I like to think I’m a patient man, but I’ve given up on Kentucky fried chicken. I’ve been writing them once a month for over ten years and they still haven’t came up with anything crispier than “extra crispy”. I even gave them good suggestions on what to call it. Either “mega-crispy”, “extreme crispy” or “they most crispy you can get without a prescription”. So, screw them – they won’t have Tony Myers to kick around anymore. From now on my efforts are going to convincing Sudafed to come up with an “extra drowsy” version of their flu medicine.
Archive for March, 2007
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to eat it anymore
March 27, 2007snuff tv
March 27, 2007I think it’s a shame no one on Sesame Street has ever thought to send Snuffleupagus to an endocrinologist. His metabolism seems to be way off and it just may be a problem with his glands. In fact, if they were my kids I wouldn’t want them hanging out with the guy. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure he means well, but mixing toddlers and a clinically depressed wooly mammoth is just asking for disaster.
(Only autograph I ever paid for)
Top 5 Most Boring Conversations.
March 27, 20075- What the weather was like where you used to live.
4 - Things my pet does – ( I consider children under 12 years old as being their parent’s pets)
3 – Big storms you were in.
2 – What highways you took when you went on vacation.
1 – The meaning behind your tattoos.
New movie idea
March 27, 2007A puppy is trained to be a seeing eye dog and becomes one of the all time greats. Then he gets Dog Glaucoma and slowly loses eyesight. Since he can no longer do the work he loves he becomes depressed and develops an addiction to pain pills. Finally one day he decides he’s not going to give up on life after all, so he starts writing music and becomes one of the first dogs to blend gospel and R&B – making him a wealthy and beloved figure in music history. Then, on the way home from a sold out concert at Carnegie Hall, he gets run over by an ice cream truck. (I sorta stole some of the idea from “Ray”.)
Ben Franklin/ Not Ben Franklin
March 26, 2007 I’ve been reading a lot about Ben Franklin. I’ve sorta have this unifying
theory about him. Everything in history can be divided into two group. Ben
Franklin, and Not Ben Franklin. If your not sure where it goes, put it under
Ben Franklin. For Example:
BEN FRANKLIN:
Bifocals
Wood Stoves
Electricity
Staples
Fake Moles
Not Ben Franklin:
Cars
MTV
Corn
Puppies
Tetris
Anyway that’s the main reason for my interest in him, but I also learned something most people don’t know about him. Ben Franklin was one of the original fly girls on In Living Color. He didn’t do as much dancing as the rest of them. He would just stand in the middle and read from Poor Richards Almanac while the other Fly Girls did that wiggly dancing around him.
I’d like to be like Ben Franklin, but I’m not really good at science or
dancing. And I don’t have the social skills to be left alone in the same room
as a diplomat, much less actually be one myself.
I’ll be the first to admit that my deep and profound hatred of Ben Franklin has a lot tom do with jealousy. Everyone loves and respects Ben Franklin. Know how many people revere me? You could count them all on one hand. Heck ,Mordecai “Three finger” Brown could count them on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to flash you the peace
sign and poke Bill Wambsganss in the eye. And there Franklin is staring at me, mocking me from every hundred dollar bill.
I even have recurring dreams where I’m in this fight club deal with Ben Franklin. Which I wouldn’t mind if I won some of the time. I may not be the toughest guy in the world, but surely I can beat up a 300 year old man. I know my dreams are just products of my subconscious , but you think my subconscious would be on my side. I’m the one that feeds it.
And so much of it is unfair – It’s hard for me to compete with him since he was born so long before I was. I can’t very well be a founding father now. If there was another revolution I’d kiss up to the new leaders and try to be considered on of the new founding fathers, but I can’t very well overthrow the government on my own. I don’t even know where it is at. I know where the post office and the department of motor vehicles is, but that’s it. There has to be more to it than that.
