So, I live in Mobile, Alabama. I know that every city has a different collection of comic strips, so I can only comment on the ones that the Press Register subscribes to. But, comment I will.

What in the fuck is with the comics these days? There's an old Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin is talking Hobbes about how his grandfather complains that the comics have shrunk over the years to the point of illegibility. In the last panel Hobbes coments that Calvin's grandfather takes the comics pretty seriously.

Well, so do I, and if Calvin and Hobbes were still around they'd have an even greater complaint: the fact that the comics, these days, are weepy fucking four-panel cry-a-thons. Like I said about stand up comedy, I take it pretty seriously. So much so that I not only own the hardback, canvas bound definitive collections of both Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, I even named my first born son Calvin. So, like I said, don't fuck around with my comedy...

First off, the format of comic strips playing out in real time so that we can watch the characters age is egotistical and annoying. I can't remember a time that I've laughed at For Better Or Worse. Ah, over the course of how many painful Canadian years that pile of shit has run, we've gotten to see how the Shitball family has grown older and older, with tidbits of half-assed insight every day thrown in for good measure.

And they're not the only strip that does that. Hell, they're not even the worst. You've got Crankshaft, a formerly mildly amusing strip about a cromudgetty bus driver griping about the perils of noisy children and weighty meatloaf, you've got Arlo and Janis, my mom's favorite strip...enough said, and the world's worst: Funky "Goddamned" Winkerbean.

I remember when comic strips made the news for poking fun at politicians or using questionable language (I would buy the hard bound Bloom County collection as well, I miss it terribly...). Now, the comics are making the news again with some bitch on Funky Winkerbean dying from breast cancer.

Now let me stop right here for a moment and say something serious, I currently have four people VERY close to me who are either cancer survivors or are currently undergoing cancer treatments. If there was ever a proponent of cancer awareness, I am it. I don't give money to the homeless, I don't donate food to food drives, I don't care about AIDS, I don't care about Darfur, I don't care about any of it. But, I will always donate to cancer research. Why? Because (well, the Darfur thing excluded) it's the only one above that can't be avoided somehow, and it is a horrible disease that affects too many people in too many ways.

So, that being said, get that fucking shit off of my comics page! People read the comics to laugh and escape Section A of the newspaper where you can find PLENTY about disease, teenage pregnancy, suicide, and other horrible shit (all of which has been covered in the panels Funky Winkerbean). People are finally beginning to speak out against death in the funny pages, pleading with Batiuk to NOT have a chick die from breat cancer in the funny pages. Batiuk's response?

"I honestly don't think readers know what they want," he said. "They think they know what they want. But what they really want is for me to give them a surprise every now and then."

Oh, Tom Batiuk! You have us pegged... No wait... What we really want is to LAUGH AT THE FUNNY PAGES! Turns out we DO know what we want!

I say if Funky Winkerbean can kill a bitch with breast cancer, then next I want to see Beetle Bailey finally get ass raped by the Sarge. I want Hagar the Horrible to finally rear back and pop that bitch of a wife, Helga, in her smart little nag-hole. I want Dagwood Bumstead to walk into his office with a sawed off and start plugging sucking chest wounds into anything that moves the next time his rich cunt of a boss tells him he's fired.

There's some real life situations for you! Why aren't these tales played out for us, the reading public, who don't know what we really want? Because, while maybe not as consistantly funny as my favorites any more, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, and Blondie follow the proper formula of creating a funny comic strip. There's usually not any insight, and that's how we fucking like it.

Oh, and Frank and Ernest... Someone should PUNch that guy in the sternum to MALAPROP his ass on a stretcher... Stop writing comics.

This is an old story, but it's still one of my proudest moments:

So, I'm outside in the gazebo with my wife and oldest son one afternoon. She and the boy were down in the yard playing right outside the gazebo, while I did some work to the gazebo itself. Now, the gazebo was built by a former owner of the house and it's made almost entirely from cedar which apparently is a favorite snack of carpenter bees.

