toothbrush adventures

I gave myself the mission this morning of redesigning my desktop. I got it in my head that I wanted a late 60s Peter Max /yellow submarine vibe, and after a while of digging about on flickr, I came upon this collection, which is totally magnificent and also just what I was looking for.

I picked the below pic for my desktop....

Robin and I were trying to make out just what the backstory is here. What we decided is that....Li'l Miss Bluepuff is floating along on this curious shelf while her pal Mr Toothbrush is regaling her with his tumultuous, epic life story. He won some sort of toothbrushing championship (top right) and went on to represent the U.S.A. at the toothbrush Olympics (top left) Resulting success and acclaim (top center) led to him succumbing to some bad habits, as many stars do (see middle, left ) Now, I am not certain what Toothbrushdude is smoking here---peyote?? Swisher Sweets??--- but the fact that it's curling his hair and has TURNED HIM GREEN is a fair indication that he should cease & desist. And he does kick the junk and professionally reinvents himself as a singer (bottom left ) but after a couple platinum albums he grew wary of the pitfalls of fame and extricated himself from the public eye. He moved to Columbia (the S American country, not the university) and began ranching,(bottom right) eventually becoming the world's second largest supplier of giant toothpaste radishes.

The pic is actually taken from a book called "The Teletrips of Alala"written by Guy Monreal and illustrations by Nicole Claveloux (said book is now on my Amazon wish list). So after stumbling onto the amazing work of Claveloux that led me to this book publisher Harlin Quist who, in the late 60s thru the 70s put out all these really avante garde and artsy kids books with real quality illustrations (Claveloux was one of his principal illustrators). And now I want to buy them ALL. Well, most of 'em. I love a well illustrated children's book. I am a little obsessive about buying them too, but I always give them to my nieces& neph so that I look not quite so odd.

I was going to search the stacks at Encore books (my neighborhood go-to used bookstore) for any Harlin Quist offerings during my lunch hour, but I made the mistake of revealing that I was going to grab my lunch at Wendy's (next to Encore) and in 2 shakes of a lamb's tail I had in my possession a post-it with 3 coworkers' lunch orders. I don't want to infer that any of 'em are ingrates, they were all quite appreciative and said their pleases & thank-yous at the right junctures, but I was internally perturbed because it stopped me from popping into Encore. I mean, I was right nearby, and I could have stopped there (no one forbade me) but I was consumed with the thought of 3 people back in the office awaiting their lunchies and I knew that would prevent me from browsing as leisurely as I am accustomed to doing. I did run a bank errand prior to hitting the Wendy's drive thru, but have postponed Encore until after work.

Speaking of Wendy's...remember how I was griping about their restructuring their drive thru in a really asinine fashion?? Well they split a traditional 1 line drive thru into 3 lanes with three ordering speakers that merge into 1 queue to pay & pick up. Well I KNEW it just wasn't going to work and sure enough, when I went today, I saw they'd closed it down. My boss was saying how some of the Wendy-folk that you reached via those speakers were in MARYLAND! Oddness. Some Wendy's HQ in MD took your order and IMed or emailed it to the crew at the Wendy's you were at. Come ooooon. Sometimes, simpler IS better!!

Oh, and in defense of Claveloux, not ALL of her illustrations were so loopily far out. Take the lovely example below ...it definitely shows a 60s pop influence but is not so drug induced looking