My favorite part of this gag is the bottom caption, “Not A Typo.” My buddy, Cliff Harris the King of Wordplay, wrote this gag but as I was adding the balloon lettering I realized it looked exactly like a common typo. So I added the bottom and the joke came together for me in a new way. It’s mild, but I like it.

One huge error in this is that the twins only have two arms showing and actual conjoined twins would each have a pair of arms (that’s four total arms, for the mathematically challenged). But that would have complicated the image and might not have come across the way I wanted so I left them with just two. Sorry guys.

Bizarro is brought to you today by Nothing.

Modern American parents often worry about more than parents did “back in the day.” Some wonder if this popular birthday party game is teaching our kids that if you beat an animal to death with a stick, you will be rewarded with candy. On the contrary, I believe this game is a valuable tool for rooting out potential sociopaths. If your child takes that lesson from a piñata game and begins beating live animals in search of candy, you likely have a future serial killer on your hands. Or at least a slaughterhouse worker.

For normal children, this game teaches nothing more than not to stand too closely to a blindfolded person swinging a club. A valuable lesson, indeed.

Just for grins, here is a previous piñata cartoon I did a few years back.

I’m a big fan of Bigfoot cartoons. I am not a believer, as you may have guessed, but I have a friend who is an ardent member of the congregation. Whatever fills your taco shell, right?

The idea for this cartoon came from my good buddy, part-time amateur counselor, and The King of Wordplay, Cliff Harris. Few people love to parse the English language more than this dude. Cliff missed his calling (and didn’t have voicemail) so he became a pediatrician, thinking that was a foot doctor. (This confusion led to his interest in language.) After a few decades of treating sick children (with special attention to their feet) he retired and is now writing clever books for kids (which incorporate some very clever language stuff) though he is yet to be published in that arena. I’ve read them and they’re boffo! I predict big things for you, Cliff! Best of  luck and get back to your keyboard!

I used to live with a couple of different women, at different times, and both of them spent a fortune on youth and beauty creams. They were both naturally youthful and beautiful and weren’t the type to wear tons of makeup or fuss over their hair, but their fear of getting old led them to fall prey to the beauty cream racket. It is, by the way, astounding how much that stuff costs. (I don’t like looking older, either, by the way, but I don’t do anything to prevent it other than dye my hair, tape my eyelids up, wear a toupee and a girdle, and shove white Chiclets into the spaces where I’ve lost teeth.)

So with that background, this cartoon occurred to me. I did a different type of cartoon using the same basic premise about our obsession with looking younger. You can see it by clicking these blue words. (For color blind readers, click the red words.)

I got a number of questions from readers about this cartoon so this seems a perfect time to clear them up.

Question: What the hell does this mean?

Answer: Some guys in the Middle East and South Asia are famous for lying on beds of nails. I’m not sure why, maybe it takes their minds off how miserable their lives are otherwise. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, there is a product called a “memory foam mattress,” which is made of this new kind of foam stuff that indents with your body, giving you a perfect night’s sleep. I have one of these things and I really love it. (A memory foam mattress, not a bed of nails.) So this cartoon is a combination of those two very different things with the intention of amusing people.

Question: Why are those guys each wearing a diaper on their butt and head?

Answer: They are not diapers and it is racist (or something equally bad) for you to even say that. I won’t dignify this question with an answer.

Question: Did the guy who carved Mount Rushmore out of granite eat too much of the mountain?

Answer: No, but this guy did.

Lincoln had a big year, not the least of which was the Academy Award winning film directed by what’s-his-name, starring that really good actor. A Lincoln film you might have missed, however, is one I happened to see the other night on that big, black, flat, rectanglular deal on the wall of my living room. It is called something like “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” It had good and bad things in it.

