Adjusting Expectations
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. You can see Wayno’s weekly blog post here and I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Hey, Jazz Pickles, it’s good to be with you once again. I’m sitting on my sofa in Mexico typing on my laptop with an NFL game on TV in the background in Spanish, but in my mind, I am with you having a friendly chat.
Since I’m actively trying to learn a second language, people often tell me that watching Mexican TV can be a good way to learn Spanish. Your results may vary, but I have not found that to be true at all for several reasons. The first is that Mexican TV is so bad that I cannot make myself watch it long enough to learn anything, much less a language. Second, I have watched football games in Spanish now for five years and the only thing I’ve learned from it is that the words for “fourth” and “quarter” are the same in Spanish—“cuarto”. So the entire game sounds to me like a couple of guys hopped-up on cocaine speaking jibberish with Mexican accents until midway through the second half when one of them says, “cuarto cuarto”.
At that point, I pause for a moment to congratulate myself for understanding a native speaker, then I spend a good long while criticizing myself for understanding only one word of an entire football game after studying the language for nearly six years. It’s pretty pathetic.
If you’ve never tried to learn a language past the magical early years of effortless language acquisition, you may not know that people typically learn to speak and comprehend at different rates. This is something I only realized recently. For instance, I currently speak Spanish like a four-year-old but I only understand spoken Spanish at about the level of a two-year-old. I can grab a verb or noun here and there and based on the context, figure out what someone probably, sort of, maybe said. As I said, about like a two-year-old. Then I guess at how to form a reply in Spanish, execute it, and watch as the person I’m speaking to adopts the look of someone who feels sorry for an idiot.
After speaking and comprehension of the spoken word, there is a third metric of language acquisition and that is the comprehension of written text. Relative to the first two, I excel in this category and can read as well as perhaps an 8-year-old. That does me no good in my personal interactions with people unless I want to carry a whiteboard around and ask everyone to write down what they want to say. I can only imagine the looks of pity I’d get if I tried that. I’d probably also get the occasional donation of pocket change and a pat on the head.
Still, they say that learning a new language is one of the best activities for staving off dementia so I remind myself that each day I struggle with Spanish is a good day for my brain, if not my reputation.
Now let's find out what effect Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week will have on his reputation…
And they won’t be the only mindless lumps on social media.
It runs out of battery just as it gets to the top, of course.
I like to think there’s a special level of Hell for people who pick up their dog’s poo, then leave the bag somewhere other than a trash can.
Hey! This might be a good time to show you another snapshot of our sweet new dog, Lucy Goose!
Back to our cartoons…
The worst part is that now they have to manage the maintenance and repairs themselves.
In Wayno’s blog this week, he confesses to misspelling the band’s name. More accurately, he didn’t misspell their name in exactly the way they misspell it.
Suet Chips provide just the kind of rewardless snack experience you’re looking for.
We hope your experience with our amusing illustrations today was not completely without reward. Thanks for not throwing any tomatoes. If you like what we do and that we do it without a lot of ads and clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the handy links below. As the newspaper industry shrinks, so does our income, unfortunately.
Until next week, thanks for being Jazz Pickles as opposed to Polka Gherkins.
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