And I can’t even lie and take credit for his stuff. Do you know how drunk a girl has to get before you can convince he that you discovered electricity. Maybe if I was born first I would have invented bifocals. Maybe I would have invented a wood stove. I wouldn’t have called it the “Franklin Stove” , that’s for sure. I’d call it “The King George Stove” just to piss off Ben. Or maybe the “Cook-O-matic 1900″, which would have seemed very futuristic to everyone back then.
A couple of years ago I made something I called “The Upper Middle Class Tony Almanac ” to compete with ” Poor Richard’s Almanac” the one that bastard Franklin put out.
Then I forgot about it for a year. Then one day remembered it, but forgot it about it the next day and it stayed
forgotten until now.
I think one of the reason it didn’t take off as well as I hoped, besides forgetting all about it, is that it only had “wise
sayings” in it instead of all those stuff about crops and home remedies or stuff about the phases of the moon and stuff like that. The problem is that I don’t know much about that type of stuff. So I’ll mix that stuff in with my wise saying and my advice and stories and other crap like that.
Farming: Plant in the spring. Pick when it looks like food. Dress is casual. One size fits all baseball caps with a tuft of hair sticking out the back seems popular. If you know where any dead bodies are in your yard that’s a good place to start your garden. It’s good fertilizer. I’m not saying you should kill people just to use them to fertilizer. That’s a moral gray area, and I don’t condone it. I’m just saying that if there happens to dead people in your yard already, that’s a good place to start.
Moon - You’ll find the moon in the sky. You won’t always see it in there, but when you do see it that’s where it will be. If you ever see inANYPLACE but the sky be sure to call the nearest observatory. If they hang up on you try calling Art Bell.
Solar Eclipses – They don’t exist. I mean come on, grow up. They tell you that there’s an eclipse of the sun but you’re not supposed to look at it because it will hurt your eyes. Bullshit. That’s like when they till little children that Santa Clause won’t visit their house if they’re awake. There is no such thing as Santa and there is no such thing as Solar Eclipses.
It’s like Lincoln said “You can fool all the people all the time if youcan get them to believe that their
eyeballs will melt if they don’t do whatever you tell them to do
Home Remedy for gun shot wounds – Remove and discard the large outer leaves of a cabbage. Wash it and cut into quarters. Cut away cores and cut cabbage quarters into 1/2-inch slices. Place in crock-pot. Peel and dice the beets and onions, and crush the garlic. Add them to cabbage. Add the flanken or short ribs, sugar, ketchup, salt and lemon juice. Add water to cover all the ingredients by 2 inches. Cover tightly and cook on low 18-24 hours, occasionally skimming. Call 911.
When you get out of the hospital you’ll have a nice Cabbage Borscht waiting for you.
Health Tip – Showers at campgrounds are really nothing more than walk in urinals
Way things are going they’re gonna crucify me…
March 24, 2007assorted jesus stuff
I’m now the same age as Jesus was when they killed him. I’ll admit that he accomplished a lot more in his 33 years than I have with mine. But I guess it’s not really a competition. As long as half of the number of people that worship him start worshiping me I’ll be satisfied.
They sell bibles with every other page blank, so you can add your own notes. Any Christian who thinks they have something to add to the word of god must have a huge ego. I think a good idea would be for the companies who publish Bibles to take on sponsors. It wouldn’t change the meaning of what was said, it would just be like product placement in movie. Like: Blessed are the meek, and blessed are those who drink RC cola. And they could add that while Moses was wandering the dessert for forty days and nights he could have cut his travel time if he just went to priceline.com. Stuff like that.
You know those plastic things in urinals they use to hole the urinal-cake in place? In a restaurant I ate at yesterday they had one of those things that had the name of the company that makes those things and the words “JESUS SAVES.” The Jews used to think that it was blasphemy to even speak the name of the Lord. Pissing on his name seems a whole lot worse. I wonder if anyone has turned their life around after reading that. That would be a pretty wild testimonial at the next Billy Graham crusade. Most of those stories don’t start with “So, I was standing there with my prick in my hand and…..” I thought about going to the car to get my camera so I could prove it was real, but I’ve found that anytime you take a camera into a public toilet it makes people nervous
If you’ve washed in the blood of our lord Jesus Christ, you’ve washed with everyone he’s ever washed with.
Real Conversation: A little kid just comes back from the bathroom at a Perkins restaurant:
Dad: Did you go potty?
Kid: Yeah
Dad: Did you wash your hands?
Kid: Yeah
Dad: Do you love Jesus?
Kid: Yeah
I don’t know if he always asked the kid that, or if he thought something might have happened in the toilet that would turn the kid against the Lord.
Christ was misunderstood on the “eye for an eye” thing – . Back then they were trying to set up an organ transplant system. At the time we were working by trial and error. Most of the surgeons were basically barbers or butchers on their day off with no education to speak of. They figured that one organ was pretty much as good as another. So if a guy lost an eye lost of times they would just strap a spleen to his face. Whatever was lying around. That’s no good, draws flies. He tried to set up a guide for transplants and now people are wanting to knock out people’s teeth.
Society For A Less Cute Internet
March 24, 2007Society For A Less Cute Internet
est 1876
26 – Theses
1 – Don’t try to draw anything with punctuation. Ever. The argument is that “
when you post on the Internet “people can’t tell if you’re serious or not”.
We’ve had a written language for a long, long time – every other medium has
been able to get by without drawing a happy face to show intent. And if you are
going to draw faces for God’s sake don’t make funny noses for them. Drawing
with punctuation will be my generation’s legacy.
2- Don’t shorten small words. Like “R” for are. “U” for you. “4″ meaning for
or “2″ meaning to or too. If you’re that busy, don’t waste you’re time
with usenet.
3- Spelling doesn’t count unless you misspell words for effect like: nerdz
roole
4- Lose the cute acronyms: LOL, ROLTF , IMO and any other Internet only
shorthand.
5- Don’t write “In My Opinion” on every damn post. We assume that it’s your
opinion since you’re the one writing it.
6- If you want to type an obscenity, go ahead and do it, but don’t type fu**.
Anyone who can read knows what you mean, so what’s the point of being cute
about it?
7- If you’re going to try to make a joke don’t set it up with “contrary to
popular opinion”. Dumb and overused.
8- Don’t type verbal mistakes like “oh. .err, I mean . .” to try to be funny.
Also dumb and overused
9- Pick a century and stick with it. Don’t use old English words for effect
10- No mock-foreign words
11- nO NoN StaNDard cApItIlAzaTiON to try to look cool
12- Lose all sitcom catch phrases.
13 -Don’t ever footnote a usenet post.
14 -Don’t whine about the bandwidth. You won’t live long enough to find someone
who cares about stuff like that.
15 -Unless you’re talking about the product of the Hormel corp. lose the word
“Spam”. Way too cute, and been used way to long.
16 -If you’re over the age of nine, don’t try to talk like Winnie the Pooh. It’s
creepy to see grown men do that.
17 -The words “rock”, “suck” and “rules” are way overused as adjectives. Lose
them.
18 -Don’t use *asterisks*, _underline_ _thingies_ and CAPITOL LETTERS ( unless
you’re channeling Owen Meany) to make your point more strongly
19- Sig files aren’t important. Don’t comment on them.
20. -Don’t talk about how funny you are. Particularly when you’re not. A clue:
if you have to point it out to people, you probably aren’t. There’s not a
thing wrong with not being funny. Unless you try to be.
21 – Never ever be self-contradictory.
22 - If you start a response with the word “dude,” don’t expect anyone to take
you seriously
23.- Adding the words “from hell” never made anything funnier. Like “Date from
hell .. Job from Hell…Teacher from hell…”
24.- Don’t use the word “relate” when you mean “tell”.
25: -Tony thinks that when you refer to yourself in the third person it pretty
much points out that you’re a dungeons and dragons geek who was made fun of
in gym class.
