Label Gun Rights
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 be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Hey, Jazz Pickles, thanks for stopping by. Based on my Sunday cartoon above, you might think my little essaylette today might be about labels. I’m not sure yet, but it might be. To find out if I have anything meaningful to say on the subject, I’m going to start typing and see where it leads us.
Modern label-making devices are undoubtedly digital and I have no interest in those. The only label gun that ever captured my imagination was the one my grandfather had around 1970. It had a plastic, rotatable wheel full of letters and numbers and a spool of vinyl tape that was shiny on one side and adhesive on the other. You could spell out a name or a sentence one letter at a time and pulling the trigger would emboss your message into the thick vinyl, then you’d peel the backing off and stick it to something.
It sounds like the most boring thing in the world and it was. But before the age of the Internet and video games, that’s all it took to amuse the average American child. If you were too young to take hallucinogens, that is, and in 1970, I was. It was also before cable TV, so there were only three national channels and one or two local ones if your town was big enough; the odds of there being anything on that you wanted to watch at any given time were slim. There was no way to watch recorded shows or movies, either. That seemed as futuristic and impossible as the transporter on Star Trek. It was an austere hell that you cannot even imagine if you were born after a certain time.
What did we label? Let me think. I’m sure we spelled out our names and stuck them to our shirts: DANNY, TOMMY, KAREN. We probably tagged all of our belongings after that: DANNYS PENCIL, KARENS BARBIE DOLL, TOMMYS FOOTBALL. Next, we likely named random objects around the house: RADIO, DOOR, TOILET, TABLE. Eventually, we took to misnaming things. A bottle of wine might say SHOE POLISH. My dad’s briefcase may have been designated as a BOMB. I remember my mom asking which of us had put a BUFFALO label on the family cat. (We quickly learned that if you put it between their shoulder blades, they can’t remove it as easily. We were way ahead of the flea and tick prevention industry.)
Kids today don’t know what they’re missing by having so much pre-manufactured fun. I can’t help believing that my generation would remain sane longer stranded on an island than younger generations. Especially if we could bring an old-school label gun and an enormous supply of vinyl tape. PALM TREE, PHILODENDRON, MONKEY, HEAD HUNTER.
One last thing before we adjourn to view Wayno’s week of Bizarro cartoons:
I did a podcast recently. If you want to watch and hear me pontificate about myself, click this and see what happens. To the best of my recollection, I said nothing about label machines.
Musical trucks: Categorize under “ways to make trash collecting even more unpleasant.”
As the saying goes, “If a job is worth doing, are you really sure it is worth doing? Maybe it can wait.”
And don’t be hiding it under your tongue just pretending you swallowed it.
Thanks to my buddy, Cliff Harris the King of Wordplay for this bit of verbal high jinks. (Cliff is the King of Wordplay but Wayno is the Pooh-bah of Puns.)
I’d like to be coned and covered in cherry syrup, thanks for asking.
She doesn’t drink the champagne, she pours it into her gills.
That was the final shot fired in this week’s war on comedy. Thanks for helping us fold the white flag and sign the surrender. If you like smiles, appreciate that we deliver them free of charge, and you’ve been lying awake at night feeling guilty about that, please consider getting a better night’s sleep via one or more of the links below. Our degree of appreciation will be off the charts.
Until then, if you can’t stand the heat, take off that sweater.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
COMICS KINGDOM SHOP (now with Bizarro products!)
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels