We stopped at a red light and asked a guy with a very hoarse voice where a good place to eat was and he squeeked out ‘bagels on broadway’ so off we went on a search in Missoula, Montana. What a beautiful town. It’s a college town (U of M is there I think) so it has that college town vibe to it. We found the place and had great bagels. We told them we were from the bagel capital of the world, Tulsa, Oklahoma so they were mightily impressed.
The quote for the napkin came from the magnetic poetry thing that was in front of us at the counter. Here is a picture of it.
I did a caricature of the bagel maker for my napkin. She wasn’t in a great mood but by the end of our time there she was smiling and happy. Our mission to get a bagel and spread joy was complete. Here she is with the napkin.
Caitlin the Bagel Maker in Missoula, MT
Sorry I have been so lame about posting, the trip has been more fun and more time consuming that I anticipated!
My first brown napkin ever! Got it at the Super 8 Motel at breakfast in Buffalo, Wyoming after a day getting to Badlands National Park JUST as the sun set! But we found an ultra cool abandoned church and took some pics there.
And just a few minutes later we got into the park and got to see some bison and witness the sunset. It was gorgeous. We even got a pic of us at just the right moment!
Next stop, Yellowstone National Park!
Drawing and photos (all from my iPhone, ‘good’ pics from my camera to come later) by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily.
Hello Napkin Kin! I am going to be on a road trip this week and a bit into next. I will be driving from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Seattle, Washington (about 2,000 miles) to help my daughter move. I will then fly down to San Diego, California to visit my 92 year old father and my sister and her family.
I will be drawing on whatever napkins I find along the way, at diners, fast food joints, hotels, wherever. It might be a quote, might be something funny I heard, who knows.
I will also be taking photos and posting them. Let’s hear stories of your road trips with links to your photos as well, ok?
If you are on my route go out and wave as I pass by, ok?
In 1981 I was still in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I was contemplating doing a multi-colored woodcut dealing with the idea of distraction. For me, a young male at the time, an obvious example of distraction was a man paying attention to a woman when he should be paying attention to something else. I did a series of sketches on this idea.
There is only one way to know if you are being told lies. You MUST be a self-educator.
Where might you be told lies? We can start with religion, culture, science, nationality, race, education, government, nutrition, fitness, illness, sexuality or history. The list goes on and on.
In those situations (and many more) how do you know if you are being told lies or not? Maybe you aren’t, maybe you are. But how do you know? You know if you seek answers from multiple sources. If you are in a ghetto then you aren’t likely to get those multiple sources. (I don’t use the word ghetto in a derogatory fashion. It’s original meaning was a place isolated from it’s surrounding area for one reason or another. I am using simply as a description of isolation.)
I don’t mean a physical ghetto. I mean an intellectual ghetto, a mental awareness walled off from the wider world. If you only listen to people and ideas that come from within that intellectual ghetto, then there is a good chance you will have a distorted view. At the least you will have a view by default. It won’t be one you came to be exploration, it will be one you came to by taking the path of least resistance and not taking responsibility for your own thorough education.
I have known a number of people, for example, within the Christian community who think they have thought through an issue. But in truth they have simply mulled over a pre-determined, pre-packaged ‘thoughts ready to think’ supplied by those in charge of their ghetto. They haven’t read or listened to ideas outside that ghetto. This is true in both liberal and conservative congregations I have been a part of. So, while they believe they have come to their own conclusions, their lack of objective exploration outside the ghetto belies that assumption.
To be fair, I do know many, including the Pastors of the two churches I attend regularly (one liberal, one conservative), who are constantly exploring outside the confines of their own congregation’s leanings and heritage.
I appreciate and applaud the people who do this. They are the ones I trust to be truly searching for truth.
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Smiles don’t equal honesty. Beauty does not equal honesty. Handsomeness, charm, sincere listening, thoughtful words…none of those things equal honesty. Honesty is not in a face, not in eyes, not in a voice. Honesty is only in one place, and that is action. That action might be true words spoken, yes. But honesty is most likely to be seen in what a person does, not what they say. And especially not what they look like.
Those who say ‘he has an honest face’ are fooling themselves. Faces aren’t honest, people are.
Drawing by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Quote by ….. Willow from the TV Series ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
I think this is a great quote. What it says to me is that telling the truth is an art. It is within the realm of truth that you are allowed the greatest leeway. You can craft that truth in such a way that it is kinder or meaner, transparent or opaque, light-hearted or deadly serious.
Manipulating the truth is not the same as crafting the truth. Crafting it means you use your wisdom and knowledge to say something the best way you can. Manipulating the truth means you use your knowledge to make that truth sound like it is a different truth, a truth you want your rabid followers to hear for example, or that you tell to get money or attention. Those manipulated truths are half-truths, they are mutated truths. And those are lies.
You can see it in politicians but even more so you can see it in the mean-spirited demagogues who rule the airwaves. They aren’t interested in the truth, they are interested in manipulating people to do what they want. And what they want is to have adulation, power, prestige and money. It’s the most depressing thing I know about modern society at this time. It is an embarrassment and they should be ashamed. But they aren’t.
The Half-Truth is an animal whose mother was a purebred Truth and whose father was a purebred Lie. They fooled around and next thing you know this creature was born. A Half-Truth can only breed with a Lie. It can’t breed with a purebred Truth. Each successive generation will be more and more like a purebred Lie.
It is a very sneaky creature. It lives among Truths by disguising itself to look like one. It usually gets away with this for a while but it always gives itself away by being angrier and more secretive than a Truth. The other Truths always can sniff out the Half-Truth after a while and usually kick it out of the clan. It will go off looking for another tribe of Truths but almost never can sneak in, since the original Truths have warned all the other tribes of his coming.
Catching a Half-Truth is very hard. It will bite you if you try to catch it from the front so it’s best to try to catch it’s tail. Of course if you catch it by the tail it will always quickly jerk around and bite you. It is not an easy task. The best advice is if you come across a Half-Truth it’s best to walk way out of its way. Don’t try to make friends with it, it will bite you. Don’t try to feed it, it will just get stronger and more ferocious. Don’t try to cage it unless you are very sure the cage is escape proof. Do remember, the Half-Truth is very slippery and can get out of even the smallest of openings.
The best thing to do is to keep the Truths and the Lies completely separate so no Half-Truths are born in the first place. Stay near the Truths’ den and don’t let any Lies come close. They will try to charm you and get you to let them go in, but if you allow it, they will try to take advantage of the Truth and breed with it.
I said this post may be about truth. But I lied. It’s about lying.
What brain mechanism activates to allow us to believe something we actually know to be a lie? Whether it’s about ourselves, our parents and family history, about our nation or maybe about science and the social world, we don’t have to go very far to see us believing something we know to be false.
The next question is harder. What do we get out of doing that? Is it like a movie set? We know it to be just a facade with nothing but empty space behind it, but the facade is SO convincing, so alluring, we just fall into believing it’s got a whole building behind it.
I had a friend long ago, at least 20 years, who told me she was estranged from her father, hadn’t talked to him in many years. When she was asked about her family she told people that her father was dead. It saved her from having to explain why they were estranged. She told me that she never, ever mentioned her father in the present tense, even when talking to herself or her spouse, who was one of the few who knew the truth that her father was still alive and actually lived in the same city. Luckily it was a very big city so they didn’t cross paths.
She was so consistent about her verbalization of him in the past tense that she really, truly forgot at times that he was alive. It convinced her of the lie.
Why do we do that and what do we get out of it?
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903-1990, English writer
