Klossner: Why did you do this?

My cartoon process has several compartments. There is the communication with an editor or writer at FCW who gives me a subject matter for the issue's cartoon. After that I do my research, depending on my familiarity, or lack thereof, with the subject — this involves reading through , with stops at . Then I'll usually spend anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours trying to think of a concept for the cartoon. When I finally arrive at an image or idea, I pencil a rough sketch of the image, after which I ink and electronically manipulate (adding shades, fixing any lines) the cartoon. Inking, from the stories I find, seems to be a fun period for cartoonists and illustrators. How to describe it? It's as close to physical labor as a drawer gets. It is a time where I can let go of the mind clutter that accumulates during the conceptualizing and sketching parts of the process. Most cartoonists who I talk with spend the inking time listening — to music, to television, to anything that can serve as aural wallpaper. My personal favorite is online archives of a growing corral of radio, television, podcasts and Web shows. (As the technologies continue to grow, will the terms "radio" and "television" become extinct? Should we be working on one catchall term for electronic content? I nominate "digital flotsam.")Without boring you with a list of my listening preferences, today was an interesting coincidence. While inking this week's cartoon on , (see below)  I decided to catch up on archives from one of my favorite radio programs, . The Vinyl Cafe is a show on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, starting to be heard on more and more U.S. public radio stations. I would call it the Canadian "Prairie Home Companion," and it's host Stuart MacLean the Canadian Garrison Keiller, but I find that such comparisons usually don't do either party justice. In this case it's about as accurate as comparing the United States with Canada — it gives you an idea that they're near each other, but the comparison ends there.As life's little coincidences would have it, one of the archived broadcasts featured something they called the Arthur Awards. The listener was told that Arthur was the name of the dog of one of the characters in a running skit on the show. The awards are given to celebrate small acts of kindness. This awarded someone who built a wheelchair for a paralyzed rabbit, a realtor who sold his building and the restaurant in it to the lessees for well below market rate, and someone who befriended a lonely college student and welcomed her into her home.Similar to the United States and Canada, I'm not comparing these accomplishments with those of Fed 100 nominees, but I found a similar spirit in both awards. Stuart MacLean, the host, calls each of the "winners" (which seems like too small a word in these cases) and asks them "why did you do this?" I imagine the Fed 100, like the Vinyl Cafe Arthur Award winners, do not act out of the possibility of winning awards but out of something bigger. Although their reasons for their actions are probably widely varied, why they did what they did seems like something that we'd hope we could bottle and have on the shelf in every home in the United States and Canada.