postcards: the robot riddle

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mail, postcards, robot

art generated by humanely raised free-range robots

One of the traditions here on Mars is sharing the weird and wonderful postcards that arrive in my mailbox, but it’s a tradition that hasn’t got nearly enough love in the past two years. Friends, family, and clients have sent me a joyous pile of fun, thoughtful postcards since I relocated to Tucson in early 2021. They are always a bright spot in my day, and they get displayed in the Martian HQ for months before being filed in my archives. Maybe before I blow out of this hellhole in Tucson forever in three weeks to start the next chapter of my life, we’ll enjoy a postcard retrospective.

Before we get to all that, I want to share one that arrived this week, because you might have some insight into the question it poses. This postcard is the very first to arrive completely unsigned since the hilarious call to begin the intergalactic invasion in 2013. Sending random unsigned postcards to make someone’s day a little more surreal is exactly the kind of frivolity this blog was founded on more than a decade ago.

I still don’t know for sure who sent the invasion postcard, but I am pretty sure I know who sent the following robot riddle for me to solve. I thought you might like to take a shot at solving this riddle, too. Post your answers in the comments, and maybe you will help the mysterious sender get some ideas for her robot novel.

What is the sound of an inert robot when he’s laughing?

I came up with one solution to this riddle based on a post at https://www.livescience.com/electricity-humming-noise, but you might have ideas of your own. And if you have never received a postcard from me personally, then that’s on you! Email me your address and get on my list for mailings that go out at irregular intervals once or twice a year.

Another year lost in the wasteland.

postcards

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clown motel, postcards

‘Tis the season to send and receive holiday cards, but traditional themes of snow, Santa, and religious imagery are lost on me. Fortunately, I have pen pals who understand what a nut I am and how much I enjoy weird, wonderful, wacky images. They send stuff like this:

Although I lived in Nevada for a year in 2002, I never visited Tonopah and its famous Clown Motel, which has had a comic book and one or two movies made about it since it first opened in 1985. The sender of this postcard is an inveterate road tripper and included a quote attributed to Hal Hartley who, among other things, directed the film Henry Fool which I saw on the big screen at Ann Arbor’s incomparable Michigan Theater in the late 1990s: “There is no such thing as adventure. There is no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire.”

Cynical, perhaps, but after several decades of pursuing romance and adventure, I can’t really disagree with Hal on this point. Speaking of holiday cards, I sent out a batch of 50 custom-made cards for the first time in several years. It’s been so long that I discovered today that one of my addresses was outdated by four years. So, if you didn’t get a card but would like to get on my list, send me an address update via email. Keep in touch!

The fronts of this year’s cards featured my drawing of Meteor Mags playing piano in space, with the interior message “Peace on Earth and throughout the Solar System”. The back was a reproduction of the cover to Mags’ latest book, The Singing Spell. And you know what that means: The cost of the cards is a deductible marketing expense for my publishing company! Nothing says Happy Holidays quite like reducing one’s tax liability.

And what festive holiday imagery did I choose for the stamps on the envelopes? That’s right. Tyrannosaurus Rex! To hell with reindeer. I need dinosaurs! Check out the awesome T-Rex series from USPS.

Deck the Halls with Prehistoric Carnivores!

Stay safe out there this holiday season, and don’t do anything dangerous like visit a hotel that’s haunted by evil circus freaks. Or if you do, at least send me a postcard, darling!

postcards

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balladeer, continental drift, Jose Guadalupe Posada, postcards, tellus science museum

Two fun postcards arrived in September. The first was a print of “Balladeer” by Jose Guadalupe Posada. My pen pal claims to have carried it around for more than twenty years before mailing it! I wonder if the guitarist was still alive back then.

The second postcard comes from the Tellus Science Museum I visited last year. It’s a lenticular print, meaning the image changes depending on the angle, and it has not two but six different images representing stages of continental drift.

Mom did not know when she sent it to me that I had been working on a story that involves continental drift, and the postcard made me realize I got something wrong in my story, despite all the research that went into it. The original draft got the date wrong about when Australia completely split from what is now Antarctica, and the error was off by about 470 million years. I’ve since made the correction. Thank you, educational postcard!

