After two weeks in two of the most popular tourist cities in the world, I am conflicted. The sheer number of people milling about the streets is depressing. They are like a plague of two-hundred-pound gnats, inside and outside of every old building or church. Swatting at them does no good.

We’ve been in Rome for one week as of today and have been having a wonderful time. I’ve been here a few times before and have always loved this city but this is Olive Oyl’s first time and she is as smitten as a teenager meeting her favorite movie star. I may not be able to get her to leave. 

As I type this on Monday, I’m sitting at the St. Louis airport. I’ve been here for more than five hours and our first flight doesn’t board for another hour—around half an hour from when we were originally scheduled to be at home in Mexico. Overall, American Airlines has decided the best they could do after taking a lot of our money is to turn our 6-hour trip into a full day of misery.

This week’s Sunday cartoon, above, is an alternative version of the famous German fairytale, Rumplestiltskin. To refresh your memory

That’s my biggest problem with most Internet memes I’ve seen. They spell out the joke so plainly that it kills the humor. In fact, they can even be a little insulting.

When my kids were young, we had a little blue and green pet lizard that one of my daughters named Eduardo Lizardo. Once a day, I would catch some flies with a butterfly net and…

The Sunday cartoon above is the third kids’ poem-cum-comic. I’ve mentioned in previous posts how a bunch of weird little poems began coming to me back in the late 90s and how

I’ve no idea what it was like in Lake Wobegon this week but it was anything but quiet here at Rancho Bizarro…

I have a few things to cover today, not all of which are funny or pleasant. Let’s take the Sunday cartoon above first.

When I was a kid, I loved the old black-and-white Tarzan movies. An Olympic swimmer named Johnny Weissmuller played him in most of the ones I watched and he was an adorably bad actor.

My Sunday Bizarro cartoon, above, was conceived, written, and drawn by a human being. And all of the sentences in this post were typed by a human being. Of course, that’s just the sort of thing AI would say, isn’t it?

As a rule, I avoid trying to predict the future. Philosophically, I’m all about embracing what is and living here and now, not in some more perfect world later or some bleak post-apocalypse. But recently…

Lou Reed is proof that you don’t need to be able to sing to be a famous singer.

Olive Oyl, our two dog ladies, and I just returned from a couple of weeks’ vacation on a remote beach in Mexico. It sounds exotic but rustic is a more fitting adjective. 

This week’s cartoons!

Wayno and I have been collaborating on jokes for a couple of decades now. In this week’s Sunday Bizarro (above) I’ve gathered three that we’ve done on the same theme.

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…