This is an occasional column by one of the authors of The Underminer, or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. In this installment, the Underminer has taken up graphic design!

3,000 dollars total? You can just put it all on my Double Obsidian Visa Card...

Oh hi! Ha, weird I have like no peripheral vision or something. I can't believe I didn't notice you were behind me in line here at Utrecht Art Supplies! You are so slippery and silent sometimes!

What are you doing here? Oh buying some sketchbooks and pencils. I didn't know you are still drawing and making art! That's so cool! It's great to hold onto your dreams.

I know! I am buying a lot of stuff! Well my business is booming! Hm? Yes my new graphic design business. This is dumb but I am being called some sort of design wunderkind. I have been redesigning various logos, softening their look for today's times, and it's really caught on. You didn't know? Maybe I started it while you were a real estate broker in Ohio.

How is that going by the way? Oh, no no worries, you don't have to talk about it.

Well anyway, business is booming on my end since my graphic design firm took on our new client, Blackwater. Yes! We redesigned their logo. We gave it a friendlier look. Here let me show you my portfolio.

See, Blackwater decided it was time to just soften their image a bit. So they turned to me.

Immediately, as if I was possessed by the Muses, I crossed out the old logo of a bear's paw print caught in red crosshairs, and, using my extremely honed Photoshop skills, I scaled back the scary gun-target graphic and tweaked the paw print and gave it a juicier look. After a couple hours of intense $3500-an-hour work rendering the image, I came up with this: a new logo that isn't macho but still looks masculine.

The rest of my portfolio is pretty interesting. For instance, here on the next page are our redesigns of Mel Gibson, The Congo and bagged spinach.

Oh and here is our work with AIDS. We just wanted to give the disease a chummy-old-pal kind of look, so we put it in an Old Western font. It really gives AIDS a lived-in feel. It says "AIDS, that loyal friend who will never go away, no matter how much you ignore it!"

For Rudy Giuliani's campaign, we are lengthening the first "i" and the "l" so that they look like two towers in the process of collapsing, and then we added some flames around the letters just to hammer home the Ground Zero thing and that he is a HERO. We may add a few charred bodies in the bottom of the "u" too. You know how voters are. You can never be too obvious,

But I've got a tough week ahead, we are redesigning the logos for FEMA, rape, and the often used phrase: "murdered Iraqi children." I see the phrase in the papers so often—"murdered Iraqi children"—I really feel like it needs an image overhaul, don't you think? Something cheerier and jaunty.

I'm just so busy!

Well good luck with your artmaking! That's so great and nourishing for you.