Free Valium

This Bizarro is brought to you by the struggling executives of America's oil companies. "We don't want your pity, just your firstborn, an arm, a leg, your soul, and another Republican in the White House."

Since I live in NYC, the only city in America where you can not own a car and still get anywhere, anytime, any day of the year, the price of gas isn't on my mind all that much.

I drive a Vespa scooter, which used to cost me about $4 to fill up, now nearly $8. If I drive it a lot every day, which I rarely do unless I'm smuggling illegals in from Canada, I fill up once a week. More typically, I fill up once a month.

I do feel the crunch when I fly, however, airline prices are out of sight, and the cost of cabs and car services in NYC keep going up.

What is the best thing we can do to alleviate the gas crisis? Elect a president who isn't butt buddies with the Saudis. (The ones who blew up the towers. Remember?)

Am I a genius, or could a box turtle to figure this out?

Whispers and Shouts

Today's Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by Subvocalized Punch Lines. "Act them out in your head, they're funnier!"

It has been my experience that people read in very different ways. Really good readers, with large, bulging, veiny brains, can glance at words, understand their meaning in a microsecond, and move on at tremendous speed.

Average readers, like me, tend to hear a voice in their head saying the words. (Don't get me wrong, I am an avid reader and can achieve the glancing technique when I just want the info and don't care about style, but when reading for fun I slow way down.)

Then there is the third type, who move their lips and whisper as they read, usually more slowly than they would speak, often with their eyes half shut and a little drool on their chin. (This third type is not to be ridiculed, many such readers have attained great personal success.)

The punchline above is one that begs to be subvocalized, as the emphasis on the words is essential to the gag.

One of my pet peeves is when a cartoonist emphasizes the wrong words in a caption. I see this all the time. For instance, if during a heated debate one character says, "What are you talking about?!" the proper word to emphasize is "talking." But often, the word "about" or "you" will be emphasized instead. Say these aloud and hear which makes the most sense: What are you talking ABOUT?! What are YOU talking about?! (this version could make sense, but in the context of an argument, it isn't the emphasis you're looking for.) What are you TALKING about?!

That's a hypothetical example and sounds dumb, but believe me, I see this all the time. If I went on the Internets right now, I'm sure I could find an example somewhere and post it. But then I'd be deriding a colleague, which is not cool in my book. Unless it is Jim Davis, who no longer writes Garfield anyway and who could afford to buy the entire block across the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, turn it into an ice cream truck parking lot and leave the music on all night.

Happy Thoughts!

Bizarro is brought to you by Our Horrendous Predicament. "You asked for it – ENJOY!"

(click image to make it GMO BIG!)

Since I was a kid, I've enjoyed imagining and drawing what things would look like "if". Here, I got to explore what a pickup truck would look like if a 10,000 lbs. chicken stepped on it. It isn't strictly accurate, of course, an old truck from the 70s wouldn't have crushed nearly this easily or uniformly. But if I hadn't drawn it this way, wouldn't be funny. That's where science meets art in the world of the cartoonist. (said facetiously)

This cartoon also serves as a reminder of the dangers of GMO foods. Chickens probably won't grown to 25 feet tall (although I'd love to be there when one that size tore through the family room wall of Jim Perdue's house), but the truth is, we don't know what will happen. Like marriage, genetic modification can be sublimely beneficial or a never-ending horror show. In my opinion, it isn't something you should tinker with for as frivolous a reason as wider profit margins.

But that kind of thinking never stopped a capitalist before, so I'm pretty much just pissing into the wind. At least when the planet finally extinguishes our species, as our obese, pampered bodies succumb to flesh-eating bacteria and dissolve on live TV, some of us can wave our bumper stickers, pins, T-shirts, and cartoons and say, "TOLD you (cough, cough) so!"

This has been today's Bizarro Happy Thought. : )

I'll try to be more upbeat tomorrow.

Pale Backs

Today's Bizarro cartoon is dedicated to the patriotic men and women of the American Northern Border Patrol. "If it looks like a Canuck and walks like a Canuck, we shoot at it."

Before any literal-minded readers' wigs start smoking, let me say I do NOT advocate shooting Canadians. Unless they are trying to sneak over the border, then they are fair game.

As the army of misinformation drones on Fox News tell us daily, illegal immigration is the biggest problem our country faces. They are behind the high price of gas, the sinking dollar, our faltering infrastructure, and the war in Iraq. It's not US, it's THEM. Any fool can see that.

But wait, the border between Canada and the U.S. is the longest unguarded border in the world. No fence, no barricades, no machine guns or howitzers pointed at Toronto. What gives?

