I apologize to Frank Herbert and the entire Dune-enjoying world for this.

Last October, I inadvertently participated in Inktober by drawing a bunch of funny birds, like the ruby-throated hoverbro or the barre chord owl. Then the drawings sat in my sketchbook, unused and forgotten. Until! Until a friend asked me to make her a calendar, and I remembered that I had a buttload of drawings just sitting around doing nothing. A little bit of photoshop fussing, et voila:

I combined the calendar into a single PDF, printable on regular office 8.5×11″ paper. Feel free to download, print, and let your boss contribute 13 sheets of paper towards making your cube more fun in 2020!

As late fall settles onto Minnesota like an unpleasantly weighted blanket, the natural inclination is to watch some TV.  Rebecca and I realized that, while we’d watched the first season of The Office (US) when it aired, we’d drifted pretty quickly. With binge weather upon us, and the clock ticking for the show to leave Netflix, we decided to go in hard on it, and powered through several episodes a night.

And: The Office is fun! The characters are relatable and human. The writing is sharp, and knows where to poke at the oddities of spending your days in badly-lit spaces with other people who don’t want to be there. The observations can be apt: one of the show’s central (maybe accidental) theses is that often the worst people to work with are the ones who can’t just let a job be a job but instead have to turn it into either their family or a crusade that gives their lives meaning (this is Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute, respectively). The show can also be a fascinating timeline of cultural change, as with the way the show handles Oscar being gay moves from turn-of-the-century kid gloves to a more current “so what?” attitude. And the show gave us Creed Bratton, maybe the most consistently surreal sitcom character since Andy Kaufman was on Taxi.

But as fun as it was to binge on The Office, I couldn’t help but notice that however sharp the writing was, it pulled punches. And if you stepped back and looked at the show, its point of view was weirdly constrained. There’s some value, I think, to taking a closer look at that.

A PLANT WHOSE ROOTS ARE BOUND UP IN CAPITALISM