Bizarro is brought to you today by Lingering Questions.Some of the most surprising mail I get is from readers who take my cartoons to mean something drastically different from what I intended. This cartoon attracted a letter from a liver transplant recipient who thought I was insinuating that most liver transplants are required because the patient was an alcoholic.
This never occurred to me when I was drawing this cartoon, nor at any other time in my life, I was simply making the cliche comic connection between liver damage and excessive drinking.
Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure what the hell this cartoon means. Now that he has a liver he can drink? Could he not drink before he had a liver? But why try to make too much sense of a cartoon about a talking lion and a tin robot anyway?
Even if you're not a football fan, you may enjoy this Superbowl story: CHNW and I were watching the Superbowl last night at our place with a friend. We have one of those DVR cable box things, so I was recording the game while we watched it so we could pause it, rewind, etc., and not risk losing the feed by accidentally changing channels or something. And since we were pausing it now and then, we were about 45 minutes behind the live feed.
In the third quarter it suddenly occurred to me that if the game went into overtime, the recording might run out and we'd miss it, so I'd better also record the show AFTER the game, just to be sure. So I clicked the "guide" button and selected the show right after the game and intended to hit the button that would instruct the DVR to record it. Instead, in a moment of colossal hand-eye coordination error, I hit the button that switches from the recorded show we were watching (the game in the 3rd quarter) to what was playing "live" on the channel at that moment. Which happened to be the very moment that Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, was holding up the trophy, confetti streaming down all around him. Of course. Why couldn't it have been another damned Geico commercial?
And thus ended our Superbowl party. I felt like a complete jerk, but was thankful that it wasn't a large Superbowl party, with 30 or 40 attendees with bets riding on the game. I'd likely be typing from a hospital bed right now.
6 comments:
1) If he only had a liver he could enjoy the effects of mildly poisoning it;
2) Your human error re the SuperBowl: If I'd been at that party I would have claimed your little mistake a divine miracle. Oh to have a football game suddenly just be over! There's only so much outfit and color I can make out of that game on lawn (I mean "gridiron").
3) Don't let fans who are working through their issues cause you to second guess yourself. It's a funny joke, a tin man wanting a heart, having to settle for a liver, and then trying to have a little fun with the thing!
Here's what I thought: Once the Tin Man got the liver, he had to become a drunk. Probably the liver was previously used by a drunk, and couldn't change its habit.
I made a Hannibal Lecter connection and assumed the Tin Man had a bottle of Chianti.
Gaah! I've done the exact same thing with our DVR, during a big college football game (luckily for us (group of 4), it saved us from staying up way past midnight for a west-coast game... we were able to fast forward 30 minutes to our team's ultimate loss). I'm *very* careful now when doing that sort of thing, and always add the 30 minute extension by default.
I had always wondered, before having a DVR, if not watching something actually LIVE would somehow feel different. It doesn't, and it's the best thing since sliced bread to be able to fast-forward through commercials (and rewind -- I keep getting older, but those college cheerleaders and coeds just keep staying the same age ;-)
He knew what he wanted a heart for, but when he got a liver he didn't know what it did. Obviously somebody told him about the organ's role in metabolism of alcohol, so he thought he'd try it out.
this cartoon is hilarious! what's wrong with people?
BTW, the cartoon in yesterday's paper made me laught out loud
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