That is a rhetorical question, of course. The last thing I want is for the U.S. to shut off the flow of illegal immigrants from Canada. My housekeeper and yard people are illegal Canadians, they work for peanuts and I don't have to pay their social security. Also, Canadian food is my absolute favorite. What would I do without my weekly moose tacos and Montreal Margarita? I contend that Canadians are hard working and gladly filling jobs that Americans feel are beneath them. So what if they talk funny? Who cares if they smell like maple syrup and think hockey is more important than football? I fail to see how they are eroding the fabric of our nation.

It's amazing what a little pale skin can do to alleviate a national security threat.

Suffering for Beauty

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Bizarro from 6-02-08 and a comment left by someone calling his/herself "julie."

This cartoon was inspired by a cartoon I posted in June about plastic surgery. In the comments section, a regular reader of this blog suggested the idea. I drew it up immediately and submitted it. I'm not too proud to accept a good idea when offered.

This cartoon's concept also grew from a comment from another reader, "ging," who sent me a link to an actual children's book about this very subject of helping children deal with their mother's new look. When I first saw the cover, I actually blacked out and lost control of my bowels for a moment. When I came to, I begged the gods to kill me, to no avail. My cats wouldn't oblige me either, thus I lived to blog another day.

Since you're my best friends in the whole wide world and I consider you family, I won't candy-coat it: The selfish, shallow, arrogant nature of our species turns my stomach. At the same time, I fully realize that all species are selfish by evolutionary design, it is part of how we live long enough to reproduce. But our species has achieved a type of intelligence that allows us to far overreach ourselves and torture and destroy the other inhabitants of the earth, and ourselves, with our arrogance. That same intelligence can be used to resist the temptation to enslave or kill others for our own pleasure.

I'm not saying plastic surgery will destroy the world, of course (unless Michael Jackson is your world), but it's the tip of an iceberg of symptoms. Many live animals suffer immensely as techniques to improve human beauty are practiced on them. At Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY, there is a pig named Charlie who has huge lumpy scars all over his body from such practice. Carved up by day, imprisoned at night, so mommy can be more beautiful.

I'd like to see a children's book about that.

Loaded Labeling

Today's Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by Natural Selection. "Being overridden by an arrogant species for over a thousand years."

This is another offering from my pal, Phil, and it appealed to me both because I like the word play, and idiotic legal warnings on signs and labels are a pet peeve of mine.

If a label has to tell you not to use an electric hair dryer in the bathtub, chances are nature didn't equip you with the skills to avoid accidental electrocution. Could be a sign you were not meant to pass those genes on. As cruel as it sounds, I feel the same way about the dangers of combining infants and plastic bags. I've not tested this theory on the infants in my own care, but I find it hard to imagine a child strong enough to get hold of a plastic bag not being strong enough to pull it from his/her mouth.

Seems if one person dies from product misuse, no matter how foolish, it must forever be labeled. Eventually lawn chairs will have labels that say, "Do not consume a case of Bud before attempting to clean a loaded gun while sitting in this chair."

Accused of Idiocy

Bizarro is brought to you today by Unexpected Underwear Unlimited.

This joke came to me a few weeks ago I thought because my CHNW and I had been planning a trip to Scotland later this year. But when it ran in papers, a TV writer friend of mine in Hollywood, Andy Cowan (Seinfeld), wrote and reminded me he had tried to sell me this gag months ago. He was right, so I thanked him and sent him a check. ($12 – don't tell him he should have asked for more.)

Another email arrived the day after this ran, from a goober in Louisiana somewhere who claimed very pompously that I had obviously stolen it from his cartoon published in a local Mensa newsletter in Baton Rouge six years ago. Like I comb old Mensa newsletters from Louisiana looking for ideas.

What few people realize is that when you and who-knows-how-many thousands of other humans pretty much just like you are racking their brains 365 days a year to come up with jokes, obvious ideas like this one are going to occur to more than one person over time. Professional cartoonists know this well, we inadvertently copy each other all the time, chide each other by email and buy the injured party a beer at the next convention. A gag like this one has been thought of dozens of times before, and will be thought of dozens of times in the future. As long as you're haven't seen the gag yourself somewhere, it is fair game.

Unless I'm mistaken, the same pompous putz (I am less than polite in my choice of moniker because his letters arrogantly insist I am knowingly stealing from him and owe him money) accused me some years ago of stealing one of his cartoons about a pirate who had gotten dressed in a hurry that morning and put his hook, peg leg, eye patch, etc. in the wrong places.

If a truly unique or strange idea is copied, you know it's plagiarism, and those kinds of cartoonists are not tolerated well among their peers. Consequently, it happens very rarely among professionals. Especially in the age of the Internet.

Bottom line, someone as widely published as I, doesn't steal jokes. It's too easy/embarrassing to get caught. In spite of the way I look, I am not a complete idiot.

Slavery Sarcasm

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Controversy Industries, Inc. "Looking for trouble? We've got it in over 250 different styles and colors!"

I normally post cartoons a week after they run in papers, but this one has attracted a lot of negative mail so I wanted to address it sooner.

Contrary to what many people assumed, this cartoon is not intended to make light of slavery or racism. My intention was to point out that modern "feel good" marketing techniques are no more honest than this kind of technique would have been during legal slavery in America. My earnest apology goes to anyone who misinterpreted it. I'm not into pushing those kinds of buttons.

Words like "free-range," "organic," and "humane," make consumers believe that animals are being well treated and that the environment is not being damaged. This is a patent lie in virtually all cases. Animal agriculture at current rates is always cruel to animals and damaging to the environment. Any animal that goes to a slaughterhouse has experienced the ultimate cruelty. It's a no-brainer, there is no such thing as "humane meat".

I don't personally believe that cruelty to any species of animal is less immoral than cruelty to our fellow humans. To me, we are all the same in our desire to be pain free, happy, and alive. I don't believe this because I am vegan, I am vegan because I believe this.

For the record, I also refrain from buying products from countries with serious human rights issues. (Although everything under the sun is made in China so to be ardent about this I'd have to live naked in the woods.)

I hope this alleviates some angry readers. If not, send me an email and I'll respond personally.
If you're interested, here is a website about what your animal-based food goes through.

Die Like Howard

This episode of Bizarro is brought to you by our nation's airline industry. "We charge whatever we feel like for every tiny thing, but at least security is unreasonably inconvenient and our service is undependable."

(Click image to enlargenate)

Just got back from South Dakota and wow, what a trip. Can't really go into it in detail here, maybe someday, but the sites were beautiful and I got to spend a lot of time climbing thick, forested mountains alone, which proved essential for my emotional well being.

This cartoon came from my wondering what might happen if Superman fell asleep while flying. I'm notorious for not being able to drive for more than an hour without conking out and though I've never had an accident, I've taken a few unexpected side trips through scenic roadside culverts.

I despise car trips anyway, so there is no love lost. But with airlines becoming more expensive, less reliable, and increasingly inconvenient because of our great nation's idiotic security system, I hate to fly, too.

More all the time, I just want to stay home. Fortunately, I live in a city where you can never run out of new things to see and do. Someday I may hole up in my house like Howard Hughes and die with long, white hair and beard and fingernails the length of shoe strings.

Mounting Patriotism

I'm viewing life from the Mount Rushmore area of South Dakota this week, dodging overweight patriots by the thousands. There are more stars and stripes around here than at a Republican convention, and nary a morsel of tofu for miles. It's alternately fascinating, fun, and frightening. I've been going through scotch and cigars like they were salsa and chips.

If I don't post for the rest of the week, it's because I'm drunk on our nation's birthday. Or I've been accidentally crushed by 350-lbs Nebraskan wrapped in our nation's flag. "Hey lady, there's a little flat New Yorker stuck to the seat of your pants."

Cookie Faith

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fortune 500 Cookie Company.

Seems like fortune cookies used to actually have fortunes inside them, but now they all seem to have bits of useless wisdom instead.

"A good friend is a good neighbor."
"There is no more beneficial exercise than smiling."
"A screaming child is the most powerful form of birth control."

Yeah, I know all that stuff –I don't need a cookie to tell me. I want useful information from my desert. Like if my taxes are going to get audited or whether I should change my flight because the plane is going to crash. What has happened to the prophetic powers of pastry in this country?

One confession: As a small child, I ate fortune cookies for several years before my parents noticed I wasn't taking the fortune out first. If I ever get a terminal illness, I'm going to blame it on the ink and sue China.

Popsicle Psycho

This Bizarro cartoon is made possible by Mind-Numbing Confections, Inc.
Like anyone, I loved hearing the ice cream truck coming when I was a kid. But now I've got this damned OCD-type mechanism in my brain that hangs onto any melody I hear for hours or days, playing it over and over in my head.

My studio is on the second floor of our apartment, overlooking our street in Brooklyn, and I like to have the windows open when it is between 65 and 85 degrees. For most of the summer, this leaves me totally vulnerable to the local popsicle vendors and their satanic soundtracks.

How a person with any hearing at all can work these trucks is beyond my imagination. I'd rather drive a school bus full of hungry badgers.

Punch Rolling

This cartoon is brought to you by AFGO. (Another F***ing Growth Experience)

I'm not the sort to buy into self-imposed myths like the power of profanity, but I like to keep this blog safe for all ages and sensibilities, so I dug out the asterisks for the above headline. It's been so long since I used one, I couldn't remember where I'd put them. Turns out one of my cats had eaten the entire bag, so I had to dig them out of the litter box.

As for this cartoon, because I'm not the sort of person who can keep anything to himself, I must tell you I've had trouble enjoying moseying lately, too. Some bad mojo stopped by my Brooklyn apartment to visit recently and I've been going to counseling to try to get rid of it.

I'm a big believer in counseling, it has saved my life more than once, and the therapist I'm going to now is the bomb. I'm not the Woody Allen sort–seeing a therapist regularly year after year for my entire adult life–I only go during a crisis, usually for a few months, then quit when I've solved my dilemma. The same way you'd treat your car.

I'm on the road to solving this crisis, but I'm metrosexual enough to admit it's been damned difficult, and I've spent most of the past couple of weeks feeling like something left in the yard by a passing dog.

There have been many times recently when I've wanted to give up and disappear, even give up my career and just wander off into the night, never to be heard from again. A self-imposed witness protection program. But the temptation passes quickly since I have no other means of making a living and I dislike sleeping outdoors.

I hope my blogs and cartoons haven't suffered (the comics written during this struggle will appear in a few weeks). I've always prided myself in being able to hide my despair from my readers and complete my appointed rounds without interruption. I went through a hideously painful divorce back in the mid-90s, I never missed a deadline and most of my readers never noticed a thing. But as a blog reader, you have unwittingly placed yourself into a special group of those privy to my most private thoughts: fair warning, free country, view at your own discretion.

For instance, when I was a toddler, I was convinced I was not one, but several girls trapped in a man's body. And the man wasn't even me. A story for another time, perhaps.

Eat to Kill

(click on image to make it become enbigger)

Today's Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by a grant from the Mixed Messages Institute.

Life is full of mixed messages, not the least of which is our parents' insistence that we treat animals and other weaker creatures with compassion, while serving us the steaming, mutilated remains of a tortured chicken
or pig.

On a less serious note, some of my readers may not know that Bizarro is offered to newspaper clients in two formats: panel and strip. I draw the cartoon in panel form, then convert it to strip on my computer, adding extra drawings on the side, if necessary. Typically, the elements shift around, the caption balloon above the characters moves to the side, and their isn't too awful much more to be drawn. This one, however, had to be finagled in many directions to get it to fit. The booth is wider & shorter, the ducks are bigger, etc. Looks pretty crappy here, you might want to click it for the larger pic.
Almost any time I draw a fair or carnival, I add a redneck shoving wads of food in his mouth, which to me is mostly what these events are about. I found fairs interesting when I was a kid, the annual State Fairs were a big deal in Oklahoma and Texas, but as an adult I can't see past the horror. Nothing says "doomed species" like throngs of overweight humans in airbrushed T-shirts, cramming more calories down their gullets than air, lit by flashing lights against a background of hideous stuffed animals, paying money to be hoisted into the air and jerked around until they get dizzy. (Note how both the OK and TX fair have giant rednecks at the gate. I've always assumed it was bait.)

Am I old enough to be a curmudgeon yet? Is there an age limit?

Emoticondom

This Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by Unlimited Choices Consortium.

I'm not a fan of using a lot of emoticons when I email, but I do use the original happy face fairly frequently. Email does not imply tone of voice, so the two-stroke smile – I don't bother with the nose dot. : ) – is not only a simple, helpful communication tool, it is often necessary to let your reader know you were kidding. My humor has caused misunderstandings in emails before and I've offended people without even knowing it. If the pissed off party doesn't immediately write back and tell you so, you've got a loose cannon wandering around town drawing a target on your chest, as you skip and whistle down the street without a care in the world.

Of course, if you're skipping and whistling down the street on a regular basis and you're older than 11, unclear emails are probably not your biggest problem.

I am not, however, a fan of the electronic, digital, Pixar-style emoticons that move and wink and stick out their tongues and wear funny clothes. Those things make me feel as though the page is crawling with radioactive insects that have escaped from some evil laboratory at Disney. (FYI: all labs at Disney are evil.) Others are welcome to embrace these gremlins, but I avoid badly-designed things in my own life and don't want people sneaking them into my field of vision without even asking.

It occurs to me that last paragraph sounded like Andy Rooney. Shoot me now. Perhaps that's why almost all of my posts fall into the "cranky comments" subhead.

By the way, anyone know what emoticon you use when you feel like this?

