Parking Chess
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
Today’s Sunday cartoon (above) was inspired by driving as a tourist in San Francisco and Los Angeles. No doubt elaborate parking rules exist in many other cities, as well, but here are typical examples from each.
If you’re planning to drive in one of these cities for the first time, you may want to plan extra time to decode parking regulations and add a few hundred bucks to your travel budget for parking tickets and tow fees.
Alternatively, you could bring a hieroglyphist (a real word, apparently) to help translate the parking signs or a chauffeur to circle the block until you return. That may sound expensive, but check out the parking fines for those cities before you decide.
In LA a few years back, I was looking for a place to park my rental car. After cursing myself for not being more like Alan Turing, I managed to decode some parking cryptography and finally determined the space I’d chosen was legal on that day at that time. I put the lion’s share of my retirement savings into the meter and crossed the street to meet a friend for lunch.
I returned within the allotted time to find a red and white envelope tucked under the wiper blade of my rental car.
It was not an invitation to a Valentine’s Day party, as I’d hoped, but a parking ticket.
Had I parked in the wrong spot? No. Exceeded the time limit? No.
My crime was that I’d been unaware of little, faded, yellow rectangles painted on the street that delineate the corners of each parking space. My rear bumper was over the line by perhaps six inches.
I glanced at the amount of the fine: $85. When I regained consciousness, I did the math and determined that was just over $14 per inch. (Coincidentally, that coincides with the standard hourly wage for male porn stars, but that’s another story.)
The city was doubtless feeling pretty smug about having extracted a small fortune from yet another clueless rube, but this rube does not give in so easily.
Some years before, I’d ignored a parking ticket on a rental car and discovered the rental company simply charged it to the credit card I’d used when renting it. To avoid that, I adopted the habit of using stolen credit cards and a fake I.D. any time I rent a car.
So I put the envelope back on the windshield, set fire to the rental, and called an Uber.
I trust it cost them more than $85 to put out the blaze and remove the wreckage.
Let’s unwind from that harrowing tale with Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week…
Wayno calls this SpudBatZilla, and it is my new favorite toy. I hope to own one someday.
They don’t have donuts, but they serve booze during the refreshment break.
Spoiler alert: That thing flies every bit as well as a live reindeer.
My wife and I have a Borderline Personality Collie. It chews up the sofa cushions, then blames us for having a sofa.
Wifi? Why not?
The clown in the crown meets the king in the thing.
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