Enter the cow

Yesterday Amy downloaded some copyright-free, derivative-work-ready photo clip art of cows and gas masks. After producing five or six variations, I came up with one that I'm happy with. So the next mission will be to clean it up and then get to work on the variations. I need 16 of them, one for each section of the MSG. For example, I'm going to create a version filtered with a really chunky half toning patter for the newspaper section. The movies section will probably have fancy sunglasses and a beret. The radio section will be sepia-toned with an old-timey microphone and maybe a fedora.

It's a relief not only to be making some progress on the site but also to have taken a bite out of such a key element of the design.

In the spirit of the occasion, now would be a good time to tell the story of how the Survival Cow came to be (for anyone who doesn't already know it). Many years ago I worked for Academic Computing at the University of Kansas. One of my duties was to work at the Engineering CAE Facility, a computer lab with a couple of Harris mainframes over at the School of Engineering.

Most of the work was fairly boring, but once we got the chance to do something fun. We got permission from the powers that be to come up with an instruction book covering basic computer use, some of the more common applications, just about anything a new user might need to know. The book was to be patterned after a similar book -- a First Aid Kit -- from one of the state schools out in Nevada. We didn't want ours to be an exact copy either in word or in spirit. And of course back then I was somewhat heavily into the whole survivalist thing. So a Survival Guide was only natural.

In keeping with the light spirit we intended for the project, I came up with some offbeat illustrations. One that was prominently featured early in the book was "Survival Cow." This was a stippled ink drawing I made based on a photo from the cover of Soldier of Fortune (or perhaps it was SOF's survivalist-oriented offshoot, which I think was called Survive). The photo was of a cow wearing a gas mask, supposedly a graphic illustration of the Soviets' commitment to surviving a nuclear war with even their livestock industry intact. All I really cared about was that it was a weird image, that it fit with the survival guide theme, and that the cow thing had a nice tie-in to Kansas.

Of course the project died a premature death. Some jackass in the Chemical Engineering department got wind of what we were working on, called our boss and told him that in his opinion computers weren't funny. The truly strange part -- and a good illustration of the insane bureaucracy that is KU -- is that they pulled out all the funny text but left most of the illustrations (including Survival Cow) intact.

Thus it's a genuine pleasure to return a new generation of Survival Cows to the stage in a production over which I have absolute creative control.