Over the years, carpenter bees have become the Ace of Spades in my deck of terrorist playing cards, so to speak. They were all over my gazebo, just munching away as much as they pleased. You could sit out there trying to enjoy an nice outdoor lunch and hear them like a bowl of Rice Krispies eating wood.

I have been known to turn into Carl Spackler when it comes to carpenter bees, letting nothing (even common sense) come in between me and the destruction of their species.

As I'm piddling around in the gazebo, I see a carpenter bee go buzzing into one of the many holes lining the roof area. I drop my tools and jump to my feet. I grab a can of prescription strength insect killer given to me by my former Terminix guy (who is the only person I've met who shares a hatred of carpenter bees that runs on the same level as mine). I light into a frenzy of spraying the poison at anything that moved.

The bees are dropping from their burrows, some dead, some just pissed off and buzzing my head. I feel like King Kong atop the Empire State Building if only Kong had a can of liquid death instead of monkey paws. I'm seeing red, I only hear the sound of my own heart. I'm in the zone. It's the way I imagine ultimate fighters feel while in the octagon. I'm like a ninja shrouded in a cloud of gaseous death! Then, I hear it...

"DAVID! STOP SPRAYING US WITH POISON!"

They talk?

No, it was my wife. In my blind rage, I was misting she and my son with poison. Rather than, picking my perfectly content son up and removing him from the sandbox and dealing with the crying while her idiot husband continued his deft attack on flying insects like a GOOD WIFE, she demanded that I stop spraying poison around like an idiot. Pffft...women...

So, I put down the can of poison and try to return to what I was doing. Moments later, I hear the distinct buzz of a carpenter bee directly behind me. I stand up slowly and turn around.

The air was thick, my friends... As I turned around I see a bee just hovering at eye level about three feet in front of my face. He staring at me. I'm staring at him. I feel like I'm in a Western. "Pick up the poison." "I don't wanna pick up the poison, Mister." "Pick up the poison." "If I do, you'll sting me!" "Pick up the poison." BAM! "He was gonna poison me and you all saw it."

I look at the poison. I look at my wife. I look at the bee. He's still just hovering there, calling me a pussy in bee speak. "Whatcha gonna do, pussy?" On the rail, I see the only thing in my reach that I can use to swat at it: my grill brush. It's not a large grill brush, but it should do to wave him away at least.

I reach very slowly toward the brush and wrap my fingers around it. I pull it toward me...slowly...slooooowwwwwwly...

*SWAT*

I shoot a forehand at him the likes of which Nadal would have been proud of. I feel something as I swing. As I finish my follow through, I notice the bee is no longer hovering in front of me.

Did I knock it down? Really? With a grill brush?

I set out looking for it. But, it's nowhere to be seen.

So, I flip over the brush in my hand...



Oh yeah...

So, I've noticed a strange phenomenon that I witness maybe once or twice a month. I'm sure you've seen it, too. But, whether it's strolling through the mall, sitting at the bar, waiting in traffic, whatever, in many ways it's better than spotting the errant mullet or rat tail. This phenomenon I speak of is this:

The "two dudes dressed exactly the same" phenomenon.

Now, I'm not talking about wearing similar colors or anything incidental. I'm talking about meticulous planning down to the angle of the cap on their head. The other day, I was at the beach with my family and I witnessed two guys strolling down the board walk, both wearing jeans, a tight black tank top, and a white hat.

The true glory of this phenomenon is that when you witness it, the people who are pulling it off aren't just running out to get some milk from the store, or even to grab some tacos. No, you can see it in every ounce of their demeanor, these guys are out for pussy. Their bottom lips are properly bitten, the swagger in their walk is just so, the hand conspicuously holding the buckle of the belt so as not to lose their pants.

So, is this a proven method of attack these days? Dude, what the fuck?! No wonder we didn't get laid, your shirt tail is out! I thought we were going shirt tail IN! Dammit, man! Now we have to go to another bar and hope no one saw us... Or is it just in hopes that some oblivious hood rat will wander up on them and say, "Oooo...what's your groups name?"

