Our Potato Heads
Glorious day to you, Jazz Pickles. Today’s post is a two-parter.
Part A
Since today’s cartoon is about brains, I’d like to talk for a moment about something that blows my mind: the power of our brains. You’ve had this human brain all your life and you’re used to taking for granted how incredible it is, but let’s stop for a moment and think about it.
Physiologically, we’re the same as squirrels: skeleton, muscles, organs, skin, fur, eat, sleep, poop, reproduce, die. It’s easy to think, Yeah, we’re mammals, we just happen to be really smart.
Wait, what? “Happen” to be really smart? That’s like saying the Sun happens to be hot. The power of our brains compared to even fairly smart mammals like dogs is like the difference between The Sun and a campfire.
Can a dog scrape together the stuff this planet is made of, create an object that can electronically reproduce what we see with our eyes, and do that with a thing that is so far away that we should logically have no way of even knowing it exists? That’s a messy way of asking if a dog could invent the camera and photograph the black hole known as M87, which we humans recently did. My dogs can’t even spell “camera,” much less invent one. And forget about Black Hole M87, they don’t even wonder what the moon is.
Furthermore, the aforementioned black hole is so far away that it takes light FIFTY-SEVEN MILLION YEARS to get here from there. And, as you may remember from 7th-grade science class, light travels at the speed of light, which is SEVEN-AND-A-HALF TIMES around Planet Earth in ONE SECOND.
So what’s blowing my mind today is that a glorified squirrel (you, me) on a comparatively microscopic speck of dust floating in a vacuum (Earth) can use a gelatinous lump of biology barely bigger than a mango (our brains) to not only invent a way to reproduce visual images with zeros and ones (the digital camera) and a way to collect information from so far away in space that it is literally from the past (radio telescopes) BUT ALSO to conceive of something like a black hole in the first place and not only prove it exists but take a picture of it. (Or, at least, what it looked like 57 million years ago.) I think not even whales and dolphins could do that. I damn sure know my dogs couldn’t.
Clearly, we humans have something nothing else in the known universe has. And whatever you choose to call it, it seems to me that it goes beyond the biological capacity of our tiny mangos.
What are you doing with your mind today? Mine is being blown.
Part 1 Epilogue
If you can’t read the background jokes in the cartoon above, click here for a larger view.
Part 2
Last week, I posted a page from the Bizarro Land Coloring Book. Lots of you Jazz Pickles said you liked it so here’s another one. (BTW: After discussions last week about the Secret Symbols, I looked at the book and found that there are 11 symbols on each page; the current online list minus the Pipe and O2/Olive Oyl.)
Some of you tried to buy the book via the link I posted last week but found that the publisher (Dover Books) no longer ships outside the U.S. Sorry about that! There are plenty of other booksellers online who probably carry it and do ship to Canada or beyond, so if you’d like one, try searching “Bizarro Land Coloring Book” and see what you can find.
And now it’s time to see what Wayno was doing with his gelatinous mango regarding the week’s Bizarro cartoons…
I’m just barely old enough to remember when criminals used to dress this way. They were so much easier to identify and avoid back then.
Which only serves to remind me what terrible drivers vultures are; the constant circling, am I right?
I’ve done a Conestoga wagon’s-worth of purdy dang funny Old West cartoons but this one of Wayno’s is right up there with my faves. I suspect the fact that I like Old West stuff so much is why the story for my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy chose to come to me instead of some other schmuck who can draw okay. Thanks, who- or whatever is in charge of those things! (The next episode is a sock-knocker-offer, if I may be so immodest.)
Insert your own Remains of the Day jokes here.
I like that they’re snacking on grape jelly. However it happens, it’s a great combination.
If you’re interested at all in the way Wayno and I divide duties and work together on these cartoons, he’s devoted some space to that topic on his weekly cartoon blog post. We work really well together and never get tired of basking in our good fortune in this regard.
That signals the end of our cartoon hallucination, Jazz Pickles. You should be coming to and wondering where the hell you are momentarily. Thanks for reading and if you enjoy what we do and appreciate the lack of ads and other forms of bullshittery, please consider thanking us via one of the links below.
Until next week, don’t forget to duck.
BIZARRO SHOP We have new stuff in the shop that’s fun and cheap!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels