March 10th, 2011

Death and Taste

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Neuter Your Pet!

Today’s first cartoon offers a clever pun about two dead guys whom I admire. I really like the peculiar thought process behind this pun, and even more so because it was thought up by a friend of mine‘s son, Emilio. He wrote another cartoon for me some months back and if I was at all organized, I could find it in this blog and link to it. Oh, wait, just saw the “search” feature. Here it is.

On the subject of death, this next cartoon also features a dead guy, albeit a fictional one. Emails of the deceased is something that I’ve thought a bit about. It’s a relatively new phenomenon since we’ve only been sending emails for a couple of decades now. A friend of mine died a few years ago and I read his most recent email a day after I found out he’d passed. It was disconcerting to be reading his latest comments to me after accepting that he was already gone. To make matters worse, I accidentally dialed his phone number about a week later and got his voice mail. Hearing his voice a week after his death was even stranger.

If you’ve been wondering why so many people are walking around today with dirt on their faces, this is a Catholic holy day called “Ash Wednesday.” Catholics go to church today and the priest reminds them that they “came from dust and to dust they shall return” by smudging a little ash on their forehead. They’re supposed to wear it all day. I had to do this each year all through my childhood but today my forehead is clean and shiny. I have a lot of cigar ashes on the front of my shirt, but that’s a fairly common accessory for me.

A couple of years ago a Fox News commentator – some woman, can’t remember who – was unaware of this religious shenanigan and remarked while watching some video of Capital Hill that Vice President Biden seemed to have an injury. She promised to report in more detail about it when she could get more info. I laughed a lot about it. I don’t watch Fox News, of course, preferring to get my information from planet Earth, but I saw a clip of it elsewhere.

One last image is this Bizarro from the late 1900s, when I drew like a drunk in a straight jacket with a pencil in his mouth. In my opinion it isn’t a particularly wonderful idea and the execution is amateurish, but it is one of those images that people still mention to me years later. Evidently, it rang a bell with a lot of readers. Yes, it is true that most people have no taste, but that’s what makes those of us with taste so special. People like you and me. (wink)

Why, yes, you can purchase tasteful merchandise with these cartoons on them! Dead Email… Oscar & Gene…Schlock