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Friday, December 30, 2011

Top Ten: Runners Up

I’m going to cheat with my “best of” list this year.

Usually I run five runners-up before heading into my Top Ten. This time around, however, I’m going to have six also rans, ‘cause there were a couple that I just really liked. Thanks in advance for your indulgence.

Scouts and scouting are favorites of mine. As a Cub Scout leader, one of my pet peeves is when people try to make Webelos singular. According to the Handbook, the name comes from WE’ll BE LOyal Scouts. This cartoon is an expression of that befuddlement.

Thanks to Calvin and Hobbes, and Linus in Peanuts before that, snowmen can take on a different dimension in cartoons. The guy who draws Tundra (Chad Carpenter) has practically made a career out of it! This is one that I particularly like.

Grammar plays a role in this cartoon as well. I noticed while watching BYU in the NCAA basketball tournament, that No. 32 could have been an irregular French verb.

One of my (very) small claims to fame is that I may have been the first to earn the Genealogy merit badge in Scouting (the council office said I was — I don’t know if they keep a record). As a kid, our family used to spend the summer in the Family History Library…where we discovered that someone (my grandma) had fudged on a few dates to make parts of our history a little cleaner, a little more respectable. Didn’t help.

Star Wars and Star Trek references show up in a few of my cartoons. To complete my geek trifecta, I had to include The Lord of the Rings (I won’t even mention Dr. Who). First, Gandalf’s other career:
 
…and the truth behind the ring!

Stay tuned tomorrow for numbers six through ten in the Top Ten Countdown!

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