There's Bloom County's Opus (the cartoon penguin). There's Mylar - more generically known as BoPET. And there's the visual appeal of a hard drive (see the image below I took this evening).

The penguin has been surfacing in my art of late - incognito - and I hadn't thought of him in quite a while. Bloom County by cartoonist Berke Breathed was enormously popular with my family. We not only read it in the paper, but bought every book of past episodes, to catch up on the origins of the critters and people who inhabited the fictional county. The pages were smudged with ketchup, yogurt, cinnamon sugar, chicken noodle soup (as were the pages of volumes of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes) because serious reading at the lunch and breakfast tables were the norm in our household. (We saved arguing for suppertime, where reading wasn't allowed.)

I'm fascinated by Mylar, and have compulsively saved deflated Mylar balloons, and more recently the wrappers and bags that hold Fritos and BelVita cookies and Annie Chun's seaweed snacks. I'd reuse the balloons as gift wrap, and now have crazy uses for the wrappers which I seemingly can't bear to toss. What is Mylar, anyway?

What is a hard drive? I remember reading years ago about the huge rooms where computer workers dressed like medical staff in a surgery unit, and dust and sneezing were absolutely verboten, but what were they doing in there?