How to Take a Serious Look at What You're Doing

It’s eight years later, and men’s deodorant scents continue to be nonsense. I currently favor “Cool Wave,” myself, because who doesn’t want to smell like a cool wave.

Note: they don’t specify what it’s a cool wave of.

Note from Missy: At least guys get scents other than flowers, even if they’re mysterious waves. If you’re a woman who thinks floral scents are disgusting, there are very few options.  If someone made a deodorant that gently smelled of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, or Froot Loops, or pepperoni pizza, I’d stock up on that shizz immediately.

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How to Help Your Child Pick a Role Model

I know a few magicians. Once I asked one of them if it’s possible to buy a small smoke bomb that can be thrown at the ground to produce a large enough puff of smoke to give the thrower cover to hide or flee. He said, “Yeah, it’s called a flash pot.”

A flash pot is a device you have to set up in advance, run wires to, and trigger remotely. I explained that what I wanted was a smoke bomb I could carry in my pocket and throw at a random time or place when needed. He said, “no, what you want is a flash pot.”

I thought he was being dense at the time, but in retrospect, I am suspicious that he might have been maintaining a trade secret.

I’d love to tell you that I was asking as research for a book, or because I had some specific purpose in mind, but if the smoke bomb I wanted had existed, I would have just used it to disappear at random moments to freak people out. You know, leaving family gatherings, ending job interviews, that kind of thing.

And yes, I probably would have shouted, “NINJA VANISH!”

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How to Ape the Motions of a Sensitive Human Being

Sometimes I did things in the comic just to amuse myself. For instance, the title of this comic is a reference to the song In Love.

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How to Do Something Original

I gotta admit, I’m pretty proud of my drawing of a Muppet Jim Henson. I think it’s a pretty good likeness of what such a thing would look like.

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How to Accept Forgiveness

I’ve found that most of the time when someone tells me that they thought I was their friend, it’s because I don’t want to do something no good friend would ever ask for.

In high school I knew someone who worked at a restaurant with their best friend. One night, the best friend stole all of the checks in the register instead of dropping them at the bank. This was the second dumbest crime I’ve ever heard of. It’s not like he could deposit them to his bank account or anything.

Anyway, the check thief went to the guy I know, asking for help covering this up. The person I know suggested that he turn himself in, which caused the thief to play the “I thought we were friends” card. In the end, the thief got arrested and convicted, and the person I know, whose crime was not immediately turning their friend in, lost their job.

On the positive side, this was the event that taught me it’s possible to learn from other people’s mistakes, and this gave me an opportunity to learn from several mistakes in one go.

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How to Accept the Fact That You Are Getting Old

Woodstock took place in 1969.

Kurt Cobain died in 1994.

As of this writing, it is 2019.

Fifty years have elapsed between Woodstock and today, and Cobain’s death is the mid-point, 25 years from each. When I was a kid, Woodstock was ancient history. It might as well have been the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Cobain’s death, on the other hand, feels like it happened a few years ago.

If that freaks you out, think about this. Fight Club, The Matrix, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and The Mummy (The Brendan Fraser / Rachel Weisz version) all came out in 1999. Those are twenty-year-old movies! Do you ever flip through the channels on a Saturday afternoon and marvel at how much more current the movies they show to fill time on basic cable now are than the ones they showed when you were young? Yeah, THEY AREN’T! To a current teenager, the Matrix might as well be The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

My point is that I’m getting old, and people my age are also getting old. We have to keep that in mind before we try to foist out cultural tastes on younger people.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to explain to anyone who’ll listen why Picard is a better captain than  . . . whoever’s captain on Discovery this week.

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How to Finally Realize What Was Really Happening All Along

The film, by the way, was Jean De Florette. Here’s the trailer:

It is, by all accounts, an excellent film, but a bunch of high school juniors from Sunnyside, Washington were not exactly the target audience.

“Oh, that poor man lives on a farm somewhere that it doesn’t rain much. That must be awful.”

(Note, the trailer doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about his crops, but a clip available on YouTube shows that he grew corn, marrows, and rabbits. It’s the thirsty rabbits that really stuck in my head.)

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How to Ponder the Imponderable

I get the feeling unlimited hydroplane races are sort of a Pacific Northwest thing.

There was a big race in the Tri-Cities every year. People would line up along the banks of the Columbia River to sit in the sun, drink beer, and watch rooster tails in the far distance. This was a welcome change of pace from what they did every other summer weekend, which was to sit in the sun, drink beer, and try not to think about the fact that they lived in the shadow of the country’s largest depository of nuclear waste.

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How to Make Fun of the Opposite Sex

This comic came out right at the beginning of when people started to see how ridiculous the whole sexy-costume industry had become.

Now I think the new frontier would be to take traditionally sexy costumes and market un-sexy versions. Next Halloween, I want to see Harley Quinn fighting a head cold, wearing baggy pajamas, an old stained bathrobe, and carrying a wastepaper basket full of used tissues.

If a young woman wore that costume, guys would still hit on her.

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How to Have a Recreational Argument

Spock 2 is real, as is the episode with the wizard-pilgrims.

Also, the Enterprise crew was befriended by a Satan-looking guy named Lucian, and all of the crew-members got magical powers.

So Sulu . . .

Used his powers . . .

To make a woman in a long-sleeved one-piece swimsuit.

Uhura seems unimpressed.

Then Sulu made his move.

This is not just an embarrassing freeze frame. This is how he approaches her, slowly, ON THE BRIDGE, IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY!

Then she turned into Lucian, who seemed horrified, and asked Sulu “What are you doing?!”

The look on Sulu’s face was priceless.

Cartoons in the ’70s!

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