4 for Fun

Bizarro is brought to you today by Walking Dead.

There is a change coming to this semi-daily blog, but it will be a change for the better and faithful readers will not be inconvenienced. I'm moving it over to Wordpress to be part of a corral of King Features blogs or something like that. I'm not sure why, really, but my buddies at KF convinced me to do it so it's moving soon. You'll be able to find it easily and I'll leave a link to it here, so don't worry about it. More later.

This first cartoon threw some readers for a loop, as my mother often says. "That really threw me for a loop!" she'd say about this thing or that. Lots of things threw mom for a loop over the years, but she's none the worse for wear, thanks for asking. The thing about this cartoon, of course, is that your brain sees what it expects to see instead of what's really there. The fun part is looking carefully, discovering the joke, then laughing at the trick your brain played on you. Proofreaders and editors will get this joke immediately and that's just one of the many reasons that people in those professions do not have as much fun as the rest of us. Don't hate them, pity them.

Spell "pharmacy" wrong and it conjures up a whole humorous picture. Writing cartoons is just that simple. Try it yourself, but until you're feeling comfortable with it, wear a helmet and protective padding. Can't be too careful these days what with the health care crisis in America.

I'm not a senior citizen yet, I think you have to be 65 or something, so I'm wondering if I'm a sophomore or a junior. What are the age limits? Are people in their twenties Freshman? If so, what are children? Besides a noisy nuisance that are lucky they're cute.

Everyone has had the "Would-you-like-me-to-take-that-for-you-so-you-can-be-in-it?" experience. Here's a true story that happened to me: A group of about six friends and I went to a restaurant for lunch one day to celebrate a birthday. Upon exiting, one of us said, "let's take a picture." So we lined up in front of the restaurant and were about to shoot when another person came out of the restaurant and said, "Would you like me to take that for you so you can be in it?" The photographer agreed, gave him the camera and joined the rest of us. As he was about to shoot, a woman came out of the restaurant and said to him, "Would you like me to take that for you so you can be in it?" He shrugged, agreed, handed her the camera and promptly walked off down the street.

The humor was in the look on the second Good Samaritan's face.

If you'd like to view any of these cartoons on groovy products, click the names below:
Prefectionist
Farmacy
Senior Center
Painting
Burqa Photo
Senior Moment

.

Bizarro Family Holiday Newletter

The Bizarro Family Holiday Newsletter, 2010, is brought to you by Holiday Gift Ideas.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Crazy Quanza, and Happy New Year to you all! Well, it is hard to believe that another year has passed here at Bizarro Headquarters, it certainly was a full one and brought many blessings!

Going all the way back to last spring, we received the wonderful news that my eldest daughter, Krapuzar, was getting married even though she was neither pregnant nor getting ugly. Having long ago become convinced that she was a lesbian, this was a shock to the entire family. And the best news of all was that the young man she married is not an asshole in any way, shape, or form. I don't think he even has an asshole, that's how special he is! We couldn't love him more, unless he were rich.

My youngest daughter, Krelspeth, had a very blessed year, too, as she did not add a single letter or piece of punctuation to her police record. Yes, 2010 will go down in Piraro family lore as the year that her police file remained in the file drawer throughout! Great job, honey! We all love you! (If you're reading this, call us. We won't try to find you or judge anything you've done. We just want to know you're all right.)

CHNW and I are doing well, too, and have much to be thankful for this year. We finally stopped going to the marriage counselor and so we saved a lot of money! We have also found that we argue less and enjoy each other's company more since the majority of our marital strife in recent years seemed to be centered around the fact that that cow of a counselor always took CHNW's side on everything! Even when she was caught shoplifting. I mean, I think a man has a right to complain about the cost of bail and legal representation when his wife is arrested for attempting to steal a pregnancy test, which she could easily have afforded! Don't you? Especially when that man got a vasectomy 7 years ago, so she couldn't possibly be pregnant in the first place. Give me a break.

I also received news from afar that was quite a surprise. Apparently I have a son that I never knew about and whose mother I don't even remember. He lives in a part of far northern Canada that can only be reached by dogsled and is very dangerous to even attempt to get to, and it only costs him $500 a month to live there. That's pretty cheap considering it includes food, utilities, housing and transportation! I'm sending it to him until he gets on his feet, one of which was nearly gnawed off by a polar bear he startled late one evening while taking out the trash. I feel really blessed by this new relationship, not only because he is a terrific young man, but because he could easily have lived somewhere like Paris and needed way more money every month. I mean, when I was traveling in Paris in my early years, I got lucky WAY more often than when I was in Canada. Which, to be honest, I don't remember ever visiting.

