Rocket (thanks to Mike Wenz)

Here is a screenshot of my desktop, which includes a rendition of my space rocket. The fill for the rocket was suggested to me by Mike W, when I asked how to make a fill conform to the irregular shape of an object, and he came up with the brilliant idea of using the blend tool.
The screenshot is basically my life as it is now, inasmuch as it shows basically all my main interests, Music (the Canned Heat Future Blues album cover) - which seemed to work well with the desktop motif. The rocket was made using Xara, the starfield using Illustrator plugin Colliderscribe, a fixture list of rugby matches and a digital clock which I use to time myself on my exercise bike. The other clock was pretty much accidental, as it was close to being the right size for the window of the rocket, the clock not having the option of increasing/descreasing its size..
As this is for wallpaper, I was thinking of the chimney breast in the house I lived in as a boy, where there was a shelf over the mantlepiece where a clock used to sit.
It wasn't too much of a stretch of my imagination to think of ornamental carriage clocks and give the idea a retro/modern twist. That the clock fitted on the rocket's window was a happy accident.

Thanks for the nod! The rocket looks great.

I would hate to post an image of my desktop at this moment--it is pretty much filled up with document/folder icons from an intense week of creating temporary files & folders from all sorts of applications...good thing my physical desk is not cluttered!

Ah, Canned Heat. One of my favs...

Difficult to know how things would reflect in space, so I went with Eagle Comic's Dan Dare style.
If you could see behind the Canned Heat pic, that's where my temp stuff is hiding. Boogie with Canned Heat was the first ¨modern¨ blues album I had heard. World in a Jug - wow!

Why is the flag upside down?

Ray

Flying a US flag upside down like that is a (proper) permitted sign of distress.

It has taken on other meanings, mainly of protest against one thing or another. It was common among the Tea Party folk to fly it upside down during Obama's presidency. Likewise there was a call to fly it upside down during Trump's first 4th of July in office among, well, just about everyone. Anarchists did it for a while, etc.

Why Canned Heat's art direction did it, I don't know.

Given the date of the album (1970) I suppose that it was a distress signal and they were hoping NASA had a (powerful) telescope trained on the lunar landing site, in case of emergencies. ;)

From Wikipedia (citing a book):

Some controversy was sparked by the moon landing/Iwo Jima album cover and the upside down American flag. The upside-down flag was Wilson's idea and was a response to his love of nature, growing environmentalism and concern that humankind would soon be polluting the moon as well as the Earth (as reflected in his song "Poor Moon").

Thanks, Mike, I didn't know that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by iamtheblues

Thanks, Mike, I didn't know that.

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Hah! I didn't either until I decided to take a look. But given the era I figured it was protest...but I just assumed all these years it had to do with Vietnam. Made me pull it out after reading the Wiki page. I appreciate the design all the more now.