“Shoot” is often used as a non-curse alternative to saying “shit.” It could be said that this is a sign that, in our society, gunplay (something any sane person wants to avoid) is more socially acceptable than defecation (something every human on the planet does.)
Which is true, now that I think about it.
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This is the comic in which I had to figure out how to pluralize the letter S. I don’t know why I delayed it to run four comics after the comic that referred to it. I’m sure I did it for a perfectly logical reason. (Note: I consider “I screwed up” to be a logical reason, and so does everyone who knows me well.)
We do have a big metal S on the wall, but I’ll have you know that I didn’t buy it. Only an egomaniac would do that. Missy bought it for me, as only a person who knows she is married to an egomaniac would.
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I have a friend, a grown woman with kids of her own, who was standing in a long line to return some things on the day after Christmas a couple of years back. She pulled out her smartphone and started scrolling through messages. The elderly woman in line in front of her turned around, looked at her, and said something like, “Oops, I’m going to be standing still for a few seconds. I need my electronic pacifier.” To really sell the bit the old lady literally sucked her thumb.
This interaction has stuck with me, even though I wasn’t there, I only heard about it secondhand, and both of the people involved may actually have forgotten about it by now.
The old lady’s thesis seems to be that younger people waste their lives staring at screens, when if they only had the backbone, the grit, and the practical intelligence their elders possess, they would put their spare time to more practical use: harassing and insulting whatever perfect stranger is unfortunate enough to come near them.
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Dr Pepper is the small batch Bourbon of pop. Cans from two different cases of Dr Pepper can taste markedly different. Some have more pronounced caramel notes, while others are more marshmallow forward. Of course, it’s not a good idea to talk at length about the flavor profile of a can of Dr Pepper, partly because you’ll sound insane, but mostly because some jerk will try to tell you it’s made of prunes.
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Back when I was a stand-up comic, I had a friend whose name I am going to keep out of this. He had a bit about how the letters F, L, M, N, S, and X all begin with the letter E.
I loved that bit! I looked forward to it every time he performed.
I’m not sure any paying audience member ever so much as smiled at it.
Note from Missy: This one strikes me especially funny, because designing fonts is now my profession. As such, I do, quite often, have to refer to letters in plural form.
I’ve settled on putting the plural in a completely different place, such as “letters S” or “all versions of S.” Yes, it tends to sound stilted and highfalutin’. And yes, I’m totes OK with that.
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Back when I was a stand-up comic, I played the Funny Bone comedy club in Green Bay Wisconsin a few times. Most cities have something they are famous for, and often when you visit the city you find their defining trait has been exaggerated. I visited New York and was not mugged. I visited Miami, and I did not at any point wear a thong.
The first time I visited Green Bay I dropped by the mall to pick up a few things and saw that part of the decoration was a massive sand sculpture depicting Vince Lombardi and a wedge of cheese.
Green Bay: believe the hype.
Interesting sidenote: when sculpted in a medium that doesn’t allow for different colors or transparent lenses in his glasses, a statue of Vince Lombardi is easy to mistake for a Blues Brother.
Why am I talking about Green Bay? Because the second panel of this comic is about Seattle’s pro sports teams, and whenever I played Green Bay all I would have to say is that my father was a Seahawks fan and I would get a huge laugh.
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Of course, this comic was written years before our current time, in which we all live awash in hand sanitizer.
If memory serves, I wrote this after seeing an interview with a scientist who said that we wash our hands too often. She (I remember being surprised that this position was being promoted by a woman, for some reason) said that a good rule of thumb was “if your hands smell bad, wash them.”
I created my own rule of thumb, “Stay far away from that woman’s thumb.”
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I may have explained this before, but it bears repeating. The symbol on Omnipresent Man’s chest is based on the “You are here” marker from Google Maps. The one on Mr. Everywhere’s chest is the same marker from MapQuest.
Before either of those websites existed, I had two products called Microsoft Streets and Microsoft Trips, that did the same thing as Google Maps, but were entirely stored on two CD-ROMs that you had to buy separately. My memory is that one had highways and freeways, the other had surface streets and residential neighborhoods. If you wanted to punch in addresses in two different cities and get printable driving directions, you needed both disks. (I think they eventually started packaging them together, but that came well after I bought them.)
You may ask, what was the point of making it possible to buy one without the other? The answer is: buying one would force you to buy the other. This is 1990s Microsoft we’re talking about. You don’t become the world’s richest man without creating some unhappy customers.
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