Good: I learned a new “rule” to the whole vampire thing and that is that vampires can’t kill each other. Who knew? Bad: Lincoln didn’t even have a beard through most of the movie so you could hardly recognize him. PLUS…the actress who played Mary Todd was attractive, which is, according to the pictures I’ve seen, historically inaccurate. When I’m watching a historical film of this nature, I immediately think, If that was inaccurate, what else about this film is inaccurate? Can I trust any of it?  If I were school age, I would definitely seek some other source before I wrote an essay on Lincoln.

Next year will be better for Washington as a film about his life is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2014. I’m hoping it pays more attention to historical accuracy.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the blue links in my posts. They are not advertisements or long and winding rabbit holes, instead, each one is typically a single picture that is somehow humorously connected to the word(s) it is linked to and designed specifically to make you smile. So don’t be afraid to click them, then come right back. It will only take a few seconds to view the pic, then you’re back on your way reading the funny, humorous, amusing words herein.

Thanks for reading and may your summer pass enjoyably without a single guided missile encounter.

In detective dramas, a little cash often improves someone’s memory. Some brainy researchers at a famous medical institute decided to test if this same principle would apply to other sorts of human functions and got some interesting results. In a study performed on 627 people with a variety of conditions from poor eyesight to dry skin to arthritis to bullet wounds to the head, they found that virtually every patient who received money claimed to feel better and asked for an ongoing cash-injection treatment program. One patient, a germaphobe, refused to take the “filthy, disease-ridden” cash, but this result was not common and classified as an anomaly.

Unfortunately, the study was postponed indefinitely when the researchers ran out of money. If you would like to donate to this important research and help us get closer to a cure for all kinds of random things, please drop a few bucks into the tip jar in the right border of this cartoon. Thank you.

Bizarro is brought to you today by The Belly of the Whale.

This cartoon is a combination of the Moby Dick story and the common movie mechanism wherein a woman who is being followed by a spooky man goes up to a stranger and asks if he will pretend they are together so she can either hide or appear to have protection from her would-be assailant, thus scaring him away for the time being. In the movies, the kind stranger usually ends up helping her solve her dilemma and they fall in love. This also happens after this cartoon, but she and Moby can’t make it work because he is a violin-playing opium addict who is so involved with his career as a solver of crimes by means of acute observation that he is not available for an emotional commitment. It’s kind of sad, really.

The small number above the copyright symbol on my signature says there are 9 “secret symbols” in this cartoon, but I just found 10. You will likely need to enlarge the cartoon to find them all.

I’ve been so busy this week that I have neglected my blog. I have brought shame upon my entire village. I know that I can never adequately compensate my dozen-or-so readers who have searched in vain for a new Bizarro cartoon all week, but I can, at least, rectify the situation by posting the week’s adventures here and now.

1. This cartoon is about a standard and traditional cartoon element, the thought balloon. If you don’t get it, form a similar bumpy bubble above your own head and fill it with the words, “What’s wrong with me?”

2. My own recent experiences with so-called “support” payments as the result of a divorce led me to this simple wordplay. The artwork the lawyer has hanging on the wall of his office is symbolic. I will leave you to determine of what.

3. My lovely colleague and friend, Dan McConnell came up with this jolly bit of wordplay. He’s a funny guy and not “funny” in the way that a neighbor “was acting funny so I thought I’d call the police” and turns out to have an apartment full of explosives,  just funny in the harmless, cartoonist way.

4. There are two kinds of artists in the world: those who enjoy drawing super-high-tech, realistic, sci-fi robots, and those who enjoy drawing corny, old-school, clunky robots. That’s right, I am the former. The thoroughly-researched, high-tech, futuristic robots featured in this cartoon will be the living nightmare of all who dare to stand in their way in the cyborg-controlled future of 2020. You have been warned.

5. My last bit of buckshot this week is this dandy little bamboo bar cartoon about the panda who needs a good, stiff stalk. And then some.

My known associate, Wayno of Pittsburgh concocted this notion. He says some informative and amusing things about this bambooholic here.