I saw this exact sign on a car sales lot today. Sometimes the cartoons just write themselves.

The announcement today that the Higgs boson has been found is such exciting news, I just couldn't wait to do a cartoon about it.

If you're like me and mostly hear "Blah blah blah blah mass blah blah blah particle blah blah blah" when the scientists speak about it, start here for some background elucidation.

It will probably be hard to miss the ongoing discussion that will follow this momentous discovery, so it's worth schooling up on it as we simultaneously realise what a truly amazing world it is that we live in.

It's that time of year again for me, when my work band gets together to rehearse for the annual Battle of the Ad Bands competition. I wrote about it last year, so won't repeat myself here, except to say that the same vibe is in the air, and it's feeling good! 

To celebrate, I thought I'd dust off another of my early Turkeyroll cartoons and give it a paint job. (Read their back story here.) I still like this one, and resonate with Shane's sense of pure, unfettered rock'n'roll freedom that the music clearly inspired him to take that flying leap off the stage.

While it will be short lived and come to an abrupt end, for those few fleeting moments it will be the greatest feeling in the world.

Rock on.

Never lose sight of your own identity. Even if others might not understand you sometimes, it's the most important thing you have. Sooner or later, you'll meet people who recognise it and celebrate it with you.

I know this news is a little old now, but it got another airing today as a former James Bond actor added to the criticism of the iconic film character ditching his signature drink - the vodka martini - for a beer in the new film. When I read the article, the above idea just hit me. Much like a beer would if it was prepared like the martini!

It's funny how precious people can get about things like that. Why are some people so resistant to change in their pop culture? Why shouldn't George Lucas add new bits to the old Star Wars films? Why shouldn't Metallica record a double album of avante garde art rock with Lou Reed?  And why shouldn't a major comic book hero be gay? Well, just because sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it's just the right thing to do.

Cheers Mr Bond!

With this week being the 100^th anniversary of the Titanic sinking, a reader requested a cartoon about the event, which also coincided with their birthday. I was happy to oblige!

Meanwhile, unlike the sole iceberg that struck the Titanic, two things struck me amidst all the media coverage of the disaster this week.

The first was a statement attributed to an academic that the three most written about subjects in history are Jesus, the American Civil War and the Titanic.

The other was the report about how many young people on Twitter didn't realize Titanic was real, thinking it was just a movie by James Cameron.

Seems a bit counterintuitive. If so much has been written about the Titanic, why aren't the kids finding out about the real story? (Maybe this cartoon will help!)

The Titanic story – be it the real or fictionalized version – is certainly a sobering   cautionary tale. A real life, modern day Tower of Babel story. (Be sure to look that up before tweet about not knowing what that is.)

Whatever side of the ship you wish to sail, be it movie or history book, it's worth reflecting on what we can still learn from Titanic 100 years on. Perhaps it's just the simple lesson that too much technology can be bad for you.

This week I unexpectedly found myself in conversation with a global warming skeptic.

Dressed in a fine suit and sipping a wine, and apropos my mention of one of my PR clients, he became immediately evangelical about how the “jury was still out” on whether climate change was in fact a problem.

 It was at the end of a long day and I'd already had a couple wines myself, so my brain was not fully engaged to respond. I did ask him if he really thought that pollution produced by human activity had no appreciable impact on the planet.

He pulled up a bit and said that of course that was a bad thing and we shouldn't do it, but that the planet was still naturally coming out of an ice age anyway and that human beings weren't really making a difference. He demonstrated his viewpoint by exhaling a sharp breath and saying, “That was carbon dioxide. That's supposed to be a big problem?”

It is fascinating to me that views like this are still out there. I drew the above cartoon about six years ago, around the time Al Gore's documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released. That film not only stirred a world to think seriously about how climate change was affecting the planet, it also whipped up a debate that is still going on today.  

I can totally understand why. The global warming process, as described by scientists, is so slow in comparison to the rest of our lives that its impact is not felt in the same way as an earthquake or other more immediate disaster. Even the floods that have hit this part of the world in recent months don't seem like they are really connected to it, even though research findings like this indicate otherwise. 

