Mother Nature…Lock Her Up!

With a Very Special Guest Contributor

It took some time, but my header is finally a bit amusing as we are officially in pumpkin season. I am celebrating this development by going pumpkin-picking today.

I hope everyone enjoyed their Columbus Day weekend, which also lands on the same day as National Kick Butt Day and National Moldy Cheese Day, I kid you not. But it’s time now (Tuesday, October 10th), for National Handbag Day and National Hug a Drummer Day. What I did not know is today is also International Stage Management Day. I will just leave it at that.

Courtesy Weston Group magazines

Courtesy American Bystander

I completed the last drawing for my upcoming museum book, Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums, to be published by Chronicle Books in Spring of 2024. This loose sketch of the lobby of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. was initially cut from the book but will now appear as a tiny spot on the last page.

Last, but not least, will be the back cover, the last item being worked on. My editor provided copy and it was up to me to find blurbs. I’m not to share yet who they are but I’m very happy. Getting blurbs can be very tricky. Two of the top three names in publishing said they loved the images in the book but they have a No Blurb policy (yes, it’s possible to guess). I think I can discuss who the others were not on the back cover. I tried contacting Alan Alda (I don’t know Mr. Alda, we only met once but I was unable to convince his rep to let me ask.), Ken Burns (who is a super nice guy and but was too busy with filming), Mindy Kaling (she is on the Smithsonian board and I tried unsuccessfully for a year to contact her), and Michelle Obama, who is in the book and after a text from her…or from her assistant, who said she was the First Lady, I was ghosted. But the eventual selection of blurbers could not be more meaningful to me, heroes of mine. I look forward to sharing them soon.

The Cartoon of the Month goes to Glen LeLievre. This appeared in the latest edition of AirMail weekly. Glen’s fantastic work can be found here. (it’s a fantastic website.)

Michael Palin has his new book out, Great-Uncle Harry published by Penguin and can be purchased or ordered at your local bookstore or online directly from the publisher here.

If you are serious about getting published than you have to check out Jane Friedman’s Electric Speed and The Hot Sheet. Go here to subscribe.

New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren was one our generation’s greatest and a wonderful person. He is included in three books I created and when we spoke together at the Norman Rockwell Museum, I stepped back and enjoyed his presence. He was always socially and globally conscious and I went to my favorite museum, The Essex Peabody, to see his exhibit on climate change. His lovely memorial can be viewed here.

You can meet me at the following upcoming events:

Miami Book Fair (Miami) Nov. 12-19

Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop (Dayton, Ohio) April 4-6, 2024

To order online at Bookshop, CLICK HERE.

I also sell lots of fun T-shirts (and iPhone covers, pillows, notebooks, mugs, wall art, totes, hoodies, pins, stickers, magnets, even tapestries) of my designs.). Check them all out here.

WARNING: I placed my more offensive work behind the paywall, including political work like the following OpEd, which first appeared in The Hartford Courant and this month in The Funny Times. I lose a significant amount of subscribers each time I insist global warming is real or share an anti-Trump cartoon and I expect the same to happen again here.

Caricature by me courtesy of The New York Times

Mother Nature…Lock Her Up!

Transcribed by Bob Eckstein

Let me first tell you, nobody worse than this Mother Nature. First thing I’m going to do, after a pardon myself, is get rid of this Mother Nature. We don’t have to put up with any this, the hurricanes, the flooding, the tornadoes, and extreme heat. You know what I call her, Hothead Mother Nature.

Nobody has a bigger carbon footprint, nobody, I got the biggest. Golf courses use over 2 billion gallons of water, a day. Do you know how many golf courses I have? Seventeen. Beautiful courses all over the world. I use over 34 billion gallons of water, daily. Other countries have droughts. People dying of thirst. Here in America we have water parks we gleefully play in, across this great country. Over a thousand water parks in the United States of this America, and I like to see that number go up. I think we can have ten thousand water parks by 2026, I really do. We love our water.

The rest of this OpEd is available to paid subscribers followed by an interview of me that has writing advice, more cartoons….and an exclusive movie of Barry, the Bear.

If you met me at the Milford Readers & Writers Festival and you signed up for The Bob, email me at Snowmanexpert@gmail.com and I will give you a paid subscription. I give paid subscriptions to students, seniors and anyone on a tight budget (writers!). I provide a big coupon for those who decide to subscribe.