For several months now I’ve had the pleasure of arting United Airlines’ Hemispheres in flight magazines regular column, Dispatches, which details cool and peculiar travel destinations and events from around the world.   If you happen to be on a United flight sometime soon,  consider pulling off your shoes and socks, flopping your tired dogs across the lap of your seatrow mate and treating yourself to some illustrated travel curiosities.

The dispute over whether cheese from Stilton can be called Stilton Cheese

A Japanese City’s Attempt at Enforcing a Zero Waste Policy

For the last few weeks and up until the middle of April I’ve been working as a sessional instructor at The Ontario College of Art and Design , where I’ve  teaching a class called New Directions in Pictorial Design. It is a mixed class of illustration and design students that focuses on creating and applying hand-rendered type and images.

My friends at Grand Creative and I came up with a website www.paperbeatsinternet.com that is a analog social networking site that is somewhere between a Twitter feed and passing notes in class.  All posts have to include hand-rendered text and images and have to be phrased in a way that leaves them open to being responded to by entries by other student or guest contributors like Istvan Banyai, Leif Parsons and Emily Flake.

Faber & Faber hired me to illustrate the cover and interior of their fascinating book on the curious history and culture of wine.  Available now at fine bookshops and online retailers.

Synopsis:

We’ve all come across those suave, confident and all-so-knowing books that tell us precisely what to drink with which dish, how to swirl, sniff, slosh and pronounce upon our wine, and, above all, how to impress our friends and business associates with our expertise.

Well, this is not one of those books. Is This Bottle Corked? is something different: a book which poses - and answers - the really important questions about wine.

What was Falstaff drinking when he called for more sack? What did they actually drink at Plato’s Symposium? When is rot ‘noble’? Did Clarence really drown in a butt of Malmsey? Why on earth do wine connoisseurs talk like that? What is it with Mateus Rose? Why do we drink to forget - and why doesn’t it work?

These, and many other intriguing, amusing and curious questions are answered within, guaranteeing the reader a ‘Yes, but did you know …’ for every occasion a cork is drawn.

Best read with a glass of good, second-growth Pomerol, or perhaps a soft, consoling Constantia (guess who recommended that for heartache and gout?) or maybe even a glass of St Anne’s Rhubarb and Ginger Wine, this book is as much for bon vivants and those of us who just enjoy a good glass or two as for the committed oenophile. Just open, pour and relax.

According to my almost three year old niece, she is getting stalked by this thing.  

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/80635/print/