobs to support my “life as a writer”, I can’t even count them all.  Had a lot of false starts too.

Anyway, fast forward to June 18, 2010. I married the woman of my dreams (Lee) atop Hot Springs Mountain with a handful of guests.  It was a gorgeous indoor/outdoor nature wedding (if there is such a thing).  We had so much fun.   We still do.

Well, most people by now know that I founded my offbeat cartoons & funny gifts, Londons Times back in 1997 but I had a few near stops, real stops etc due to health, school, etc.  Then around 6 months into our marriage Lee suggested I’d probably be happier if I started a Londons Times Gen 2 cartoon reflecting all that has occurred in the world since my early cartoons, which a lot of people still thought were fine, but they didn’t reflect the changes of today. She was onto something (I later discovered).

Since I launched that cartoon came Google, blogging, 9/11, social media (Twitter, Facebook et al), med-resistant e-coli, tornadoes that went on for months, and so much more.   So I recruited a new creative team after reviewing several hundred portfolios. This new team was/is the tops. The new toons are much larger.  The text is more to the point, and hopefully the whole finished product is more productive.

We work as a team, as most cartoons you see in the newspaper do.  I write them, and do what is called “blueprinting them” which gives more detail such the expressions on the various persons faces, their body language, the pictures on the wall (if inside); what kinds of trees, dogs etc if outdoors.  I think blueprinting might be the hardest part of the process, but the most fun.  In a way it is like being an art director in a film. I’ve watched them work and it reminds me of that (only not so complex); I mean after all it’s only a cartoon.

I now have about 5000+ cartoons on my site and over a quarter million funny gifts. The funny t-shirts,  gifts & funny greeting cards by brand name sites such as Sears & Amazon.  Over 200 or the cartoons are new Gen 2 as are about 1000+ of the offbeat gifts & collectibles. Let me preface the rest of this paragraph with I dare not put myself in the same league with the master,  Gary Larson, but I remember when he took his all down from the net and demanded all others do the same. Finally he had to threaten suit and possibly sued, I can’t remember for those who would not remove them.  I loved Gary’s personality and his work.  I never understood why he had the cartoons removed (at first).  Then one day he said in an interview, “I had them removed because they are like my babies”.  I didn’t understand it at 1^st.  5000 cartoons later, I don’t understand how anyone couldn’t understand it.

Cartooning and creating merchandising is work that can be difficult or easy; but its always fun, and sadly, it is work that most people don’t see you do.   Lee sees me work, and as a fellow designer, she knows how hard I do work. It seems like I’m always working though it seems like play.  Between all the crazy jobs I had to take to get to our little piece of paradise in the Arkansas Mountains, I can truly say it was all worth it.  But what a journey!! I have learned new digital design skills and am now making the world’s only famous love quote shoes at my shop Shoes That Amuse and a line of Sushi Shoes & Gifts at my ShoeShies Shop. I’ll feature them in a near-future blog.  Meanwhile please feel free to take a look.  About 400 of the items have also been picked up at Amazon.com and I expect Sears Marketplace to carry them this year.

PS: Since I wrote this blog my beloved wife Lee & I watched Ed Wood and it was brilliant and strange. I loved it. She loved it (again); she’s seen it many times. In the middle of the film, we received a phone call on Lee’s phone from a very close special person in our lives and she couldn’t get to the phone in time.  When we checked the message, our dear friend had sung “Happy Anniversary To You” in a voice as atonal as mine; but we absolutely loved it.  (Let me add she is a most talented woman and known around the world for various advanced skills….but like me, singing does not happen to be one of them.  But it surely was fun and we surely did laugh aloud the rest of the day.   It was a beautiful day with my amazing wife Lee on our 1st anniversary and I felt the love and support from everyone who wished us well, who have supported us in our business ventures, and been there for us. It does not go unnoticed.  We love you all.

