Sunday, January 17, 2010

Anatomy & Physiology redux

Ran into my former Human Anatomy & Physiology instructor a while back and she asked permission to run this old cartoon in their Society newsletter. I had originally doodled it out sitting in class, which might be one reason I flunked the second semester of the course (that's where the raw memorization skills of endless chemicals and formulas come into play). Seriously though, it's recommended for art majors to take at least the first semester of this year-long course so as to better understand skeletal and muscle structures and in turn better inform their figure drawings.
The caption had originally said "pumpin' out a stroke volume of over five thousand mLs a minute"....but it was tweaked to correctly read "cardiac output" instead. As my handwriting was barely legible back then in those days, so I just rewrote all the verbage - even if my sense of humor hasn't matured at least my rendering skills are a tad bit improved. That and I'm still getting corrected by my teachers.



There's one potential drawback to doing gags for niche markets: even if it's an in-joke ("pre-supposition of obscure knowledge"), it better be right or you'll never hear the end of it from the specialists. My experiences with doing graphics for, say for example, biologists (ornithology seems to be the worst) has taught me there's a really fine line between faithful accuracy and creative license.
"OK, I don't like to gear my material to the audience, but I'd like to make an exception, because I was told that there is a convention of plumbers in town this week—I understand about 30 of them came down to the show tonight—so before I came out, I worked up a joke especially for the plumbers. Those of you who aren't plumbers probably won't get this and won't think it's funny, but I think those of you who are plumbers will really enjoy this. This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch gangly wrench. Just then this little apprentice leaned over and said, 'You can't work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch wrench.' Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, 'The Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.' Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, 'It says sprocket, not socket!'
[Worried pause.]
"Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?"
- Steve Martin

No comments:

Post a Comment