Oh, bloggers. I’m ready to make the Portrait of the Week weekly again. As Caitlin has mentioned, I now have a mega-studio. She usually refers to it as The Master Studio. I came into some money, and I got a tabloid-sized scanner and a Wacom Cintiq, which is a monitor that you can draw on with a stylus. Both very nice. Also, she and I moved some things around, and now I’m comfortable with our workspace. So basically, things are moving again. Things are happening again.

Now, I think that these portraits could start to fall on a consistent day, don’t you? Like what about Mugshot Monday, or Famous Friday, or Celebrity Saturday? I like that last one because it’s only an aural alliteration, which is fun and funny. So probably I’ll start putting them up then.

Anyhow, Cait and Chadwick Matlin (“the staff reporter for The Big Money, Slate’s business site, which will launch later this year” -from his Slate byline), and I went to the © Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum recently and we had fun. So here he is with his mascot sprites, Kaikai and Kiki.

Okay, okay. I forgot how long it takes to settle into a new place. It’s almost been two weeks, and obvi I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly portraits, or, for that matter, drawing much at all. But! this ain’t LiveJournal, so I’m gonna berate you with another unnecessary change I’ll make to our writing system once I enforce my Totalitarian will on the people.

Numbers. They ain’t right. Whenever I’m measuring, or reducing, or enlarging, I always end up with .125s and .8625s and I hate it. I remember my middle school geography teacher telling my class that the Maya used a base-six system, which is actually better than base-ten because it divides better. Six divides into halves and thirds and ten divides into halves and fifths, and who the hell measures things in fifths? I think we could go a step further and make our base unit also divisble by quarters.

How about twelve?? Twelve!! The perfect number! It’s actually not all that ridiculous. Think about it! We already have unique words for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Past that, we ad the -teen to the digit in the one place, right? That means we’re already set up for making King Twelve the successor to King Ten. I’ll admit this gets tricky once we get past nineteen, but what’s so bad about tenteen, eleventeen and twelveteen? Or what about twenty-ten, twenty-elven and twenty-twelve? Or even deci-one, eleventy-two and twelfy-three? We could do worse. I mean it. Cause we are doing worse, dudes.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking, how could we ever transition to this insane new system? You’re thinking it! Come on, admit it! But, just ponder a moment, please, about circles. 360 degrees. That divides into twelves. And, uh, hello? Twelve hours? Sixty minutes? Three feet? Twelve inches? Do I even have to go there?

Of course we’ll need new numerals. Don’t worry, everybody, I got it covered. Since twelve is the new ten, it is represented by a one and a zero. And I made up some passable figures for ten and eleven. Check it:

Ookaa, duu yuu get it? Xen get wix it!

Here she is, in all her Liz Lemmon glory, scarfin down some Sabor de Soledad off-brand Mexican cheese puffs.