A Rounding Error

Plus new coasters at The Hay Adams

Here’s this week’s cartoon from The Economist.

I feel sorry for the thousands of seafarers who have been stranded on the almost 1,200 cargo ships stuck in the Strait of Hormuz over many months.

The recent commercial traffic in the Gulf of Hormuz has shrunken to approximately 11% of the pre-war volume.

It is anyone’s guess as to when the idiocy of the this war-of-choice might be resolved and the sailors returned safely home.

The initial sketch for the cartoon was a mere 4 inches wide. My original idea was to have a toll booth on the right. But upon reflection, I thought the difference in scale between the big tanker versus the toll booth might feel incongruous.

As I further developed the cartoon, I experimented with adding two small characters on the lower left observing from the shoreline. I correctly abandoned the idea in later versions.

New Beer Coasters at The Hay-Adams

In an earlier post I discussed the amazing partnership that fellow cartoonists Matt Wuerker, Ann Telnaes and I are privileged to share with Washington’s iconic Hay-Adams Hotel.

In the hotel’s basement bar Off The Record, political caricatures festoon the walls and populate the drink coasters that are provided with each beverage.

To celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, Matt and I were commissioned to create some special coasters featuring caricatures of the founding fathers.

The Hay-Adams describes our fun project in this recent article.

Below you can see three of my coaster illustrations.

This Month’s Subscriber Winner!

As a special benefit for our paying subscribers, on the 15th of every month one, picked at random, will become the lucky winner of a signed and personalized full size print of my classic Buy! Sell! cartoon (a $125 value)

This week’s winner is Gary Holbrook.

Congratulations. Gary!