2016 Calendars: Wall—Cats We
Love; Anne Geddes—Down in the Garden. Andrews McMeel. $15.99 (Cats); $14.99 (Garden).
2016 Calendars: Desktop—Dilbert;
Peanuts. Andrews McMeel. $14.99 each.
One of the nice things about
physical calendars, as opposed to electronic ones, is the way they provide
instant change and uplift, amusement, or some other emotional “zing” for your
workspace or home. By picking one of Andrews McMeel’s 2016 calendars and
displaying it where you see it all the time, you guarantee that you will have a
smile on your face, a tingle of enjoyment, or some other positive reaction to
the day – at least once! The calendars
cannot do anything about what happens after
you glance at them, but at least they can be a small dose of “up” feeling to
counter anything drab or difficult that may come along later. The key in
selecting a calendar, therefore, is to choose one you will really enjoy seeing
day after day, week after week, throughout the year. Cat lovers have an
excellent choice for 2016 in the form of Cats
We Love, which features the art of Sueellen Ross – who creates cats with
near-photographic realism and places them “just so” in a variety of appropriate
and often adorable settings. These are not kittens, to which adorableness comes
naturally: they are full-grown cats planted in entirely appropriate places. In
fact, the very first cats in this 16-month calendar – shown with four small
versions of September through December 2015 – are interacting with a planter,
one of them lying on its side in front and the other inside it, looking out of
the picture directly at the viewer. And thus the cat theme is “planted” for the
year. It continues with a lovely series of indoor and outdoor cat portraits,
several including red flowers of various types and several showing cats in
positions that cat companions (sometimes called “owners”) will immediately
recognize: a cat lounging on a rocking chair, one looking straight ahead while
snuggled on a pillow, one perched in a tree and gazing about in mastery of the
universe, and so on. Cat lovers will find this a delightful all-year foray into
the feline world, which intersects the human one but seems to coexist only
through the benign permission of the cats that occupy it in whatever way they
wish.
Amusing world-blending of a
different sort is the basis of all the art of Anne Geddes, who delights in
combining utterly adorable babies with costumes and settings that go beyond the
improbable into the surrealistic – but always with an eye on enjoyment, not
anything disturbing (as surrealism can be). The 2016 Down in the Garden calendar features a dozen perfect examples of
Geddes’ approach. An especially adorable one is the illustration for July, in
which there are four rows of beautifully decorated plant pots on four shelves –
with babies costumed as flowers peeking out of every pot. There is much more
along the same lines here: for June, one of Geddes’ frequent forays into babies
perched atop red-capped, white-spotted mushrooms; a baby-as-yellow-butterfly
for November that deliciously parallels and contrasts with a baby-as-snail for
December; some almost-laugh-out-loud babies within pea pods for April; and on
and on throughout the year. Geddes’ art is not to all tastes – some people find
it a trifle on the weird side or a touch too sentimental – but if her work does
engage you, this calendar will provide a year-long chance to revel in it and
enjoy scenes that can be really remarkable, such as the one for March that
shows three babies still in chrysalises and a fourth already hatched from one as
a beautiful butterfly.
If you prefer your calendar
amusements more on the wry side, one way to get them is with desk calendars –
those spiral-bound, open-flat planners that let you see a week at a glance and
take an overview of your schedule and appointments. Predictions that physical
planners would disappear in the rush to follow schedules electronically have
turned out to be incorrect, and in fact some people have found clever ways to
combine the two forms of tracking: the physical planner is large enough to give
you a whole week’s overview, while the smaller screen of a smartphone can then
give you specifics about individual meetings. The comics that appear on pages
opposite the ones for tracking appointments can let you enjoy whatever type of
humor fits your life best, and fits the place where you are keeping the planner
as well. It is easy to imagine, for example, keeping the 2016 Dilbert desktop planner at the office
and the 2016 Peanuts one at home.
Scott Adams’ calendar this time is called “What can I say to make this
conversation end?” The cover shows Dilbert asking that question while
attempting to work at his computer as the Pointy-Haired Boss hovers behind him,
clearly ready to offer the latest bit of mismanagement. There is a great deal
of useful advice here for people trapped in the surreal corporate world that
Dilbert inhabits – and unlike Geddes’, this world is one whose surrealism does
have teeth (so to speak). Here you can be inspired by Wally’s non-work ethic
(“when I get to within four years of retirement, I’ll only work on projects
that have a five-year payback”); by Alice’s incessant “arguing with the GPS
navigation system,” in which she repeatedly shouts at it, “Change your mind!
Change your mind! Change your mind!”; by the Pointy-Haired Boss attempting to
inspire by leadership clichés and then reporting to Catbert, evil director of
human relations, “I drilled until I hit bile”; by Dilbert’s discovery, which he
reports to the company’s CEO, that “there’s no correlation between our
predicted and actual outcomes”; and much more. The comic strips may not make
you feel better about any meetings scheduled on the opposite pages, but they
can help put all those meetings, along with the rest of office life, into some
sort of perspective.
Peanuts put life in perspective, too: Charles Schulz’ much-loved
strip had more depth and bite to it than many people realized during Schulz’
lifetime. Nevertheless, the 2016 Peanuts desktop
planner offers gentler, less-snarky humor than the Dilbert one. Here, Lucy contemplates marrying Schroeder but being
so poor that they would have to sell his piano to buy saucepans; Snoopy, in his
World War I Flying Ace persona, must bail out of his plane – only to land in
his supper dish; Charlie Brown’s team gets deeply upset about playing baseball
on Mother’s Day, which makes them “no good” and “thoughtless” and “selfish and
cruel,” although Charlie Brown points out that he himself “sent my mother a very
nice card and a dozen pink roses”; one of Charlie Brown’s interminable failures
to kick a football held by Lucy is caused by “an involuntary muscle spasm,”
against which Lucy says the odds were “ten billion to one”; and much more of
the unique Peanuts brand of humor.
There is something reassuring about all calendars: they lay out an entire year
neatly and seem to provide evidence that all will be nicely organized and
proceed according to a well-designed grid, illustrated by something pleasant
and/or amusing. Real life doesn’t exactly work that way, to be sure, but
calendars’ implication that it might
work that way next year is one of the
reasons they provide so much enjoyment, time after time.
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