Phone photo 1113

This front license plate is all that remains of my beloved '96 Olds Ciera
Now it is displayed in memory over my garage side door

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Merry Christmas! My 1996 Oldsmobile Ciera Gets ProbablyTotalled!

The best car I've ever had got creamed Christmas morning by a driver who was behind the wheel of a pickup in spite of the fact her license was suspended. Oh, and needless to say she didn't have auto insurance. It's a good thing we cartoonists have a sense of humor and appreciation of the absurd-- it helps us survive on many levels.

No one was hurt, so far as we can tell, but I am sort of sore. If I had been in one of those modern econoboxes instead of my beautiful tank, I suspect there would've been more injuries.

It is possible this wonderful vehicle can be saved, but it doesn't look good. I was really hoping we could grow old together. This auto became part of the family in 1997 when it was only a year old and had about 32000 on the odometer. If this car winds up in a wrecking yard, it will have a lot of great stories to tell when the metal hulks gather 'round the campfire and swap tales in the dead of night.

Here's a brief gallery of my faithful Old Gray who has provided it's drivers and passengers with almost 260000 miles of smoooth riding. The Olds now rests in front on my house, waiting for the verdict from my insurance company. And Doc, give the bad news to me straight, I can take it.

Phone photo 1021

Phone photo 983

Phone photo 911

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Oldsmobile peace symbol

Phone photo 401

My beloved Olds. Within a couple months I look forward with shivering anticipation to performing the Quarter Million Mile Dance!

UML

UML was an online series I drew for OlyBlog from May 29, 2007 to Nov. 21, 2009. There were 37 installments, or "issues," I guess you could call them.

The idea worked like this: Our Washington State license plates (until recently) were issued in the form of number number number hyphen letter letter letter.


Here is my '96 Olds Ciera (with almost a quarter million miles!), the inspiration for the concept.

Whenever I spotted a fellow UML I would write it down. After gathering about 26 or 27 of them, I would record the sightings on a chart, like this:

Then I would remove the grid lines, allowing the dots to float free, thusly:

Then the dots would start to connect:


And finally the lines would form an image, which would almost invariably turn out to be a dog smoking a cigarette (or cigar):

In one case it turned out to a be a cat, but that was quickly undone and reformed into a dog. These sequences were all accompanied by text, which you can read on OlyBlog. Something happened to the graphics in the early ones, they need to be refitted. OlyBlog has gone through a couple major resets since they were first posted.

I'll skip the preliminaries and present here a gallery (in no particular order) of the final panels of each UML: