Holiday Hell

Bizarro is brought to you today by Paradise Pie.

So much for my intentions to blog daily while away from home. There is just too much to do in Hawaii to make myself sit in front of a computer. Typically, we get up early and hit the beaches – snorkeling, sun bathing, napping. It's a tight schedule and by the time we get home, we're exhausted and barely have the energy to clean up and go to bed. Holidays can be hell.

More later, lots of stupid pictures to share.

Hawaii? Fine, how are ye?

Bizarro is brought to you today by Hawaii.

Hello, dear reader, it is good to see you. I am back online and blogging again, hopefully daily, after a few days of Internet silence. For the last four days I was in the birthplace of our president, Honolulu, Kenya, (where I did not have easy access to the Internets) and since yesterday have been in Maui. I was brought here by the Hawaiian Vegetarian Society to do a couple of talks – Honolulu on Tuesday night and Maui last night. Great crowds, great folks, a few real freaks (but that's one of the things I love about Maui) and now that the business end of my trip is through, CHNW and I are going to hang out for another week and enjoy the island.

The pic below is our new best friend, having met him in the security line at the airport because he and CHNW are apparently the same sort of people who cannot be near another human without getting to know them. He's around 7 feet tall, is way freakier looking in person than this photo conveys and is quite an amusing character. According to him, he is a Vietnam vet, spends most of his time rumbling around Maui on one of his four Harleys, and his name is Atta(then six or seven more syllables of Hawaiian-sounding stuff that I can't remember.) We hung out with him for a while in the airport, took some pics, and said our goodbyes. Maybe we'll see him around the island.

Until tomorrow, I bid you "Aloha." (Which I think is Hawaiian for "Where da bitches at?" )

Tube View

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Death Star.

I've always wanted to visit on of those huge mountaintop observatories like the one badly depicted in this cartoon. I think it would be cool. I have a small telescope that I used to like to use but here in NYC, there is too much ambient light to see much so I don't bother. You can barely even see the credits, much less read them.

I'm off in a few hours for a vacation, but I'll be posting here almost as regularly as I usually do. I likely won't post again until Tuesday or Wednesday of this next week, but after that, it will be fairly consistent. I've been working 12 and 14 hour days for a few weeks now trying to get ahead on Bizarro so I won't have to work while I'm gone. Hope it doesn't take me too long to relax and enjoy myself. For the first few days I'll likely be haunted by the feeling that I should be working on something other than a tan.

For those of you in Hawaii, I'll be speaking in Honolulu on Tuesday, April 20 and on Maui on Thursday, April 22. Both talks are sponsored by the Hawaiian Vegetarian Society, so look up the details on their website and come see me. I'm friendly and it's FREE!

Destroying the Lives of Children

Bizarro is brought to you today by Animal Husbandry.

Last week my cartoon was drawing attacks from all quarters. Yesterday's post was a bout a plagiarism accusation, today's is about my mistreatment of preschool icons. Below is the email I received, in its entirety:

I usually do not take the time to write someone about a comic strip. But this time I could not just ignore it.

I take EXTREME OFFENSE at your comic today. I am surprised Sesame Street hasn't talked to you yet. (How does she know they haven't?)
The Birds (Capitalized?) in the your comic strip today are very obviously Big Bird and Foghorn Leghorn.

You are making these characters out to be bullies. That is NOT what these characters stand for.
They are good characters, and I feel you are beating up on their images by using them.

I have two younger children that love to read the comics everyday with me (age 7 & 10).
When they saw what you had drawn, I'm not sure they will never want to see your comic strip again.
They were both extremely offended (as was I) and at the ages they are they knew that Big Bird would
NEVER do anything like that!!!!!! (Then what is the problem?)

It is NOT FUNNY to bully someone's image like that, to infer that they would do anything like that.
(I believe she means "insinuate." "Inferring" is what she's doing.)

To pick on an image that has been out in this world doing nothing but good for over 40 years is SHAMEFUL!!!
You should be ashamed of yourself for picking on something as PURE as Big Bird!

Sincerely,
Name withheld because I'm embarrassed for her.

