Life Can Be a Beach
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, and then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics 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.
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Buenos dias, Jazz Zpickles. I’m glad you’re here, wherever this is.
This was a rough week for Americans who cherish the two pillars of our country: democracy and the rule of law. For our foreign readers who may be unaware, July 4th is our Independence Day, and our country has recently removed one of those pillars and is openly threatening the other.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with history can see how dark this could become very quickly. The negatives are obvious and worth losing sleep over. But in my subscription newsletter article this week (The Naked Cartoonist) I describe some of the positive aspects of this kind of threat that are not normally considered.
The NC is usually for subscribers only, but I’m making this one available to non-subscribers alike, in the hope that some readers may find it helpful. It is titled “How to Worry Less About the World,” and writing it made me feel a little better about this upheaval.
I am reticent to express myself politically here because I am a progressive liberal and some of my readers are conservative. Many people come here for humor and don’t care about my political leanings. I get that and I don’t blame them, but the current situation is an exception.
I generally find that immersing myself in politics can be toxic—like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. So I don’t dwell on the topic more than is necessary. In the article linked above, I do not mention parties or politicians and stick to a big-picture, historical perspective. My aim was to suggest an alternative perspective while offending no one.
My early articles for the NC project were mostly frivolous humor pieces, but in recent weeks, I’ve been getting more philosophical, and readers have responded very positively. I enjoy humor and philosophy/wisdom equally, so I delight in combining them, but as a result of the serious nature of this week’s topic, this particular piece has no cartoons and little humor. Still, many readers have found it very helpful, and I hope you will too.
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My partner in comedy is even less likely to mention politics but did so much more succinctly than I did in his blog post this week. It is worth a read.
On a less serious note, let’s shuffle down the humor highway and peruse Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week…
Ironically, I happen to be in the market for such a policy.
Why do you suppose all land animals suffered the wrath of the Almighty, but all sea animals were spared? I sense this story may have some holes in it.
So Rudy Giuliani is suing Batman?
I always love the way Wayno draws goofballs.
With online betting, we no longer have to leave home to donate money to the gambling industry.
You’ll pay higher rent than it’s worth, but you deserve that.
That’s this week’s punchline parade, Jazz Biggles. Thanks for marching along with us. If you’re enjoying our work and don’t want us to have to do it from a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere, please consider helping us survive the collapse of the old-school newspaper industry via the links below. We’ll get giddy over it if you do.
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