Here is a brief time-lapse video showing a few billion years of continental movement.

Matthew Kalmenoff painted dinosaur postcards

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ankylosaurus, brachiosaurus, brontosaurus, dinosaur, dinosaur books, Matthew Kalmenoff, ornithomimus, painting, plateosaurus, postcards, tyrannosaurus rex

Reader Ed Dietrich sent us these postcards as a follow-up to what we’ve shared of the late Kalmenoff’s artwork for The Golden Stamp Book of Animals of the Past and Sinclair Oil’s Exciting World of Dinosaurs booklet. Ed says these cards from publisher Dover bear a 1985 copyright date, which means they come from a book you used to be able to find on Amazon: Dinosaur Postcards in Full Color. The complete set contains 24 postcards. Here are five to whet your prehistoric appetite!

dead computer guy postcard

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computer, dia de los muertos, postcards, skeleton

This “day of the dead” postcard came to me this year without any indication of the artist’s name, but it does have an address on the back for Milo Papers in Boulder, Colorado — which, as far as I can tell from the Internet, doesn’t even exist anymore. It doesn’t get much more dead than that!

scotty karate postcard

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henriettahaus coffee roasters acoustic, music, postcards, scotty karate, smalls

 We love getting weird stuff in the mail. Who doesn’t? No, not creepy weird. More like “strange and mysterious and fun” weird. This mysterious postcard arrived in the martian mailbox signed only by “The DJ Who Shall Not Be Named”. That just brings a smile to our little late-night-blogging-obsessed faces. It features Scotty Karate, and you can witness him performing in this same outfit and colorful stage set-up in the video below.

Video notes: Scotty Karate plays Dig A Hole at Smalls. February 13, 2011. Part of the Henriettahaus Coffee Roasters Acoustic series.

sketchbook sundays

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art, cards, cute animal cards, digital photography, drawing, Jack Kirby, pillows, postcards, sketchbook sundays

For today’s Sketchbook Sunday, let’s take a moment to spotlight these cute animal cards Mom sent us. In 2010, Mom had never had an email address. We encouraged her to get one, and then she started discovering the joys of Google – especially for finding images and materials for her preschool classes. Last year she took her first online course, a class in digital photography to support her animal photo enthusiasm. Now she is having her own cards made from her digital pictures. Pretty cool! Here are three of our favorites, below.

Readers of Mars Will Send No More may recall how we collaged our table with pages from old Jack Kirby comics a few years ago. The Kirby table has served us well, fueling our inspiration and filling our life with Kirby Krackle as we paint and eat. But now, it is time for a little refinish.

Love those panels of people freaking out in a morass of cosmic crackle! But as you can see, the well-loved surface is now a disaster, and it’s impossible to even tell if the thing is clean enough to eat on or not at any given moment.

So, we sanded down the big chunks with some 60 grit and a palm sander, then gave it a black and white starry cosmos finish with some old spray paint from a box of leftovers in a friend’s garage.

This week, our pillows arrived. Below you see a 20×20 throw pillow featuring the image of Meteor Mags playing piano in her black dress and silly pirate hat.

The pillows are nicely made with a sturdy outer cover. The image is printed on both sides. They have a zipper on one edge. It opens to reveal a polyester pillow. The pillows in the 20×14 products are much cuddlier than the 20×20 products. They are stuffed more. The 20×20 is beautiful, but the 20×14 pillows are more snuggly.

And that’s all we have time to share this weekend! Thank you for dropping by ~ and happy sketching!

Tiki Lives!

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memoir, postcards, tiki, tiki glass

In the misty dawn of the twenty-first century, a young human purchased an incredible vessel. Carved from glass in the likeness of the great Tiki gods, this sacred vessel cost merely twenty-five cents. First, it served as a planter for small cuttings of succulent plants. Tiki served in this capacity on his second but not final cross-country journey.

Of his many travels and ill-advised drinking adventures, Tiki remains silent. He offers no more explanation than a frightful but strangely ecstatic smile. These days, Tiki’s brains are full of Sharpie markers and paint pens.