As this cartoon suggests, there are no easy answers to global warming, but it is still vitally important to pursue them. In our fleetingly short human lives, it can feel like the Big Picture is just too big to gain any real perspective.

Coincidentally, today's feature article on Wikipedia is about one odd perspective on a response to climate change; the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. While the followers of this extreme viewpoint do seem to be quite sane and serious, it comes across to me as being something of an exercise in satire and performance art. That, like cartoons, can – in itself – be instructional.

It will be interesting to look at this little picture again in another five, ten and twenty five years and see how the Big Picture has changed. I'm fully expecting it to be even gloomier, especially if viewpoints like the one of my wine-quaffing interlocutor become more prevalent. I just hope we can keep talking about it, and more importantly, doing something about it.

There's no easy answer to what that is, but I do know that if humanity is smart enough to work out how to create the sort of technology that we have access to today, we can certainly find a way to make sure that it runs better, cleaner and more efficiently.

That's a Big Picture that's worth at least attempting to draw.

It's a notable anniversary for me today. 25 years ago on this day, 11 March 1987, I had my first cartoon strip published in a little newspaper called the Eastern Riverina Observer in the state of New South Wales, Australia.

I've written in greater detail about that strip, The Twangups, in a post last year when I realized that this anniversary was coming up. You can read that here and see some of the original (terrible!) strips.

25 years on, to still be getting the opportunity to draw silly pictures and see them in print and hear how they make people laugh is still perhaps the greatest thrill for me. Although I love the immediacy and interaction that comes around having cartoons online, there's something about the printed page – the smell of the ink, the texture of the paper – that has an earthiness that connects with me at a very deep level.

I am incredibly grateful to any and every editor that has agreed to publish – and sometimes even pay for! – one or more of my cartoons in the pages of their newspaper or magazine.   I hope to still be doing this in another 25, 50 and even 75 years!

I don't think it's ever too early to have a bucket list. I crossed off one thing on mine this week. I saw Death Cab for Cutie live in concert.

I thought about waxing lyrical here about the many ways in which I love the music of this band, but I've decided I won't. Google them, or just go out and buy one of their seven (to date) brilliant albums and discover for yourself the unique melodic power and joy that is Death Cab for Cutie. (Dammit, I've started waxing lyrical!) 

As I have similarly reflected in a previous post, being a fan of Death Cab for Cutie - in New Zealand at least - has been an exercise in patience. While they have played in Australia before, they hadn't managed to come across the water to Aotearoa ever in their 13 year history.  I was beginning to think they may be one of those bands that I would never see live.

When the announcement was made that they were coming to New Zealand for a one-off show, I - as an Aucklander - was crestfallen because their one show would be in Wellington (which for the non-New Zealanders reading this, is at the other end of the North Island of NZ) and I thought it would simply be too much cost and effort to get there. But get there I did, thanks to some nice cheap tickets snaffled through Air NZ's 'Grab-a-Seat' web site. 

The concert itself was breath-taking. Two hours of the aforementioned brilliant music I have described. It had such an effect on me that I left the concert hall afterwards feeling quite emotional and incredibly alive inside. Days later and I still feel it. Such is the power of music I guess.

A two hour concert is such an infinitesimally small amount of time in proportion to the years I have lived. And yet, I feel that moment in time will be like a coal burning, keeping me warm inside, reminding me that it's good to pursue good things.

Strangely, that feeling turned into the above cartoon. I trust it makes sense on it's own, but now you have some context.

"Patience is a virtue." I remember writing that in my high school final yearbook as my favourite quote. It's seems a bit bleeding obvious now, and a little pious, but then again I was a pious, fundamentalist prat in my teen years. These days, I prefer the quote "Nothing good ever dies." 

I sincerely believe that, and believe it all the more having now seen Death Cab for Cutie in concert. Does that make sense? I hope so.