26 – Telling people you’re going to kill file them because you don’t care what they say is a pretty good way to tell someone that you care very much. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t bother to tell them about it.
Made possible by people like me
March 24, 2007On NPR whenever they interview someone on the radio that doesn’t speak English they let them speak for about five or six seconds in whatever language they speak before they come in with the translator.Isn’t news time valuable? I bet if you added all those seconds up over a day it would be a pretty substantial chunk of time. Why don’t they just have the reporter say it in English? You don’t need to have someone babble away in some crazy moon-man language for five seconds for me to believe you really talked to someone down there. I’m not that cynical. And if they did want to, they could just fake it and tell Tina the intern to say “Gliddy glub gloopy Nibby nabby noopy La la la lo lo Sabba sibby sabba Nooby abba nabba Le le lo lo Tooby ooby walla Nooby abba naba” until Frank starts with the English. And be sure to sound sad, your baby just got swept down a storm drain.” 
This is about as political as I get
March 23, 2007Condoleezza Rice is a wealthy woman. She earns $183,500 a year. And I can’t believe that the Secretary of State doesn’t have a dental plan, so why would she not have gotten her teeth fixed by now? Not only is she horribly buck toothed but she also has a gap between her two front teeth so big that she could give head without ever having to open her mouth. If she got them fixed, she wouldn’t be unattractive. It’s hard to take someone seriously when their face looks like it was designed by someone who draws for the Simpsons. I mean Madeleine Albright was an ugly old woman, but at least she was doing the best with what she had to work with. Is that asking too much?
Zippy and Me – part 2
March 21, 2007I interviewed Bill Griffith , “Zippy” creator, for a zine I planned on making, but never did. It’s probably from 1999 or 2000.
Tony Myers: We used to get three or four series “to be continued” stories a year, but there hasn’t been any in a long time. Have you soured on the idea of telling long stories in a daily paper?
Bill Griffith: There will be longer “to be continued” stories again in Zippy’s daily strip future. I haven’t given up on the idea– but since the Zippy Quarterly faded (replaced this May with the first Zippy Annual, by the way), the original impulse is gone. I did the continuity stories so each issue of the Quarterly would have an “anchor” (and a scene for the cover). I miss doing them, so, for that reason alone, they’ll be back.
TM: Do you still paint, or does Zippy take up most of your creative energy?
BG: I haven’t lifted paint to canvas since the day I started doing comics on late 1968. Maybe someday when I can no longer drag my pain-wracked body to the drawing table, I’ll start again. Maybe a watercolor or two.
TM: Would you like to keep doing Zippy as long as you’re able, like Charles Schulz did with Peanuts, or do you see yourself retiring from it someday?
BG: I imagine I’ll keep doing Zippy daily until I’m no longer able to–if either senility or the death of newsprint intervenes. Retiring isn’t currently in my game plan.
TM: In the movie Crumb, you complained about people to take offense at Crumb’s work without trying to see the point of view of what he was saying. Do you get the same complaints with your own work? For example, do you get many letters from people who think Zippy is making fun of the mentally retarded? If so, how do you answer them?
BG: I rarely get mail from people complaining that Zippy makes fun of the mentally handicapped. On the few occasions that I have, I simply say that Zippy is a cartoon character, a satirical creation, and not a depiction of a handicapped person and I offer my apology for any pain reading the strip may have brought about. I’ve also received a number of positive responses from people in mental health over the years, saying they thought Zippy was a “role model” for mentally handicapped people, even a “super hero”. Go figure.
TM: Would Zippy be much different if you didn’t have to worry about the censorship that comes with the having the strip printed in newspapers?
BG: I don’t feel any constraints at all in doing Zippy for “family” newspapers. If I ever feel the need to enter “taboo” territory, there’s always the alternative comics world. I did an XXX-rated Zippy story a few years ago in “Young Lust” # 8. Even when Zippy was still an underground character, four-letter words and graphic sex were never a big part of his world.