Please Select Your Offering of Praise to the Great Tiki:

postcards

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postcards

More missives manifested in the Martian mailbox this month. We will let you guess which one came from Mom… and which one did not!

postcards 13

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cedar waxwing, Jack Kirby, postcards, squirrel, wildlife art

We may have ‘maintained radio silence’ in the month of April, but that doesn’t mean our readers’ postcards and messages went unappreciated. So, let’s kick off May with a few highlights from the Martian Mailbox.

The fifth most influential man on Pinterest certainly has our number, as evidenced by this wonderful Jack Kirby postcard from the Jack Kirby Museum.

Up next, a postcard made out of wood. Yes, we know paper comes from wood, but this isn’t paper. It’s a slab of wood with a squirrel on it! Now that’s how to do wildlife art.

Last but not least, we present a card from Mom, who recently picked up photography as a hobby and is learning all about digital cameras. This bird is a Cedar Waxwing, for those of you who haven’t seen one before.

Museum Heart by Alberto Rios

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alberto rios, museum heart, poems, poetry, postcards, scottsdale museum of contemporary art

The poem Museum Heart by Alberto Rios appears on a beautiful installation in the entrance to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. An award-winning author and a faculty member at Arizona State University, Rios became the state of Arizon’a first Poet Laureate in the summer of 2013.

dino cards: tuojiangosaurus

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dinosaur, postcards, Tuojiangosaurus

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of Tuojiangosaurus!

dino cards: hadrosaurs

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dinosaur, hadrosaur, postcards

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of the Hadrosaurs!

dino cards: parasaurolophus

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dinosaur, parasaurolophus, postcards

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of Parasaurolophus!

eric’s skull

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art, drawing, eric, Eric Sprayberry, postcards, skull

Feliz Dia De Los Muertos from the lord of darkness himself, our old high school buddy Eric. We sent him… something in a round of postal anarchy a couple years ago. He sent back some artwork of his own! Eric was always into punk and hardcore as long as we can remember, so it fills our Martian hearts with rock-and-roll to have this original skull. Eric said he used paint pens for this one.

brett’s bird

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animals, art, birds, Brett Alan Elliott, drawing, postcards

Brett Alan Elliott. We can’t find out much from researching the web, but we really dig this card. It reminded us of a youthful dream of being wildlife illustrators. We spent the better part of several years sick in bed reading every animal book in the public library, developing a real fondness for the illustrations.

Brett’s raven or crow has a lot in common with the local grackles here on Mars. He inspired our series of charcoal and pastel birds, and we began by imitating his bird’s pose to the best of our abilities. While we don’t ever expect to have his mastery of anatomy, structure, lighting, and detail — let alone inking technique — we found it incredibly instructional to study this image and learn from it.

We hope he doesn’t mind our posting it here, and if you know of his website or anything leave a comment for us please!

Paranoid Postcards 12

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devil girl, Kitchen Sink Comics, postcards, Robert Crumb, underground comix

postcards: the invasion is at hand

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postcards, transmogrifier

You may by now be aware that we send out some pretty nutty stuff in the mail. We like walking into the interplanetary postal branch here on Mars to ask for their help “distributing more revolutionary propaganda.” But the high point of the shipping department’s day is surely the variety of odds and ends that show up addressed to us — or to Mars, or to any number of amusing aliases. Here are two of our favorites from this long hot Martian summer.

An old school friend announces that the Transmogrifier works! He used it to become a duck, presumably posing for this fine postcard.

This one made us laugh out loud, prompting the shipping department to duct tape us to a palette of frozen goods to preserve our imperiled sanity. It helps if you know the Calvin and Hobbes reference to the transmogrifier. We also happen to know with 100% certainty what our friend’s favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon is. It always was 🙂

DINOSAURS FOREVER! Our plan to bring them back and mutate the entire west coast into lizard people is really gaining traction now!

Next up: Someone anonymous sent us this lovely communique from the Mexican front. The invasion is at hand! At least we believe they sent it from Mexico, because it isn’t even postmarked. Sometimes we suspect the postman is in on the joke and just stuffs our mailbox with his own personal madness. Who knows?

We couldn’t be happier about the timely scheduling of the intergalactic invasion. Your secret orders have been sent to the aforementioned drop box. Bring back the dinosaurs, comrade!