A few weeks ago, an old childhood friend asked me how I can always “be funny” & added “You are #1 on the Internet.  You live on a ridgetop mountain paradise. Do you ever feel empathy or sadness?  There are different types of humor and though it all “comes from the same place, different events or visuals might trigger it. Do I feel sadness and/or anger or grief.  Of course and often lately with all the world tragedies. Just because we are somewhat buffered does not mean we don’t care what happens in our world.  What happens five thousand miles away, affects us. We all now live in a global village called “earth”.

At first I thought back to the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico. I grew up on that Gulf and it was magic to me as a child even up into young adulthood.  I loved everything about it. I swam there, fished there, skied there, flirted with girls there, ran with my dogs there. It was my life in many ways. In the blink of an eye it was destroyed, and though the oil is out of sight, out of mind, we all know things are not okay but a lot of chemicals; oil and dispersants have sunk to the bottom or halfway down.  Baby porpoises are floating to the beach. Sperm whales are nowhere to be found.  I created a Tony Hayward  BP cartoon which has become popular.

I had been thinking about starting Londons Times Generation Two Offbeat Cartoons, and funny gifts, but the oil spill was the only thing on my mind.  So I made a pledge to write a parody song regarding the oil spill every day until it was plugged; and I did. If I could have found a band to record them, the funds were to go to various Gulf animal and environmental causes.  Sadly, I was unable to recruit a band on spec who could do song parodies. But I was able to purge, in a jaded sarcastic way, humor, as angry as I was. Anyone who knows Lee knows how angry I was, and I could not shake it. The songwriting helped.  Posting them on my popular well-visited blog helped even more.

Then I mellowed out a bit after a number of nature hikes with Lee and though I never forgot the event, and never will (both of us have pledged never to buy gas or other BP-owned products), we have in our own way, moved past it.  Lee is from Oregon and has never seen the Gulf and all its natural beauty.

Then came the uprising in the Arab world. Though I occasionally do socio-political cartoons, it is not the norm. Most are offbeat in the spirit of, some critics have said, The Far Side, which I consider a compliment, though my goal from the start was to attempt to continue Gary Larson’s absurd spirit, but create it with less text and a more “fine-art” look. For the most part, that has worked out fine.

So I decided to create ideas about the dictators which is always fun. It gives one a chance to be iconoclastic without hurting anyone but lampoon those who has not hurt many others.  A few of the cartoons landed in a major newspaper in the Middle East and though I find nothing about nations in turmoil funny, again, I was able to find comedy in fear and anger and it happened.

Finally, there was the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan and a lying company called Tepco.   I can’t explain how much it felt like watching the oil leak from Deep Horizon and Tony Hayward saying things weren’t so bad, and when busted by the media added, “I just want my life back”.  It reminded me of Yogi Berra’s great quote “Just like deja vu all over again”.   Now the citizens of Japan, one of our greatest allies if not our greatest, and good friend, was being destroyed, first by a natural disaster, which I know from Katrina can eventually be fixed, but then by a firm “Tepco” which seemed to play the game exactly like BP.  The sad thing is that the Japanese media seemed to go along with it; basically reading Tepco’s press releases as news, until evidence began showing what was being released as news, was not what was really happening.  Radiation was leaking everywhere.  Tepco was insisting it was not so bad.

Meanwhile radiation was covering the planet and it has now been found in nearly every country on the planet. It will go down in history as worse than Chernobyl.  My team created a two-headed frog cartoon lounging by the leaking plant reading a newspaper. The headlines read, “Nuclear Accident Safe, No Worries”. One frog head says to the other, “Looks like the media is telling us the truth. Nothing to worry about”.

Some mistook my jaded reaction to making fun of the event.  It was anything but that.  It was a message to Tepco and the complicit media that they have no right to hide the truth from their citizens (any more than BP had a right to do all they could to hide their disaster from us).    Again, there was nothing funny about this event, and it felt like BP was happening to them this time.  I was enraged.  But from that rage I was able to find a bit of humor. It was angry humor but humor nevertheless.