Career-wise, Bizarro has had a terrific year, too. To date, I have made over $61 from the ads on my blog, which thousands of people read every day for free. Forget about the PayPal Donation button just to the right of this post, just knowing that my copious efforts give you an occasional smile is payment enough for me.

Another great feather in my cartoonist cap is that another year has passed without some big, lumbering corporate movie studio making some glitzy, multimillion dollar 3-D animated abomination of my cartoons. What could be worse than having some Hollywood blockbuster with your name all over it and then watch it in the theaters and say, "Hey, that's not what I had in mind at all. That's kind of stupid." So, I've dodged that bullet for another year, thanks for asking.

Speaking of "dodging a bullet," I was very lucky and blessed to have dodged the one fired out front of our building last October. It seems the instigator of that particular flying piece of hot lead was the girlfriend of the guy who works at the tattoo parlor on the corner. She suspected he was "fooling around" with her cousin, to whose buttocks he evidently had recently applied a "Tweety Bird" tattoo. I was on my way to the deli across the street when I heard the whole story, or her side of it at least, and the bullets began flying. One narrowly missed my left ear by the sound of the air being cleaved by it. The tattoo guy was not as blessed as I was that day, however, as she managed to blow holes through several brightly-colored carp on his chest. Now we'll never know his side of the story.

That's the update from Bizarro Headquarters this year, hope your year was as special as ours. From all of us to all of you, may the invisible super hero in the sky of your faith bless us all in the coming year!


.

Catasrophe Update

For those of you who have not read the account of my beloved wife, CHNW, getting hit by an anonymous Taxi last Friday night in NYC, click here to catch up on the story.

Now that you're caught up, I just wanted to say thanks to all the quadrillions of you who have left nice comments, sent Facebook messages or emails, or used the pathetically old-fashioned telephone system to wish her well. She appreciates it and is doing great.

Here now are a few pics of the healing process. Photo number one is of us in the hospital. CHNW loves to take pictures of herself looking at all ridiculous, be it from bad hair, a funny wig or hat, silly sunglasses, or after she has bounced her head off the street. So this first picture is taken by her camera and her own hands, at the height of the festival of medical bills. I popped into the pic with my extra-big-deluxe-executive lip, which I pull out of storage any time there is a worthy "poor baby" situation, for which this certainly qualified.

Picture two was taken at home the following day as she lay in her luxurious four-poster bed, ringing a tiny bell every few minutes to summon me to help her because she was "dizzy" or "weak." What a big baby. Sometimes I had to get her a glass of water, sometimes a cup of soup, which entailed my peeling the paper lid off of a cardboard container and pouring hot water into it. You can't believe how hard it is to walk into the next room with one of those things without spilling it. Meanwhile, I had to make my own breakfast, lunch and dinner for two solid days! Now I know how Civil War nurses must have felt. No thank you, Clara Barton!*

She took this picture partly because she thought that the purple of the "boxer's eye" really set off the blue of the unmolested one. I couldn't agree more, that one side of her face has never looked lovlier.

Finally, here she is as she looks today, up and around and getting her own damn soup. It's great to have her back. The cool thing about CHNW's bruising is that because she has a mechanical heart valve (from a past medical problem, not the cab), she takes a blood thinner every day. This does weird things to her bruises and the resulting kaleidoscope of colors and shapes is breathtaking. It will change many times over the next few weeks, like an over-decorated house in the suburbs of Wichita, perfect for the holiday season.

What you may not be able to fully appreciate from this picture, though, is that her eye has a distinct oval of black and purple around it, the sort you might expect a first-year movie makeup student to do on their first attempt. If I were the instructor, I'd recommend a little less makeup and a little more blending. But what's really horrific is that just today she is beginning to develop a large circle of chartreuse around it, reaching all the way down to her jaw line. In the coming days it will get even more pronounced and promises to be positively Halloweeny. I'll keep you updated.