Postcards 11: Sandman

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Black Hole from Outer Space, Chris Sand, memoir, postcards, sandman, Timezone LaFontaine

This postcard came from Chris Sand, who recorded and performed music for many years under the name Sandman, and later expanded that moniker to Sandman the Rapping Cowboy.

I first met Chris in 1994 in Olympia, WA, where he performed at the same musical open mics as me and my sister. Accompanied solely by his acoustic guitar, he rapped classics like the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” — which, for you non-musicologists in the crowd, is often considered the first rap or hip-hop song. He mixed in some folk tunes and a song composed for his gramma which, if I recall correctly, was modeled after a letter he wrote to her.

And of course, who could forget “Talkin’ Hormel Chili Blues” in which he recounted the story of putting a can of chili in the microwave. DO NOT TRY IT. It’s dangerous! It made sense for him to pay tribute to the form of “talking blues” as a rapper. Despite Sugar Hill Gang’s claim to producing the first rap, talking over music was common much earlier in the twentieth century among folk singers like Woody Guthrie.

Chris later moved away and became a truck driver, but continued to perform at local festivals, events, and house shows. A couple years ago, he even had a documentary made about him! Recently he got married and had a baby, and music performance has taken a back seat to life’s other great creative endeavor — raising a human being.

A couple years before that happened, we found him again on Facebook and corresponded. He sent us this postcard along with a really wonderful and well-produced album The Black Hole from Outer Space. You can find it — and much more by Sandman — easily on Amazon or iTunes, and at Loner Records.

The Black Hole from Outer Space was produced by Timezone LaFontaine, and independent hip-hop artist whose work we also love.

Paranoid Postcards 10

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postcards

Cheap-ass motels.

Below, a tape case insert from 2006. It is the last “mix tape” anyone ever made us. Not the last we ever received, because we have one friend who is so terminally slow that a mix tape made about five years prior would eventually reach us by, oh, 2009. Anyway, we have long-since digitized our favorite tunes on it and consigned the physical cassette to the great rubbish bin of obsolete consumer electronics that hovers around the planet like a giant evil robot with a tiki face.

Postcards 9

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alwun house, memoir, music, postcards

Today’s batch of four postcards comes from the Alwun House, a non-profit arts organization in downtown Phoenix where I performed music with several different small groups, duets, or solo for a few years. Tom had called me to “fill in” on guitar at one of his shows there, and I fell in love with the place and the vibe and the people.

When none of Tom’s crew could make a date, I filled in with a bassist and a drummer I met through Craigslist, and one thing led to another. We used the name Kado Jones Project — the working name of my bassist buddy Kipp’s home-recording project.

Tom and I continued to play duets there and all over town as Beat City Jazz. Later, I put together a second trio for the Exotic Arts show, and played solo for a couple events like the sign dedication party. It was fun. I miss performing tunes and rocking out with friends, but I don’t miss lugging all my gear all over town and having to make art on a time table after driving in traffic. The positives certainly outweighed the negatives when I had the time and resources to do it, and there really isn’t anything in life quite like musical collaboration.

Paranoid Postcards 8

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postcards

Paranoid Postcards 7

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la luz de jesus gallery, matthew bone, postcards

This postcard promotes Matthew Bone’s “Paradise Lost” exhibit at the La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, California in February 2012.

Paranoid Postcards 6

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Last Gasp, postcards

Hey, who doesn’t love getting cool postcards in the mail? In these days of email and instant messaging, it’s easy to forget the joys of getting real, tangible letters delivered to you! Fortunately, our pen pals don’t let us forget. We’d like to share with you some of the fun postcards we get, mostly from our pen pal who goes by the top-secret code name ‘Paranoia’ — hence, paranoid postcards!

Paranoid Postcards 5

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postcards

Hey, who doesn’t love getting cool postcards in the mail? In these days of email and instant messaging, it’s easy to forget the joys of getting real, tangible letters delivered to you! Fortunately, our pen pals don’t let us forget. We’d like to share with you some of the fun postcards we get, mostly from our pen pal who goes by the top secret code name ‘Paranoia’ — hence, paranoid postcards!