How to Avoid Making Harmful Assumptions

Another possible way to administer the spray would be the way Hunter S. Thompson suggested using ether in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He wanted to soak the floormats of his car in it and just marinate in the fumes as he drove. You could set up something similar for a cat using its carrier and a pillow you don’t mind ruining.

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, DON’T DO THAT! EVEN WRITING IT OUT AS A JOKE MADE ME FEEL LIKE A MONSTER!

I think what I’m learning here is that there’s no way to help your cat “huff” that isn’t clearly abuse.

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How to Deal With Definition Creep

Literally no longer means literally, not always anyway. Sometimes it means literally, other times it means something like “might as well be,” which is literally the opposite of what it usually means. (That sentence is true using one of the two accepted meanings for literally, but I can’t be bothered to figure out which one it is.)

What this all boils down to is that literally is literally meaningless. (As in it might as well be meaningless, not that it is actually truly meaningless.)

Now that the word literally has lost all reliable meaning, people use it much more often. Can that possibly say anything good about people?

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How to Explain an Unpopular Opinion

I am excited for the new version of DUNE. That said, the film is doomed. DOOMED, I SAY!

It already had unattainable expectations back when they planned to release it in November of 2020. Adding a year of further anticipation is not going to help.  It certainly didn’t do any favors for Wonder Woman 1984.

Here’s a question that I haven’t heard anyone else ask. Why 1984? There are nine other years that fall within the ’80s and aren’t already the title of a well-known story—a story which is in no way related to, and is very different in tone from the story of Wonder Woman 1984. It would be like making a third Babe movie, where he returns to the farm after his trip to the city, and calling it Babe 3: Animal Farm.

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How to Be the Bigger Person

If you start an apology by saying “it takes a big man,” it is not a real apology, and you are not a big man.

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How to Come to Terms with What You've Become

Panel 3 would make a great Father’s Day card, if your father has the sense of humor to handle it . . . which means in most cases it would be a terrible Father’s Day card.

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How to Send Out Christmas Cards

Greetings cards are a weird concept. People try to express their unique feelings and personality by selecting a mass-produced card that was written by someone else and distributed to every grocery and drug store in the country.

Most of the cards could be replaced with a simple one that says, “You are experiencing an important event, and I have no idea what to say about it,” because really, that’s what every greeting card says.

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How to Accept Constructive Criticism

I’m afraid we’re now beginning to get into the stretch where the strain of writing over a thousand comics with four jokes in each one began to take its toll. Note that in this comic, I am being chastised by a coworker for telling our mutual boss that I am smarter than him. Now think back to two comics earlier (How to Speak Your Mind), when I chastised Jenkins for telling the boss that he is smarter than him. I think you see what I mean.

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How to Change Your Plan

As cool as I think blimps and dirigibles are, I cannot abide any mode of air travel where part of the landing procedure is people running around in a field trying to grab a rope. It just seems like it would rob your arrival of much of its glamour.

I must say, I really like panel two in this one. I love the idea of the blimp-pack, and the dialog about the bloated gasbag strapped to a blimp feels like a throwback to good old-fashioned jokesmanship.

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How to Speak Your Mind

When I was in high school, I had a job in the lucrative food service industry. One of my coworkers was perhaps the least intelligent person I’ve ever known. Like all truly stupid people, he believed himself to be far smarter than most of the people he met. One day he started popping off about how the restaurant manager was “just about the biggest dumb-s**t in the world.” We pointed out that the manager had hired him, but he didn’t see what we were getting at.

None of us went much out of our way to defend the manager beyond that. None of us wanted to look like suck ups, and also, we all knew the manager was a horrifying racist, so that dulled our enthusiasm.

It was not a great job.

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How to Process New Information

I firmly believe that aside from screen size, the average TV available for sale at Costco probably delivers a superior viewing experience to what the average movie theater in the seventies and early eighties could deliver. It was an age of worn-out prints, dim projector bulbs, and one big mono speaker placed directly behind the screen.

Heck, if I wanted to perfectly recreate my experience the first time I saw Star Wars, I’d need to stretch a piece of bright green yarn down the screen to represent the massive scratch in the print, and I’d have to rent someone’s five-year-old to play my younger brother and constantly demand that I explain who everyone was, what they were doing, and why they have such funny names.

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