Parking the Dog
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. He does a weekly blog post, too, and I highly recommend it.
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Greetings and welcome, Jazz Pickles. Olive and I spent the past week traveling in the U.S. and just returned home last night, so I’m still a little rough around the edges. Forgive me if I don’t seem as playful as usual.
Visiting the U.S. these days can be an emotionally-charged experience, especially over the Independence Day holiday. While we were there, between July 2 and July 9, there were 25 mass shootings; twenty-two people died, 138 were injured. The vast majority of Americans want much stronger restrictions on guns, but barely a handful of Republican senators will allow it to even be discussed on the floor of the senate. They managed to pass an embarrassingly impotent law while state legislatures and the Supreme Court took huge steps backward into the barbaric past. And, thanks to a president who tried to overthrow the democracy he was sworn to protect, we now have a Supreme Court that completely backs this insanity and in light of what happened at the school in Uvalde, Texas, is willing to make such crimes easier, not more difficult. It is the definition of unfathomable and no other developed nation on earth can understand why we continue to allow this. Happy Independence Day; free to be morons.
But for something new to be born the old thing has to die. I am attempting to maintain a belief that this darkness that has overcome the nation (and many other parts of the world) is a symptom of the death throes of the old regime. I may not live to see it, but I want to believe that a new worldwide paradigm is being born, one of compassion for each other and respect for the earth. Humans have been racing toward a wall for too long, it’s high time for another great leap forward in wisdom and maturity.
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To help get that process started, let’s leap forward to Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week…
I always think of fireworks as a hands-on I.Q. test.
When I was in first grade in the 60s, they gave us big, fat pencils to learn to write with. They were more the size and circumference of carrots than pencils. As though what a tiny hand that is not used to writing really needs is practice writing with a log.
Before Wayno sent me the sketch for this gag, I didn’t know that some frogs spend the winters frozen underground. I supposed they know what they’re doing but the wifi must be terrible down there.
Wayno assures me that all of his entomological-themed cartoons are meticulously researched for accuracy.
Geese can be incredibly demanding spouses, lord knows.
In the meantime, you should be learning to sing, kid.
That wraps up this week’s operetta, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around for all 17 curtain calls. If you like that we do this for free, without ads or paywalls, please consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll thank you with magic thought waves of superpower.
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