Shrinkage
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post can be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Good Monday, Jazz Pickles. I usually write & post these blog entries on Sunday but Olive Oyl and I were traveling yesterday. We’ve snuck back into the U.S. to visit family and they are not very amenable to my ignoring them to construct a blog post. Thanks to jet lag, however, I’m up a couple of hours before dawn this morning to get it done.
We left Mexico very early yesterday which, since we live an hour and a half from the airport, required a 3:30 am shuttle pickup! When we arrived at our destination midday—the home of a family member with whom we’re staying this week—we took an hour's nap and then greeted more local family arriving for our early Thanksgiving dinner.
I’ve always been the person in my family who lives “elsewhere” and have learned the hard way that traveling home for Thanksgiving or Christmas is as foolish as trying to stop by Walmart on Black Friday to quickly grab a couple of essentials.
To me, holidays have always been random moments in time anyway—Jesus wasn’t born in December and who cares exactly when pilgrims and Indians did or didn’t have a real or mythical meal together?—so I see no reason not to just slide holidays around to facilitate easier travel. For years, I schlepped my wife and kids from state to state during various holidays to visit both sets of parents and siblings, but it was a miserable, losing game. Moving the holidays around has made much more sense to me in recent decades.
The dinner last night was terrific and, perhaps because I watch what I eat every other day of the year, on holidays I tend to toss all rules and reason into the fireplace and eat like a condemned man hoping to barf on the executioner the next morning.
That double-wide dinner, a couple of hours of jet lag, and the fact that we’d been up for what seemed like days plopped us in bed and asleep by 7 pm. We were as thankful for that bed last night as anything we’ve come across recently.
We’re also deeply thankful that the authoritarian faction of American politics did not take over the country in last week’s elections so we did not have to sneak into the country disguised as devoted patriots of Gilead (see The Handmaid’s Tale.) It seems the U.S. has bought a couple of more years of democracy, so let’s hope people continue to wake up to the age-old misconception that it doesn’t matter which party you vote for.
Oh, one last thing: I posted a new episode of Peyote Cowboy the day before I left town. See it here. The top image is the latest episode and you can scroll down the page for all of the previous episodes. If you’d like to see my short video about the project, scroll down a bit on this page.
Now let’s trip out on this week’s Bizarro cartoons from my partner, Wayno…
His really close friends call him Gle.
Reading the online comments about this cartoon, it was alarming (but perhaps not surprising) how many people do not know that male ducks are drakes. It would seem the pandemic was not the only thing to put a major dent in modern education.
Beware of shopping mall Santas who say “Yo-ho-ho” instead of “Ho-ho-ho.” Especially if your kid comes home smelling like rum.
When lottery winners cash those giant checks, do they get giant bills?
Little known literary fact: Dickens changed his name from Penisens.
PRO TIP: If you suffer from “wrestler’s leg syndrome,” a dose of cannabis before bed will likely knock it out. You can even use an edible with no THC. Works for me, anyway, and I’m a longtime, daily sufferer. (May you live in a place that has legalized the most beneficial, non-harmful plant this planet has to offer!)
That concludes our stupidity summit for today, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for hanging around till we dabbed the stains out of the carpet. If you enjoy our work and that we present it for free, without paywalls, clickbait, or pop-up ads, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll place you on a special shelf in our hearts.
Until next time, don’t let a calendar tell you when to share a big dinner with family and friends.
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