For those of you who have recommended litigation, rest assured that we have a close friend who is a very successful personal injury lawyer and he will be leading the charge against the ironically named, TLC. (Taxi and Limousine Commission) We don't want to retire to South America, just get the med bills paid and around $80,000 for my own pain and suffering while having to play nursemaid.

















*Note to those of you who do not know me personally: I'm not as big a jackass as I portray myself here. I've been taking good care of her and have not said a peep about being put out. I'm sure being a Civil War nurse was more difficult than what I've been dealing with. The amputations without anesthesia alone were probably a major buzzkill.


.

Quintuple Tragedy

(click the pic to make it big)

Bizarro is brought to you today by A Leisurely Drive.

Hey, I went to a holiday party last night and they had a very fun live band. But it turned out that was not the most exciting part of the evening.

Nor was the most exciting part when we left the place at midnight, hailed a cab out front of our friends' building, and my formerly lovely wife, Ashley, stuck her head into the passenger-side door window and said to the driver, "Will you take us to Brooklyn?"

The most exciting part was when the cabbie suddenly stepped on the gas (fear of Brooklyn? involuntary leg spasm?), throwing my formerly lovely wife to the street, conking her head on the pavement and knocking her unconscious.

Not being a trained crime fighter, instead of drawing my gun and shooting at the cab or simply getting the car's number, I fell to my knees and began shouting to her, asking if she was okay. She was not okay, as her bloodied and sleeping face quickly told me.

I called 911, they came quickly, tossed us into an ambulance and brought us to an emergency room at the other end of the bumpiest street in the tri-state area. With what it costs to ride in an ambulance, you'd assume that included some sort of suspension system, but you'd be wrong.

Upon entering the ER, the first thing I learned was that all of the employees are superstitious. They forced me to put my camera phone away, presumably fearing I would steal their souls. I told them I had all I could handle with my own soul and had no interest in theirs, but that reassurance seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Now in the trauma room, at first there was a lot of clothes-cutting, shouting of inane questions to get a brief test of Ashley's I.Q. –– What's your name? What day is this? Do you realize we're ruining your fancy party clothes by cutting them off because it is so much more dramatic than removing them the normal way? –– and bandying-about of medical terms like "stat", "cc", "saline," and, "Sir, put that camera away, we're not going to ask again!"

One interesting thing I found out was that you don't really have to leave the trauma room if you don't want to. I learned this after they asked me several times, rather sternly, to step outside and I simply said, "no." Instead of calling security or producing a taser, they just sort of looked disappointed and went on about their business. In their defense, however, they were being forced to ask me and this caused them fear; "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait outside," they said over and over. "No," I blandly stated each time and this seemed to allay their fears for a few more minutes. I was, after all, standing calmly off to the side, not scrubbing up and offering to help.

After seven hours of poking, prodding, testing, and mostly waiting on gunshot and knifing victims to be treated, they gave her a couple of stitches in her eyebrow where previously there were none and sent us home, warning her to keep her head away from speeding taxis and the pavement until it healed.

They further admonished her not to get the wound wet for 24 hours, which is a real drag because she has quite a lot of dried blood in her hair. I'm sure it will be uncomfortable for her to sleep with dried blood in her hair and I'm not downplaying that at all, but what about me? I have to sleep with a woman with a face like Rocky Balboa and dried blood in her hair. That's not something I thought I'd ever say.

CHNW is a real trooper and was happy to allow me to publish these pics of her and make a humorous post out of this otherwise unfun event.

I would like to offer two bits of advice to you, dear reader:
1. If you are in NYC, do not ask a cab driver if he will take you somewhere. Get in the cab, close the door, and tell him where he is taking you. By law, they have to do it, but if your destination is not as profitable as they'd like, they will often get away before you can get in.
2. Avoid the holidays. You're safer at home where nothing moves quickly enough to knock you down.


.

My Marathon

Here are a couple of pictures of me running the NYC Marathon yesterday. It passes by about a block from my house and every year I see all those people jogging past hour after hour and listen to the bumper-to-bumper detoured traffic on my street honking and wonder, "what's the big deal with that thing, huh?"

So this year I decided to compete. I didn't win, but as anyone who runs in this kind of event can tell you, it's not about winning, it's about the personal challenge. And it was very challenging to get out of bed that early on a Sunday.
I hope these pictures will help you to admire me and maybe inspire yourself to get out of bed, too.