Then came the flurry of tornados. One hit our hometown of Hot Springs about 7.8 miles from us and we lost some of our Arkansas citizens.  This was a very sad time and even out of anger or fear, I found nothing funny, so I just stared at the news and went on hikes when I had the energy. I created a few items, but no cartoons.  It was a time of grief as the warnings kept coming and tornados were hitting ground and destroying cities and killing people and other living creatures.  I was too sad to get much done, but I allowed myself to be that sad.  Lee understood as she too was sad.

Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it, and I grew up outside of New Orleans, tornado and hurricane alley and went through the worst of them. It had been a way of life growing up. Now with global warming and climate changes, the tornado behavior was/is too.  All I knew is we were lucky to be surrounded my mountains, and though there is always a slight chance of one landing inside such a geographic area, it is very rare.  That did not take away the sadness I felt and still feel watching the people hit in Kansas, Alabama, Mo, etc try to pick up and put their lives back together.  No way to create cartoons (or much of anything) when you know people are experiencing such a tragedy.

I don’t enjoy creating cartoons out of fear or anger. To me, they are not as funny nor do they have the same feel of professionalism as do those that come out of my head when the world feels a bit stable and I am hiking/communing with nature.

So I founded Rick London Designs which include Sushi Wear (I kid you not) and love quote gifts (again no joke).  I don’t have to feel funny to create these gifts and collectibles.  I love sushi and I love shoes, so I make shoeshies (sushi shoes) at my ShoeShies.com. These are fun creation, but I don’t have to “be funny” to create them, yet I have a wonderful outlet.

The love quote gifts and sushi items also just got picked up by our main manufacturer who is not a traditional POD but a private organization who chooses talent they want (creators cannot simply sign up with them), which means they are already beginning to show at Amazon and should soon be at Sears online and other outlets. Some of the sushi gifts at Amazon can be seen here.  The famous love quote gifts on Amazon can be seen here.

This makes me not feel angry, but that life is good.  And it is.  The world is a good world.  We live in a very good place.  Lee and I get to create for a living and she gets to hike and take photos and design products. I get to design products and think up cartoons and make gifts that make people laugh.  I can’t think of anything for which we would trade our lifestyle.  And as you can see, we still are a part of the world, feel sadness, happiness and all the other emotions persons in Metropolis feel.

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Rick London says he’s a semi-pro blogger, a designer of sorts, a cartoonist who doesn’t draw well, and a professional twitterer who doesn’t like social media all that much.  He and his wife Lee enjoy hiking, outdoors, nature and wildlife and they live in the heart of the gorgeous Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas.  Lee is a professional wildlife and nature photographer who runs the popular blog HikeOurPlanet.com. She designs beautiful designer shoes, gifts, clothing and home decor at her Lee Hiller Designs Gift Shop.

Of course the first and main reason the gratuitous slap in the face to all the life coaches, social media experts, “wisdom experts” (who either lift quotes and/or articles and take credit) or edit them just enough to insult our intelligence with their name as the credit.  I love such “writers” who do not understand that we’ve been to college, because they certainly haven’t.  Most of those are what are known as “life coaches” who are nothing more than a “gang of literary thieves”.  What they do is often attractively package and sale mundane and sometimes exciting philosophy that we learned in college and is, of course, now free on the web. They charge a fortune for books, tapes and the like, leaving their victims (clients) bleeding in the streets, but with the opportunity to become such a “literary-thief-in-training” as well. So it has a “Donald Trump/Amway MLM feel to it”.

My wife Lee and I decided a long time ago that was not for us. Don’t get us wrong. Nearly every major life coach on and off Twitter has tried to recruit us…let me rephrase that..recruit our wallets, but we decided it might be safer to put what extra we have in savings and invest in our our clean businesses which involve designing and selling gifts and collectibles. Our business is very simple, very clean, and offers products of tangible value, no regurgitated philosophy or wisdom, simply usable and/or collectible gifts, clothes, etc.

Lee is an amazing nature photographer who writes a nature blog, Hike Our Planet, and I’m sometimes told I can turn a phrase and create a cartoon that goes on all our products.  Though we often deal with POD’s (Print On Delivery) manufacturing companies, our main factory for six years now is in Rhode Island and the majority of our products sell at Amazon.  Recently the Sears Marketplace picked up a good many of my cartoon gifts. Lee has taught herself not only photography, but how to take that photography and her own unique graphics and create products such as shoes, tees and gifts at her  Lee Hiller Designs Shop. Her items are also available at associate shops all over Amazon.com. She has no snake oil for sale. It’s the real thing.