TM: You’ve become a spokesman for the effort to keep the Doggie Diner sign up in San Francisco. Is there anything people who don’t live in the area can do to help with that?
BG: Readers living outside the San Francisco Bay Area can voice their support for keeping the Doggie alive and well atop his pole by visiting the zippythepinhead.com website and going to the Doggie page. There’s
info there to help anyone let the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Mayor know how they feel. Being such a tourist-oriented city, these elected officials are aware of how important SF “landmarks” (of all types) can be to non-residents.
TM: Is there still hope for Zippy on TV? The humor in the strip is pretty unique , there isn’t anything that is funny in the same way Zippy is. Do you think you could find writers who could recreate the feel of the strip, or would you have to write all the scripts yourself?
BG: There is an animated Zippy TV show in the works. It’s for a major cable channel. As soon as I’m allowed to divulge the details, I will do so. We’ve already found a few writers to work with, especially one who
made major contributions to Seinfeld. I’m naturally a little nervous about the project, but I’ve got all kinds of creative controls built into the deal and I’ll be personally involved with as much of it as I can, including writing, model sheets, choice of voices, etc. It’ll either be a great show or I’ll be eaten alive by the industry.
TM: Doonesbury, Herman, and MAD magazine have put out archives of their cartoons on CD-ROM. Will there be a Zippy CD-ROM in the future?
BG: There may be a CD-ROM in Zippy’s future, once the animated TV show gets on the air. Who knows?
TM: How did Zippy’s habit of repeating phrases three times start?
BG: Zippy’s “over-and-overs” began strictly as a kind of babbling poetry in a strip years ago. It just seemed right. Zippy often says or thinks things we all do– but usually just to ourselves. Zippy has no sense of the difference between himself and other people’s perception of himself, so he lets out whatever is going on in his head, “uncensored” by a super-ego, or “monitoring device”.
TM: What do you think of the Zippy HTML editor out there (the program that adds Zippy quotes to web pages)?
BG: I’m not too comfortable with computer hacking at any level, so the HTML Zippy quote editor that’s out there bothers me. But, at the same time, I don’t feel any need to try to stop it– not that I could if I wanted to. So I guess I’m neutral about it.
TM: Are there any not-well-known cartoonists that you feel are overlooked?
BG: There are dozens of overlooked or forgotten cartoonists littering the cultural landscape. One of the greatest, W.E. Hill, is completely forgotten. His strip was a weekly full page called “Among Us Mortals” and was the inspiration for my “Griffith Observatory”.
TM: Do you use a computer in creating Zippy at all, or is everything still done just on paper?
BG: The only time computers are used in creating Zippy is in the coloring of the Sunday strips. I do a detailed “Color Guide” in colored pencils and it’s redone in Photoshop by a colorist at American Color in Buffalo. They do a great job.
TM: Is there hope for the comic strip world to get better, or are the Dilbert’s and Ziggy’s going to win out? Could you tell me what you think of some other strips? What do you think of Peanuts? Doonesbury?
BG: I liked the early Peanuts and am glad to see papers running the old strips now. In general, my favorite comics are either from the “good old days” (1910-1950) or the underground. Robert Crumb is still my all-around favorite cartoonist of any era. Doonesbury is terrific satire, great writing. But I miss an emotional center in the strip. I love the original “Nancy” strips by Ernie Bushmiller. Current daily newspaper strips are mostly of little interest to me, though I do enjoy “Bizarro”. A lot of the craft of comics has withered as TV has taken over the function daily strips once had.
———————————
Mr. Griffith was very much right about W.E. Hill being forgotten. I did a web search and the only thing I could find was a college course in Dallas that uses his art collection to help teach fine art. The collection is at the Dallas Public Library, but I’m not sure if it’s a collection of his work or just a collection of art that Mr. Hill donated to the library. If anyone reading this knows where I could find some examples of his work, please let me know.
The Zippy The Pinhead official page is at www.zippythepinhead.com
The Zippy Annual will be sold through Fantagraphics Books.
