How to Face Your Ancestor's Misdeeds

There is no reason to believe that the famous chemist who developed “The Meyer Method” was in any way related to me. In fact, there’s ample reason to believe that he isn’t, simply because he was famous, and a chemist.

There are many spelling variants of what is, phonetically, the same last name: Meyer. There’s an old legend that all Meyers used to be part of the same family, but the many Meyer brothers got into a terrible fight and all changed the spellings of their names as a way to disown each other.

It’s just an old legend, and probably isn’t true. But, having seen the way my father and my uncles deal with their differences, I can believe it.

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How to Avoid a False Bargain

Yet another comic based on a real conversation with a coworker. He bought his girlfriend a bottle of perfume he selected because it was the largest bottle for the lowest price.

This was in Orlando. There are a lot of strip mall perfume stores in Orlando, most of them called “PERFUME.” They’re usually next to stores called “LUGGAGE,” “ELECTRONICS-SONY,” and “T-SHIRTS.” For some reason, tourist destinations seem to draw certain kinds of stores, even if they don’t fit the area’s primary draw. If you’re on a romantic trip to the Bahamas, perfume makes sense. Same goes for Hawaii or Cabo San Lucas, I guess. But if you’re going whale watching in Juneau, or spending a July day at Universal Studios Orlando, the last thing you want is something that will make you smell more.

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How to Capitalize on Current Trends

This strip was written about the show Castle. The basic premise, a crime fighting novice with a seemingly unrelated skill set teaches an irritated cop how to do his-or-her (usually, on these shows, her) job, is so widespread now that I’ve heard it referred to as “The Castle Formula.”

They’ve announced a new Star Trek series following the life of a now much older Captain Picard. As I said on Facebook shortly after the announcement, I sincerely hope it follows the Castle formula. I’d call the show Murder It So.

If I were writing it, there’d be a retired Borg who lives nearby, and Picard would always try to pin the murder on him at first.

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How to Assert Your Intellectual Superiority

I did, in fact, go to radio broadcasting school. Very early in my time there, our chief instructor called us all together and made us watch a documentary about how the radio industry was dying, and then told us that he strongly suggested that we do something—ANYTHING—else with our futures than go into radio.

Later on, during a job interview at a radio station, a program director told me straight up that most program directors avoid hiring anyone who went to broadcasting school.

We all have moments in our lives when we wish we had listened better to one of our teachers. That job interview was one such moment for me.

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How to Handle Shocking News of a Highly Personal Nature

I picture a commercial that’s just closeups of bloodshot eyes while a Sarah McLachlan song plays. (Not the song you’re thinking of. It’s been done to death. I’d use something inappropriate, like Your Love is Better than Ice Cream.) Then a voice-over would say that your donation will make it possible to give these poor afflicted souls a squirt gun full of VISINE.

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How to Find Your Roots

One of my uncles’ favorite stories is about the time they got the pigs drunk on ’shine. It’s a proud heritage.

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How to Work Product Placement Shamelessly into Your Narrative

We, as a society, are still trying to work out how corporate sponsorship of TV shows can work. There was a time when characters on hour-long dramas would be embroiled in some life or death situation then suddenly become distracted by how incredibly roomy their new car is. I distinctly remember an episode of Fringe where two FBI agents discuss whether their new Nissan Leaf had enough range to make it to the paranormal crime scene. These are characters who dealt with alternate dimensions and alien invaders, but their most pressing concern was range anxiety.

These days I mainly notice product placement on HGTV, which is already in the process of becoming the 24/7-attractive-couples-bickering-about-backsplash-tile-channel. Occasionally they’ll compose the shot in such a way as to make it obvious that said attractive couple is bickering in a Ford.

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How to Understand Men's Fashion

Sport team based Garanimals for adult men would totally work! If the shirt, pants, and tie all say Seahawks, you know they go together.

Or, you could use sci-fi franchises, for the more slightly built, pastier chap. Disney could make that work, now that they own (or will soon own) The Avengers, X-Men, Star Wars, and Tron.

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How to Learn from Other People's Mistakes

It seems to me there were a few different iterations of the show “Say Yes to the Dress,” where women shopped for their wedding gowns, but there were no versions where the men went tux shopping. “Say Dunno to the Tuxedo,” or some such.

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How to Enhance Your Reputation

There’s a whole slew of charity schemes that utilize workplace peer pressure as a means of prying your wallet open. It’s never sat well with me, probably because my first exposure to it was a retail job in college where they called us all into the break room and literally told us that not publicly pledging to sign over part of our paychecks was basically the same as saying we wanted sick children to suffer.

The manager who oversaw that meeting also accompanied his daughters around the store and watched, stone faced, as they asked all of us employees to buy Girl Scout Cookies.

He was later fired and prosecuted for embezzling. I can’t help but wonder if he was somehow wetting his beak when the cookie monies rolled in.

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