Pulting Things

Written By Dan Piraro

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 and should be seen here. I highly recommend it.

Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.

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Hiya, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for stopping by. When we last spoke, I was in the middle of a holiday visit to the U.S. and confessed how excessively I had been eating since we began our trip with a big, Thanksgiving Day-style dinner with the family. 

I’m ashamed to admit that nothing much changed for the rest of the week. We ate in restaurants almost three times a day, which always leads to me eating too much of things I try to cut back on at home. For instance, when I eat breakfast at home, which is every day that I’m not on the road, I eat oatmeal with 18 or 20 kinds of seeds, nuts, and berries in it. When I eat breakfast on the road in sit-down restaurants or diners, it’s omelets, pancakes, waffles, pastries, you name it. I’d eat a bowl of Coco Krispies if they had it.

So I was eating like that every day and promising myself that tomorrow I’d be better, and then we went to Disneyland. I’d never been. If you’re from the west coast, you’re probably making that face that everyone made whom I told that to: eyes wide open, mouth in the shape of a big O as though I’d just said I’d never bathed. Yes, I’m in my sixties and I’ve never been to Disneyland. I wanted to go as a kid but only rich kids went to Disneyland from Oklahoma, so it didn’t happen. My family didn’t go on airplane vacations, we went on station wagon vacations. I don’t think I even knew a kid who’d been to Disneyland. 

My wife, the ineffable Olive Oyl, on the other hand, grew up minutes from Disneyland and had season passes most years, so she wanted to show it to me as part of her story. It was fun and I’m glad we did it. But I ate more garbage. Delicious garbage like a Mickey Mouse chocolate ice cream bar. Or several. And some churros, which were not half as good as the ones we can get in our town here, but at least they cost four times more. As does everything in California compared to where we live in Mexico.

My seeming obsession with my diet isn’t about weight. I’m blessed with a metabolism that doesn’t gain weight easily no matter what I eat, but I’m trying to keep my “numbers” down, if you know what I mean. I exercise daily, go to a gym three times a week, eat with health in mind, and would seem to be in perfect health by any normal person’s standards. But to hear my doctor tell it if I don’t change my ways, my bad cholesterol is going to overcome my good cholesterol or my glucose is going to allow dark matter to take over my consciousness or god knows what. So I watch my numbers. Or pretend to.

So we just got back home to Mexico tonight and we’re glad to be here. Our cat is happy to see us and we pick up our dogs from doggy camp in the morning. They’ll be as happy to see us as the cat is, the only difference will be that they’ll show it. 

To finish this post, I’d like to bitch about a topic I’ve touched on before: what a legal I.D. does and does not do.

This came up for me during my week in the U.S. because I went to a couple of different cannabis shops to buy weed. Both required I.D. for entry, which is fine, I have no problem with that. But it so happened that the only I.D. I had on me on one occasion was my Mexican driver’s license which had expired a few months ago. 

You guessed it, they denied me entrance because my I.D. was no longer valid. 

How does my age have anything to do with whether or not the I.D. has expired? I don’t cease to be that age when the I.D. expiration date arrives. Using that metric for validating one’s name or age is thoughtless at best and idiotic at worst, and it has real consequences. My consequence wasn’t so bad because Olive Oyl could still go in and buy our weed, but imagine being denied the right to buy a bottle of wine when you're in your sixties and you’re on your way to a party and you can’t go empty-handed? So I just wanted to put one more vote out there in the cyber-web-iverse to change that nitwitted concept about I.D.s and routinely let people use an expired I.D. to prove their name and/or age. The expiration only means you can’t legally drive in that state anymore, not that you are no longer that person! Thank you for reading. I feel marginally better.

Continuing that trend of feeling better, let’s visit Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week!

Wayno may one day be inducted into the insects and soup hall of fame.

That dragon you asked for would have looked like this in a few years, anyway.

Let’s face it, we’ve all been there and it’s never easy. And we’ve been on the other end, too, having the imaginary person or creature break up with us. It’s painful but it passes with time and it builds imaginary character.

I think it will be best if none of us asks what he did to release the demon from the child.

Fun with Spanish:

The town we stayed in while in California is called Brea. That means “tar” in Spanish. We stayed in Tar, California. Perhaps you’ve heard of the La Brea Tar Pits? The Tar Tar Pits.

The word “padres” in Spanish means “parents”. The San Diego Parents is a professional baseball team.

Some wiseguy brainiac on the Interwebs told us that a steam locomotive is an external combustion engine. Thanks for ruining our joke Mr. Science Historian!

We always like to end on a down note so we’ll say good bye. Thanks for attending our little pity party and for sticking around until the last tear was sopped up. If you appreciate that we offer our work for free, without clickbait or pop-up ads, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll appreciate it mightily and stick up for you should a mob with your name on their angered lips ever form!

Dan Piraro
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