How to Mind Your Manners

I’ve always found the idea of denouncing Yale graduates as uncouth barbarians to be hilarious. It’s probably a side-effect of the fact that the first sitcom I remember enjoying as a child was Gilligan’s Island. That also explains my love of sword canes. Obviously, Thurston Howell III was my favorite character, which only made it more hurtful when my father bought me a white bucket hat and started calling me Gilligan.

Note from Missy: I’m one of those wrong-hand food-cutters. I’ve never understood the whole deal with switching your knife to your fork hand to cut, then switching back to eat. So I roll with fork in the right hand, knife in the left, and anyone who has a problem with it can go suck an egg.

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How to Maintain a Healthy Diet

Sun Chips were a triumph of marketing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they taste good, and I’ve eaten my share of them, but at the end of the day they’re just empty carbs covered with salt, just like almost everything else on the chips aisle.

I don’t blame them for trying to position Sun Chips as a healthier alternative. You have to differentiate your product some way, and the ways in which Sun Chips differ from potato and tortilla chips don’t make for great ad copy.

“It’s the snack made from compressed wheat fragments that would otherwise go to waste!”

“It’s the perfect snack for the early ’90s! It’s half cracker, half chip! It’s a Crip!”

“The snack that’s corrugated, for increased longitudinal stiffness!”

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How to React to Good News That is Actually Bad News

I don’t discuss anybody’s pregnancy unless they bring it up. In my experience, expectant parents either can’t wait to talk about the pregnancy, or don’t want to talk about it at all.

Nobody is ever perfectly happy to discuss their pregnancy but not in a hurry to bring it up. If they don’t bring it up, it’s because they don’t want to talk about it, period. Oh, they’ll tell you they’re happy to discuss it, but in a flat tone of voice, while looking at you through narrowed eyes.

The worst-case scenario is bringing up someone’s pregnancy and finding out that they aren’t pregnant. The only way to get out of that faux-pas with honor involves cyanide pills.

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How to Apply for a Promotion

I once had a friend who was dissatisfied with their job, and when they finally arranged a promotion my friend pulled strings to get me the job they wanted out of.

I was desperate enough for a job at that point that I took their cast-off job happily.

Later, when I left that job, instead of replacing me with a new hire, they divvied all of my tasks up amongst my former co-workers, all of whom found it terribly demeaning, which did not do anything to make me feel bad about leaving.

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How to Be Diplomatic

In my experience, the person who controls the availability and the quality of the coffee supply in an office wields great power. Maybe the fact that the office I worked in was in Seattle in the early 2000s had something to do with that, but what can I say? My experiences are what they are.

Of course, messing with the coffee supply was a dicey proposition, because lack of caffeine in the morning makes coffee addicts irritable, and causing that irritability by failing to supply the coffee in the first place gives them all an obvious target upon which to focus their irritability.

I think that’s why the British Navy used to placate the sailors with rum. Deny someone their rum and they get more rational, not less. 

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How to Assert Your Individuality

Really, (and I may have done a comic about this, it’s all a bit of a blur,) these sorts of cultural affiliations are sort of like the adult male equivalent of Garanimals.

Garanimals are (That’s right, not was, ARE! They still have a website and still sell kids clothes, mostly at Walmart, it seems.) a children’s clothing brand where all of the garments have a tag with a picture of an animal on them. If you pick a shirt and pants that have the same animal on the label you will know they go together. Wearing a lion shirt with lion pants is fine, but wearing a lion shirt with giraffe pants means that you had no fashion sense, which we all know is a terrible burden for a nine-year-old.

What I’m saying is that for an adult man, wearing a Seahawks shirt and a Seahawks hat is fine, or a Seahawks shirt and a Mariners jacket, if he wants to push it, but he knows that he can’t wear a Seahawks shirt and a Raiders jacket, because he’ll look ridiculous. The same goes for wearing a Harley jacket over a Honda shirt, or wearing anything with a Ferrari logo while driving any other car. Sadly, 99% of all Ferrari merchandise is worn in this manner. 

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How to Encourage a Friend Who's Doing Something You Don't Like

I dunno. I just don’t get poetry. That’s probably a terrible thing for a writer to admit. I think I gave up on poetry when my teacher spent hours droning on about about rhyme scheme and meter, then told us that a poet didn’t really have to adhere to any of it if they didn’t want to. I remember thinking, “Well then what’s the point of any of this?”

It’d be like learning the rules of a game and then being told that you can break them if the fans and the referee like you enough.

That might be why I don’t like sports that much either. 

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How to Tell Someone How You Are "Doing"

The idea of the bowel cannon is one that predates the comic. It started out as a piece of stand-up material I could never get to work.

It’s amazing how many of my memories of my stand-up career start with the phrase “There was this bit I could never get to work ...”

The original idea was that a typical meal at a steakhouse—a bunch of bread followed by a big piece of meat followed by a cup of coffee—was analogous to the wadding, cannonball and explosive charge they used in breach loading cannons.

Back then I described the results in greater, or at least more graphic detail. The bit did not contain the word “analogous.” Drunk comedy club patrons in smaller towns do not take kindly to words like “analogous.”

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How to Lose with Dignity

My brothers and I had a Nintendo. Later on I had access to my younger brother’s super Nintendo and his N64. Missy’s family had an Intellivision, then jumped to computers and never looked back.

Later, after Missy and I got married, I bought a GameCube and go a copy of Mario Kart: Double Dash. Missy watched me play it for a day or so, then picked it up one afternoon while I was doing other things. We started racing each other. Naturally, I figured that superior experience playing videogames would give me a natural advantage. By the end of the day she was consistently beating me.

In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when Kylo Ren reached out for Luke’s lightsaber and it flew past him into Rey’s hand, I knew how he felt.

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How to Talk to a Farmer

There I go, flogging my anti-milk viewpoint again.

That chicken might be the best drawing that ever appeared in this comic. It’s kind of amazing that I didn’t work harder to find excuses to use it again. Perhaps a superhero who fights crime by hitting criminals with a live chicken, or with the help of a super-intelligent chicken who speaks English . . . OR BOTH!

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