How to Insult a Large Subset of the Human Race

I love Tillamook Medium Cheddar. It is the Cadillac of cheese. My father and I see eye to eye on this issue, and almost nothing else.

We visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory (In Tillamook, Oregon) at least four times when I was a kid. They had fantastic ice cream as well! We’d get a campsite in nearby Netarts, Oregon and go crabbing. If you’ve never been crabbing on the Oregon coast, it involves renting a terrifying little boat and going out into the terrifying, choppy, lead-gray water, and hauling up cages full of terrifying live crabs, which you take back to the shore and cook in a terrifying giant cauldron of boiling water and seaweed.

To a child with my temperament, the cheese factory was a welcome relief.

When this comic ran the first time, I got a nice gift basket from the Tillamook Cheese Factory. It was one of the proudest days of my life. That is not an exaggeration, and no, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

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How to Tell a Scary Story

I remember having a protracted giggle fit when I came up with the idea for panel three, which didn’t often happen when I was writing the comic. My usual response when I come up with an idea I believe is funny is to nod and smirk, as if I’m thinking, “Ah yes, the master strikes again.” Of course, what I’m really thinking is “Whew! I came up with something!”

The fact that panel three made me laugh out loud might be because it’s probably the silliest thing I ever wrote.

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How to Bring It

It’s funny how, once I went to the trouble to draw an entire Monopoly game, I found multiple excuses to use it in the comic.

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I enjoy a good game of Monopoly. By “good,” I mean “one where I win.”

Once when I was in high school, I played Monopoly with a friend, and he got so frustrated that he hid the deed to Boardwalk, then insisted that I couldn’t buy it because the deed wasn’t available. He declared the game a draw, but I claimed the moral victory, which in Monopoly, more so than most games, counts for NOTHING! It and Risk are two games designed to demonstrate the futility of winning the moral victory.

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How to Handle a Surprising Truth

This was one of those times where I made the comic, then realized like a day later that it was factually inaccurate, but I felt it was too funny, (and, let's be honest, I had put too much work into it,) to let it go. So I just slapped a disclaimer on the bottom of the comic and ran that puppy.

Also, I figured that the “fact” I had gotten wrong was about imaginary car robots, so how much sleep was I going to lose over that, really?

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How to React to Something Amazing

No situation is ever made better by yelling “Geez.”  Just saying the word instantly robs you of any gravitas or illusion of having the upper hand.

Here, I’ll prove it. Picture Liam Neeson saying the following.

“I can tell you I don't have money... but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. I mean, geez!”

I think the problem is that everyone knows that “Geez” is the midway point between saying “Gee,” and shouting “Jesus!” Saying “geez” tells the listener that you really want to curse, but you can’t quite bring yourself to do it, and if you can’t bring yourself to say something drastic, what are the odds that you can bring yourself to do something drastic?

Of course, I could be wrong. Geez may have some deep meaning. For all I know, when you yell “Geez” you could be calling out to Saint Geez, the patron saint of ineffectual anger.

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How to Cope with Jealousy

I’ve always thought that it would be cool to have a themed wedding based on the end credits of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, which may just prove that my definition of the word “cool” is a bit off. Of course, you’d have to hold your wedding in a paved drainage canal, but then again, if your bride-to-be agreed to your best man wearing a jacket with no shirt underneath, she’ll probably agree to anything.

You might have better luck with a wedding themed after the end credits of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou instead, as it’s the same exact thing, except that it’s by the water, and they end up on a boat, which would be a great place to hold the reception.

Note from Missy: the only issue being that both of those end credits only have one woman in them, and the day there’s a wedding where the only woman involved is the bride is a day I’ll eat my hat. (Side note: dammit, Hollywood, can we get over the single-woman-in-a-sausage-fest-movie trope already?)

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How to Wallow in Unbridled Hedonism

For a brief time, my older brother and I both worked at the same Pizza Hut. The woman who ran the place was smart enough to avoid having the two of us work together unsupervised if she could at all help it.

I remember one time my brother and I were the only people in the kitchen, and one waitress was out front, tending to the customers and maintaining a safe distance from our idiocy. My older brother made himself a pizza with a solid base of red pepper flakes between the crust and the sauce, and another layer between the sauce and the cheese. That’s how I know that a person’s taste buds can turn white and fall off.

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How to Be a Gentleman

Timely!

When I describe this comic as “timely,” it’s with the understanding that from a woman’s point of view it was probably equally timely at any random point between this moment and the beginning of recorded time. Right now, the comic seems especially timely to us men, because we’re just beginning to wake up to how serious the problem’s always been.

It’s an interesting point, I think. Not a funny point, like, at all, but interesting.

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How to Help someone see the Bright side

Ric and I had a friend who suffered an unfortunately timed case of hemorrhoids. There’s no good time for hemorrhoids, but his chose an especially bad time because his hemorrhoids came right as another friend of ours was on a hard-core positive-thinking kick, which led him to proclaim that the guy with the hemorrhoids was looking at things “all wrong,” and that the hemorrhoids could turn out to be “a marvelous opportunity.”

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How to Help Someone Recognize Their Faults

I did this comic as a gift for Ric, believe it or not. His favorite comic strip of all time is Peanuts (early Peanuts when it still had an edge). There was a run of comics in the ’60s where Lucy shows Charlie Brown a slide show of all of his faults. I did the same thing to Ric in an effort to make him happy and as a tribute to Charles Schulz.

Also, I was short of ideas.

Note from Missy: How intriguing that I’m the second-tallest bar in the graph. And yet, that level of esteem for him never stopped real-life Rick from calling me “Skippy.”

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