Cannot Tell a Lie

Today's cartoon is brought to you by Delayed Reaction Rationale, Inc.

Funny how everything good about America during Clinton's administration was said to be a result of the Reagan/Bush era, and that everything wrong with America in the early '00s was blamed on the Clinton administration.

The one solace I had after election day '04 was that perpetrators of our doom would be in office to take responsibility for the poison fruit of their labors. Now, our ass is so far into a crack that there is pretty much no doubt who wedged it there.

Hot Fried Babes

All proceeds from today's Bizarro cartoon will benefit the Tots for Tots campaign.

I like potatoes. I'm not afraid of them, I don't buy into the Atkins nonsense that carbs will kill you. Fried potatoes will kill you, but it's the fat and cholesterol in the oil, not the potato doing the lion's share of the work. Animal flesh has plenty of that stuff, too.

I eat tons of carbs every day (plus some plant protein), in the form of natural, whole plant foods, and I have no weight problem, no cholesterol issues (the good or bad kind), plenty of energy and health and very low blood pressure. Every single other person in my family battles these issues, so it isn't just genetics.

But I do love me a French fry. I eat them on occasion – not daily, of course – and man, there are far worse-tasting things you could put in your mouth. If I met a French fry woman like the one above, I might leave my wife for her. If I found out French women taste like fries, same risk. Don't tell CHNW.

By the way, the Atkins diet is reported to make you lose weight and though I've never tried it, I have observed that Atkins himself weighs much less now.

The National Coffin

Today's Bizarro is brought you by Pessimists Amalgamated. "The glass is half full, but it's half full of poison!"

I'm not a pessimist, but I'm very pessimistic about certain things. Like many pessimists, I call myself a "realist."

One thing I'm realistic about is the upcoming election. In a reasonable world, Obama would win in a record-breaking landslide: Bush is the least popular president in nearly 100 years, the economy is in the toilet and a finger is pressing on the flush handle, our reputation worldwide is in the gutter, gas will be $5/gallon by November, according to legal experts, our constitution is in crisis, McCain's policies are the same as Bush's or MORE in the direction that nailed us into our current coffin. It's a no-brainer.

A part of me thinks Obama will win in spite of the combination of stupid, blind patriotism and racism that will account for 90% of the votes against him. But the realist in me is bracing for another close election that the Republicans can steal at the local level. I'm not an alarmist, but that would be national suicide.

If McCain wins, it will change this country for a very long time. Forget what disasters will befall our economy, our troops, our international reputation – the Supreme Court will become a fascist juggernaut for decades to come, and nothing short of an armed uprising will be able to stop them.

If you don't already have a passport, you might want to apply for it before the election. If Obama loses, those offices will be mighty crowded.

UNinquisitive Inquisition

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Kansas Board of Education.

Cartoonists have long explored various renditions of the "fish walking out of the sea" and other evolution motifs, and I'm no exception. There is just so much you can do and say with this subject.

I'm not entirely sure what this one is saying, but I think it might be about how some people can't believe we evolved from single-cell organisms because they are trying to see the entire picture at once. They imagine a fish got legs one morning, walked out of the ocean, bought a suit, and showed up at the office that afternoon.

Richard Dawkins uses a good metaphor in his book, "The God Delusion," saying that if you stood at the bottom of a huge, sheer cliff, you could not imagine how a person could possibly get up to the top without help. But if you go around the other side and walk up the slow incline to the top, it's quite easy. (If I've got the wrong book here, somebody let me know.)

Evolution vs. Creationism is sort of a favorite subject of mine, both in Bizarro and in my personal life. I love documentaries about the subject and have read a number of books about it, both scientific and political. I believe in being polite and diplomatic, but I admit I find it very difficult not to be condescending to supposedly well-educated people who believe in creationism in the face of so much evidence of the relative accuracy of Darwin's theory. It's as though they were born a thousand years too late.

War on Grammar

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Straight Talk Express.

The day this cartoon ran, I got a couple of letters from soldiers who were angry that I was making fun of our troops. I politely explained that I was not making fun of the troops or anyone else, but rather pointing my satire at the Bush administration, who began and continue this war because of oil.

One wrote back to me and claimed it is not Bush, but Al Gore and the environmentalists who are responsible for the high price of gas. At least that's what I think his nearly random arrangement of letters and punctuation was trying to convey. (not all right-wingers are illiterate, of course, but this poor fellow is damn close.)

I explained to him that Bush, Cheney, and their hoard are oil men and that they and their cronies are making billions off the current crisis. I asked him to Google "oil company profits." He wrote back and said that he had, and found nothing.

I'm guessing Google had as much trouble interpreting his scattershot English as I did.