"Well, we aren't signed yet, but listen out for 'Hella Reese', we about to blow up!"

Hella Reese? Wow, I just made that one up and it's fantastic. Sometimes I make myself proud...

Labels: america, dancing, japan, take anything you want, tourist

Let me preface this story by saying that my wife will be pleased that I have immortalized this story in the confines of the internet so that now maybe I can quit telling strangers about it.

So, I'm sitting in the bathroom the other night, taking a shit. There's nothing churning in the gullet, no abdominal pains, nothing real out of the ordinary prior to sitting on the shitter. So, anyways, I'm sitting there, thumbing through "ESPN: THE MAGAZINE, BITCH!" (It's such a pile of shit, but I got a free subscription, so I read it while I shit...) and I feel the toothpaste reach the end of the nozzle, so to speak.

Once again, nothing momentous, but I can tell instantly that it's one of those shits where you have to push like you're birthing a fawn, yet when you look down, the bowl is full of olive-sized shit balls. So, I'm pushing and sweating and red in the face, and finally I break free. It's like when you siphon gas from a car, you have to really give the hose a good suck start, but after you initially break the seal, the gas just pours into the bottle. Same thing, I break the seal and feel myself relax.

So, I flip the page, and SAY there's a story on David fucking Beckham! I wonder when he's finally coming to America so that Jesus Christ himself will descend from heaven and decree our great nation the most glorious of...

Then, I feel it.

Like farting in the bathtub, and a fart bubble floats up between your sack and your thigh, I feel something thump and slide off the back of my scrotum followed by a flat "flap!".

Now, I'm confused... The strain of pumping out infants was like 15 seconds ago... What the fuck was THAT?!

I stand up and drop "ESPN: THE MAGAZINE, MOTHERFUCKER!" on the ground and look in the toilet, fully expecting a C.H.U.D. But, there was no C.H.U.D.

No, my friends, what I saw was....A MILLION TIMES BETTER THAN A C.H.U.D.!

Inside the toilet bowl below me was a turd, scratch that..A TORD! that extended all the way down the hole, through the water, and all the way up the side, finally beaching itself just below the rim of the bowl. This beast would've made John Holmes throw his cock down in SHAME!

I stood and marveled, pantsless, in its glory for a moment before flushing it away to the TORD Hall of Fame. Of course, it clogged the pipes, and 5 flushes and a plunging ensued, but that's just details...

When I initially told my wife this story, I expected her reaction to be anywhere from "Wow! From the drain to the rim, huh?" to "Why the fuck do you have a need to tell me this shit?"

Her reaction?

"Well, did you wash your nuts off afterward?"

Labels: dookie, espn, poo, poop, shit, turd

After Man vs. Wild on Discovery Channel, Last Comic Standing is my next favorite show currently on television. However, I also happen to have been a stand up comedy fan since as long as I can remember. I've learned a great deal about humor via Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Doug Stanhope, and countless others.

Last night was an atrocity against humor. I sat with my wife last night and watched Dante (that's it, just Dante. I fucking HATE one word names. Only Sinbad can get away with that, and he's still not really forgiven.) perform one of the biggest cliches in stand up comedy: the vomitous rage inducing "What if such and such were performed by so and so" routine, followed by a circle jerk of ridiculous impressions. It's right up there with airplane peanut jokes and mother in law jokes. So, for 30-45 painful seconds, I watched this half-ass motherfucker do a bit about "What if the Wizard of Oz was performed by Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lloyd, and some other people I can't do impressions of..." He even finished it off with a fucking TERRIBLE impression of Robert DiNero saying, "You talkin' to me?" THE MOST CLICHE LINE IN THE MOST CLICHE BIT IMAGINABLE!

Then, came the most disgusting part of all. It's all up to you America (but we know from Season 1, when Drew Carey stormed off the set because the producers threw the judges votes away and picked who they wanted anyway, that the audience vote doesn't matter)....your choice for the audience favorite is... MOTHERFUCKING DANTE! Yes! Why you Larry The Cable Guy lapping, good for nothing mongoloids! The producers were probably sitting there wearing their Crocs, eating their KFC Goo-Bowl, and wiping away mashed potatoes as they said, "Ooo! I like impressions. He's in!"

P.S. - Four out of the five on the stage of finalists didn't make me laugh even once. Doug Benson is the only funny one from last night, and that's just because I'm not so sure that he's not actually retarded. Do better Last Comic Standing producers. Oh, and since you (the producers) obviously didn't notice, no one laughed at the fat crazy chick with the cats. No one. Her joke about skinny girls was met with crickets.

If Sean Rouse doesn't make it next week and the fucking HEMI guy does...well, I think you may be reading Part 2 next Wednesday night...

Labels: comedy, dante, last comic standing, nbc, stand up comedy

So, I'm leaving Best Buy today and driving off through the parking lot of the mall. As I'm pulling up to an intersection, I see a big blue conversion van turn the corner at the intersection ahead of me. On top of this van, I can see a large maybe 6' x 6' cube of vinyl or some sort of material on top. It's huge and it towers over everything.

On each side of the cube is a various picture of an abortion. Not a drawing. Not some representation of an abortion, but picture of a motherfucking chopped up baby! A real dismembered baby! Accompanying this gruesome image are the words, "My mommy and daddy paid a man to kill me." followed by a website who I won't give validation to by mentioning.

Okay... What the fuck? Screw the abortion debate... That's just fucked. I don't care if you're pro-life, pro-choice, pro-abortion...that's just fucked, and there's no other way to describe it. Now, as he drove past I did feel myself be moved, but it didn't sway any preconceived opinions I had on the subject. No, the only thing that I felt when I saw that was, "Why you sick motherfucker!"

What if my kids had've been in the car with me? Does that fit your agenda for me to have to explain to my four year old what a chopped up baby looks like? Driving through the mall parking lot at lunch during the summer with a six foot cube of dead babies... Jesus Christ on a cracker, who do they think they were going to sway? I know what they'd say, "If we can just keep one girl from having an abortion, our mission won't be lost." But, what about the HUNDREDS of women, children, and men who had to look at the chopped up babies that never even considered an abortion?

Now, there's valid arguments on both sides of the table. No question about it. But, face facts, just about every woman or girl who has an abortion needs to have an abortion. A child needs to be loved. I mean, it's not like two loving people who desperately want children one day come up pregnant and say, "Whoops! Not today, we've got a cruise planned in a few months, and the last thing I need is a fat belly." No, it's 16 year old Jolene, who just can't take the thought of her fourth waterhead wobbling around the trailer eating spiders out of the corners, and even if she gives it up for adoption chances are pretty good that kid's not going to be a neurosurgeon. So, do you go ahead and take care of the problem now or wait for him to blow himself up in a meth lab explosion a few years down the road?

Personally, I could never ask anyone to have an abortion. But, that's because I've always known I wanted to be a dad, and personally I think I'm a damn good one. But, as in the example above, there's very logical reasoning behind it. The last thing we need is more unloved children growing up to beat their girlfriends into oblivion or molesting children or robbing us. I know, I know...there's plenty of people out there waiting to love these kids. Bullshit! Where? I know more fucked up foster home kids that bounced from family to family than I know couples on a waiting list to adopt children, and I only know TWO foster home kids.

Anyways, I didn't mean to go off on a tangent about what I think on the topic, all I really wanted to say was by that guy driving around with his dead baby cube through the mall parking lot, he didn't sway my opinion on abortion, but he did strengthen my opinion that self-righteous zealots are some of the most ignorantly dangerous people in the world.

Labels: abortion, best buy, pro-choice, pro-life, protest

Yes! You will! And you will love every second of it!