Why do I make this “comparison story” between “life coach” and legitimate businessperson?  Early on, especially in social networking, it could have so easily gone the other way. The life coaches are artists. Con artists. They are friendly. They know all the right things to say. They can win one’s hearts and minds the way no politician or army even dreamed of doing.   And they have built in radar that heads straight for the pocketbook.

Life coaches often “build a name for themselves”, then start the process of writing books, making cds and tapes, having seminars, and talking nonsense that sounds somewhat like wise philosophy, and it should, as it is more often than not lifted from major names like Emerson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and so many others, edited and/or watered down, and their own (the life coach’s name) placed on it. I’ve even seen them lift Biblical quotes, change them a bit, and wala, guess who the new author is?

If you’ve just started Twitter, you probably have many of them on your friends list who are following you. They seem to be predatory (the most) to newcomers who haven’t a clue.  Many of the wiser ones change their moniker to “spiritual coach”, “spiritual advisor” “life author” “coach/author”, and the list goes on and on.  In any case, watch for subtleties; the devil is in the detail and as I mentioned earlier, they are con-artists of the highest degree.

My wife Lee once quoted, “You are your own best life coach”, and she is so right.  The alleged purpose of the life coach of whom you pay thousands of dollars is to motivate.

I prefer the freebie by Walt Whitman who would laugh at any life coach. His great quote is, “To Begin, begin”.   Really, what more does one need to know?

Oh, look in the yellow-pages under “pest control” to rid ones home of rodents. I almost forgot that part of the story; but should note it since rodents and life coaches seem to be in the same category (sorry rodents, I know you’re better than that).

When I read an article, I don’t just want information, I want a remedy. A solution.

The solution is, when you find yourself being called and/or emailed by these “Oh, so nice life coaches”, and you will, cut off all ties.  Yes you will hear cries like a baby. They will “badmouth you” on Twitter, facebook and wherever.  Trust me, in the long-run, these are the types you DO want to bad-mouth you; for persons of goodwill know, that if these crooks think you are “no-good”,  you must be a person of substance.

And you really are if you were able to out-maneuver these cyber-whacky sharks by cutting them off and blocking them from your Twitter stream. It is as simple as that.  Oh and screen your calls. You may receive a few curse-word filled calls for your sinful betrayal.  That means “You Done Good”.  Congrats.  Now it’s time to play REAL Twitter. The riff-raff has suddenly disappeared and the drama and chaos has magically dissolved.  Oh, and you still have your money. Now, wasn’t that fun and easy?

On the side of the blog I’ve posted some recent products I’ve made from my various shops (the cartoon store, ShoesThatAmuse, and ABoyNameSushi) shops for your entertainment enjoyment. Oh, and please don’t be shy to purchase. If you don’t, I may have to have a life coach call you for an appointment.

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Rick London is a writer, cartoonist, and designer.  He created Google and MSN’s #1 ranked offbeat cartoons, Londons Times in 1997. Less than a decade later he launched online shops which now feature over a quarter million licensed products which are featured at such shopping channels as Amazon, Sears, Shop.com, Shopping.com and many others.  He also has his own shops such as Rick London Collection where he sells his favorite cartoons on tshirts, mugs, greeting cards and other funny gifts.  London founded the world’s only famous love quote shoes in 2007, ShoesThatAmuse.com which have received the thumbs up from APWire and USA Today.  This year he launched ABoyNamedSushi, a division of his ShoeShies which are sushi artwork shoes and gifts.  London has published over 500 articles and his cartoons have appeared in the Jerusalem Post. His main Londons Times Cartoon site boasts 5000+ color offbeat cartoons which have lured 8.7 million visits.  Several of his originals are a permanent part of the Roy Orbison Collection and Mayo Clinic Medical Library.