I responded politely to her note, as I invariably do, and told her that everyone knows that Big Bird would never act this way and that is what makes it funny. I suggested that if she explained that to her children they would no longer be upset by the cartoon and learn a little something about the way humor works, too. I got no response.

Oh, the tremendous weight of social responsibility that a cartoonist bears.

Thieves, Cowards and Clones

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Amateur Crime Fighters.

After this cartoon appeared in the paper last week, I received two emails. One was from a polite person wondering if I had seen a Far Side cartoon from the late 20th century with a similar joke, and one from an impolite person accusing me outright of stealing the old Far Side cartoon and thinking no one would notice.

As I politely explained to both, widely-read cartoonists like me don't steal from even more widely-read cartoonists like Larson. Why? Because I have an I.Q. above that of a houseplant. You could never hope to get away with it, and what is more embarrassing that being caught stealing?

In truth, this kind of thing happens to professional cartoonists all of the time. There are hundreds or thousands of us searching our brains every single day for jokes, a twist on fairy tales or popular culture or recent movies, a way to turn a common phrase into an unexpected meaning. It is only natural that more than one person comes up with the same idea from time to time. The cartoon above is not all that unique, really. You take the common phrase, "let sleeping dogs lie" and think of a new way to illustrate it, this is pretty much what you get. The sort of things a dog might lie about are even likely to be similar. It's just the way the human mind works.

Professional cartoonists will pretty much all concur on this. We've all unintentionally published gags similar to our colleagues, and all had others publish ones very similar to ours. It just goes with the job, none of us waste much time pointing fingers because it's only a matter of time before we are the seemingly guilty party.

As a person who has judged caption contests before, I can tell you from experience that this happens to non-cartoonists, as well. If you publish a given picture and ask people to caption it, no matter how many entries you get, around three quarters will be in the same couple of veins of thought. None of us is as unique as we'd like to think.

My apologies for not having memorized more Far Side cartoons back in the last century. If I had, I would not have published this one. But as far as I can tell, no harm was done. I appreciate the two readers who wrote to call this to my attention, although I appreciate the polite reader far more. One of the downsides of the Internet is that its anonymity often fills the cowardly with false courage and incivility. (Hence the need to moderate comments.)

Toddler Shock Collars

Bizarro is brought to you today by Future Families of the Past.

I used to have children a long time ago (now I have adults), before it became socially acceptable to put them on a leash. As weird as it looks, I could have used this device and would have in a heartbeat.

Toddlers are energetic drunks with no sense of their own mortality, so if you don't have them tethered, there is nothing to keep them from darting out into traffic after a shiny object. I tried tying a water ski rope around mine's waist but this raised too many eyebrows and questions from mall security guards. I moved to ankle weights, just to slow them down, but that only developed their leg muscles, making them even faster when the weights were removed. Drugging them seemed harsh, braiding their hair and hanging onto the end of it seemed cruel, as did a shock collar. There was just no good answer in those days.

But modern science has brought us toddler leashes and all is well. Now if we could just get parents to carry pooper scoopers and clean up after their kids, we'd have a truly civilized society.

Brain Goo

Bizarro is brought to you today by Dubious Parades.

I remember visiting a museum years ago – can't remember which one or where, which is one of the problems of traveling a lot – wherein there was a display describing prehistoric surgery. For reals.

Apparently, somebody (anthropologists? archeologists? utility workers?) found ancient skeletons from cave man times that have pretty clear evidence that their skull had been cut into then sealed again while they were alive. I suppose scientific curiosity is a possible motive but that aside, I have to wonder what they were trying to cure. How aberrant can a caveman's behavior be that his friends decide they might be able to fix it by digging around in his head? If he was killing people for no reason, seems more logical that they'd just kill him. If he was hallucinating, they'd likely chalk it up to a spiritual experience. Same with epilepsy or whatever. Maybe he was the first person to start talking and they thought he was crazy. It's interesting that they even suspected that fiddling with the goo inside your head might change something about your life.

If anyone knows more about this, let me know. I don't have time to research it this week, I'm trying to get ahead on deadlines so I can take a little vacation. Even if you just have a theory, leave it in the comments. I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating.