They're coming to get me

This isn't one of those "what I did today" blogs that are so danged popular on the internet. Except for today.

I was recently accused of only being comfortable when the outside temperature was one of two degrees. Well, today is officially the perfect weather day, ever. Sun, but a distinctly oceanic breeze that smells like back to school shopping. It's 68 degrees. I think the other perfect temperature is 69. Maybe 67. Not sure.

In other news, Quirkyworks might be working on a new banner for tiny dog. Stay tuned.

By the way, what is with the tiny dog reader who regularly informs me via IM that I am not getting enough comments on my posts, when he himself reads the blog quite often and yet, never posts? Any thoughts on what the heck his problem is?

Went for a walk in the suburbs. I meandered for many blocks, probably 45 minutes of walking, and did not see a living soul. I might even have welcomed a zombie unless it was one of those newfangled fast-moving zombies, which give me anxiety attacks.

Speaking of... every night I choose something to worry about when I automatically wake up at 2 a.m., thanks to a baby who now sleeps through the night but successfully trained me to wake up at 2 for the rest of my life to ponder all things fearful in the tomblike darkness. Last night it was the tripods in War of the Worlds. Let's put the whole matter of Tom Cruise and the remake aside for the moment here, must Tom Cruise jump all over every couch he touches? And focus on the very scary matter of these genocidal deathbots, and how closely they approximate a weird paranoia I have always had about distant, industrial type sounds, which I have imagined since early childhood to be emanating from tripod-like devices gradually moving closer, because they know exactly where I am.

I swore I heard them moving closer last night.

More comics

The Lockhorns

The creator of this strip has allegedly been dead for 15 years, and I swear it is still funny. I swear!! Where does his dead self keep coming up with these zingers week after week? You think I am joking but there is no irony here. These two marrieds just keep hurling the thunderbolts of comedy decade after decade and let me tell you, this reader keeps coming back for more.

Look, what do I have to do to convince you? Check out these strips. Are these not actually humorous? In fact they are. "I'm staying in shape, Loretta. This is the shape I'm staying in." I love it!

Verdict: Keep it coming.

9 Chickweed Lane

First of all I just realized, where in the hell is "9 Chickweed Lane" in this comic strip? Juliette lives on a farm that is most assuredly not on Chickweed lane and Edda lives in New York. I don't get it. Yet another strip about women written by a man, it features extremely thin women in high-waisted pants acting sassy, yet seductive. Things really fell apart for the strip when, wishfully, Amos the knock-kneed nerd hooked up with Edda, the pencil-thin blonde ballet dancing uber-babe. It's like the central conceit of all Woody Allen films: that Woody Allen is attractive to women. Men, I've got an announcement. Hot women never fall in love with nerds. Not ever. Don't go bringing up Billy Joel. Look what happened there.

Verdict: Edda does not love Amos. Let's be honest with ourselves about this.

Fudgems!

There was once a post here about Fudgems but tiny dog decided to share his fudgey joy with Flak Magazine although this peice fails to mention that Fudgems also has a Spanish-speaking cousin, Brownito.

Dios mio!

Comix: tiny dog weighs in

I read comics. Yes, those sub-amusing five-panel stalwarts in the "Lifestyles" section of the local paper that you don't subscribe to, those are the comics I'm talking about. Oh, hip, grim indie comics full of non-sequiturs and a grim world view are still a laff a minute, don't get me wrong, and I've read my share. But I somehow, against my better judgment, keep coming back around to the classics:

Cathy

Dorville has already discussed the Cathy phenom in an ancient peice that appeared on Tiny dog's defunct ancestor site, The Hall of Heads. I am not sure much more can be said about this comic since, for the entire duration of its thirty-year run, all that has happened is that Cathy has tried on swimsuits that she has determined to be immodest and undersized.

One solitary exception to the matter of trying on ill-fitting suits is that Cathy finally got around to marrying her dullsville boyfriend Irving in a series of strips I somehow successfully avoided in their entirety, but which are captured horrifyingly in a compendium.

Let us note that Cathy Guisewite still has not learned how to draw in three dimensions, although she has apparently been employed as an artist for a quarter of a century.

Verdict: Learn how to draw dogs, Cathy Guisewite.

Luann

Luann, disturbingly, is penned by a middle-aged man. It involves the foibles of a frumpy high-school she-nerd with whom I was often compared by my brother in my school days (fortunately the strip also features a clueless older brother, for retaliatory purposes).

Luann is reachingly earnest and unhip, and strives toward political correctness with its misty-eyed firefighter tributes, cancer-stricken heroes, and wheelchair romances. Probably its most odious storyline involved Aaron Hill, WASPy object of Luanne's teen dreams, actually interacting with Luann.

Verdict: It's sort of like "Family Ties" meets "Saved by the Bell" meets those inspirational tru-life stories in Reader's Digest, as rendered by a corny middle-aged guy. P.S. to my brother: I am NOT Luann but you are Brad jerk idiot. Also happy birthday little lose.

To be continued...

Real men love Jesus

Saw this bumper sticker while walkin' around the burbs, slapped on some sort of ironically godforsaken hatchback, the kind of car angry young dudes drive around before they come in to money of any kind. It occurred to me that this Jesus heartin' dude may in fact not be acquainted with the reasons that Jesus does not actually exist (at least as a deity; as my brother once said, "I don't dispute that there was probably some dude named Jesus walking around in the dirt two centuries ago.").

Just a few of the myriad reasons that Earth spins on, god-free, in the cold vacuum of space:

1. All that obvious stuff like genocide, tsnunamis, and war. Let's just get that out of the way right now so we can get down to the trivial points of proof.

2. "Two and a Half Men" is a popular show. So is "According to Jim." Hundreds of thousands of Americans sit in their living rooms, laughing when these shows are on the TV.

3. Tummy time. I had to throw this in on request of a certain small baby.

4. A land-raping fundamentalist Republican asshat will win the 2008 presidential election by a landslide.

Still not convinced?

5. KFC Famous Bowls. Incidentally, why the plural? I only see one option here, the one that has the KFC prep table dregs dredged in gravy and cheese.

Goodbye to goo

Today we went to the Seatac airport to pick up my brother and sister-in-law. After hacking our way through aimless, twisting lines of triple-screened outbound passengers, we reported to the new TSA passenger arrival station to retrieve our relatives.

They handed us two sacks of dust, since all goo and liquids had been shop-vac'd from their bodies back at a security checkpoint in California. I can't even be sure that the sacks of dust contained the complete sandy remnants of my own relatives, and not just an amalgam of powdered passengers slapped into burlap bags by guys named Chad who make $7 an hour to keep our skies safe from shoe bombers and box cutter bogeymen. Wish us luck.

Ghost dog

Last night I was visited by a ghost.

This happens about annually or so. He usually appears somewhere in the middle of a stream of nightmares, but he is a familiar face and not a particularly scary one. He is Charlie Brown, childhood dog.

Brown Dog, my dad called him. Chuck. Named of course after neurotic, round headed kid of infamy, Charlie Brown was your standard stray-dog melange of Collie, German shepherd, and probably Laborador-- those labs get around. I have no idea how my parents picked him up, probably some friends of theirs had a box of puppies, you know how it goes despite the best efforts of the S.P.C.A.

He was big-ish, kind of goofy, and basically harmless. I think he might have bit someone once, either it was Alicia, the babysitter I hated who made us go to bed way too early, or maybe it was the paper boy, I can't really recall. Brown Dog mostly lived in our backyard, which kind of a bummer for dogs. It was basically a rectangle of cool deck with a pool in the middle, around which Charlie paced, barking, while the kids splashed about.

In my dreams he appears, looking at me dolefully through the old sliding glass door of my childhood home. Except that it's now, and he's maybe been out there for 20 years or so, waiting for some attention. I look up and there is Chuck, gray-muzzled the way he was in the end, sad-eyed, waiting for me to notice him, and come on out to see him one more time. What have I been doing for twenty years that is so important that I have failed to see him sitting there? Why haven't I have time to just walk outside and put my arms around his neck? How many days has he sat there on the patio watching me on the inside, and hoping I would remember him?

I'm not sure why his soul is so restless, but I want him to know that I haven't forgotten.

Bums I have known

For no reason anyone can determine, I woke up this morning thinking of bums.

Now being that I frequent suburbs and corporate office parks in recent years, I have encountered less than my share of inebriated, pontificating vagabonds, all husbands aside, but my memories remain fond from my college years in a dog-eared sea town. Two bums in particular come to mind.

Bum 1: "Nothing is sadder than a barren woman"

As a carless drifter, I spent approximately 28% of my early 20's waiting at the Santa Cruz metro center for the bus that would whisk me away to whichever flea-infested, overpopulated beach shack I called home at the time. One could readily strike up conversations with a rotating assortment of bums at this locale, as many bathed in its bathroom sinks and trolled its idle population of bus passengers for change. One sunny afternoon i was sitting on the concrete island in the middle of the center waiting for a bus to San Jose. A malodorous old fellow seated himself beside me and struck up a conversation that went something like this.

Him: "You got kids?"
Me: "No."
Him: "I will tell you something. I will tell you one thing. And that thing is this. There is nothing sadder, nothing sadder in this world, than a barren woman.
Me: "Uh, I can think of something sadder."
Him: "There is nothing sadder than a barren woman. By god.
Me: "OK, then."
Him: "You think I have no money."
Me: "Actually, I didn't--"
Him: You young women, you think I'm broke. You think I'm a broken down old drunk."
Me: "Uh..."
Him: "I've got money, all right. Look here. Look at this." Opens coat and reaches into grimy pocket. Pulls out some bills and throws them to the ground at my feet.
Me: "Uh..."
Him: "See, you were wrong. You were wrong about me. There aint nothin sadder than a barren woman."

Bum #2: Whore

This bum had some serious problems with the sauce, not to say that the above bum did not. But I feel that it is imperative to remark that his condition was much closer to dead than the abovementioned bum. He dressed in a great, tattered jumpsuit of grease-stained rags, and his hair and beard were Dumbledore-white. His skin, burnt beyond recognition from cirrhosis and the sun, peeled off his face in sheets.

This fellow lived behind a Pizza Hut dumpster located directly across the street from my boyfriend's house. This house was a teetering two-story tear-down right off the main highway that ran through town, and thus it was sort of a magnet for weirdness. Our bum in fact took note of our activities at times when the haze of inebriation lifted slightly, and sometimes was known to lurk on the front sidewalk, shouting his observations.

One day I was walking with the boyfriend down to the corner, likely in pursuit of Taco Bell, when the bum appeared. He took immediate umbrage with my gender by declaring:

"Whore!!" Of course I have never accepted money for affections, and wondered where this bum had drawn this odd conclusion. "Whore!!!!" He cried. He then strangely added: "Why don't you make babies???" The boyfriend and I turned to one another, puzzled. None of this was making sense, I wonder if the bum knew that?

Upon our return, Taco Bell bags in hand, we likely discovered the bum face-down on the sidewalk in front of Pizza Hut, as he was often found, sometimes later to be revived by paramedics if a particularly spooked local patched through a call to 911.