Stephan Pastis's Blog, page 9

My Marriage Is Headed Down The Gutter

So my wife and I now play "Words with Friends" against each other on our iPhones.

It's basically Scrabble.  And it's nice because you can play it whenever you have a few minutes of downtime during the day.

It's also nice because we interact with each other more than we otherwise would during the day.

So yesterday she made the word, "Love."  Then she sent me a message along with it.

It said, "A word just for you."

I thought that was sweet.  So I wrote back, "Awwwww."

But what I didn't notice was that my texting spellcheck had kicked in.  The spellcheck automatically corrects words whether you want it to or not.

So the romantic text I sent back?

"Sewer."

Hello Minneapolis (and Kansas City and Denver and Tempe and Portland and Seattle and Sacramento)

The Stephan in Wonderland Fall Tour begins in just a few weeks.

I'll be visiting seven cities.  Sorry to all of you that live in cities I can't get to this time.  We'll try to get to them next time.

Here are the dates and times:

SACRAMENTO:  Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 6 p.m. in the third-floor conference room at The Sacramento Bee, 2100 Q Street, Sacramento.  To register for it (it's free but seating is limited), click HERE.

MINNEAPOLIS:  October 16, 2011, 1:00 pm, Wild Rumpus, 2720 W. 43rd St, Minneapolis, MN 55410

www.wildrumpusbooks.com

KANSAS CITY:  October 18, 2011, 7:00 PM, Rainy Day Books, Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 West 47th St., Kansas City, MO 64112, 913-384-3126, www.rainydaybooks.com

DENVER:  October 19, 2011, 7:30 PM, Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th Street at Wynkoop

Denver, CO 80202, 303-436-1070, www.tatteredcover.com

TEMPE:  October 20, 2011, 7:00 PM, Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 S. McClintock Dr., Tempe, AZ 85283, 480-730-0205, www.changinghands.com

PORTLAND:  October 27, 2011, 7:30 PM, Powell's Books, 1005 W. Burnside, Portland, OR 97209

503-228-4651, www.powells.com

SEATTLE:  October 28, 2011, 6:30 PM, Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park, WA 98155, 206-366-3316, www.thirdplacebooks.com

 

Your Chance To Own An Original Pearls Strip (Or Two)

I rarely auction original strips.

But I recently donated two original Sunday strips for auction by a school in Southern California.

So if you're interested in owning an original Sunday Pearls strip, just click HERE.

Burn, Baby, Burn, Comics Inferno

2,500 newspaper slots is a lot of newspaper slots.

That's the number of newspapers Jerry Scott is in.

Jerry writes the comic strips Zits (1,600 papers) and Baby Blues (900 papers).

And newspaper slots are hard to come by these days.

So I devised a plan.

It began with a "family vacation" to Morro Bay, California.  That's not too far from where Jerry lives.

I did everything I could to make it look like a regular vacation.  Even took photos with some of William Randolph Hearst's sculptures at Hearst Castle.

Then I set the plan in motion.

The first step was to call Jerry's wife, Kim, to invite them to dinner.  They were hesitant.

"Jerry's really busy," Kim said, "He's got to go somewhere the next day and –"

"Come on over," I said.  "We've rented a great beach house.  You'll love it."

I hung up before they could say no.

A few hours later, they begrudgingly arrived with wine.  That was the deal.  They would bring the wine and we would buy the take-out food from a Mexican restaurant they recommended.

As it turned out, we had no cash.  So they had to buy the food, too.

So far, I was up big time.

1) Didn't have to drive (saved $ on gas).

2) Didn't pay for the wine.

3) Didn't pay for the food.

Then I asked them if they wanted to roast marshmallows.  Told them we had this awesome fire pit in the backyard composed of nothing but broken glass.  All you had to do was light a match, and WOOSH, you had a Flaming Pit o' Glass.

So we all went out to see the flaming pit and roast marshmallows.  But it was cold and windy.   The Scotts looked like they wanted to go back in the house.

"C'mon," I said, "We'll just roast a couple."

So we all took our places by the fire.

My kids, informed of the scheme, took the seats I told them to take.  As did my wife Staci.  Leaving Jerry with the seat I wanted him to take.

So there we sat, all happily roasting our marshmallows by the fire.

Except Jerry.

His side of the pit didn't have any fire.

That's something I learned about the fire pit in my experiments before the Scotts' arrival.

The fire didn't come out of the Flaming Pit O' Glass evenly.  It only rose from spots where you dug little holes in the glass beforehand.

And that made Jerry and his marshmallow sad.  Because all the fire was on the other side of the pit.

So he did what anyone would do in that situation.  He reached across the pit.

With his drawing hand.

And this is where I'll share a little secret with you that I didn't share with Jerry.

Just because fire didn't come out of your side of the pit didn't mean it could NEVER come out of your side of the pit.

And so he reached.  And a huge flame engulfed his right arm.

And that's where I made my only mistake.

I had estimated that Jerry had the reflexes of a 90 year-old man.  He's slow and quiet, so it's a natural deduction.

But no.  Jerry had the cat-like reflexes of a Kung-Fu master.  Think of Grasshopper grabbing those pebbles from the old man's palm.  Only faster.

"Owww, my hand!" he yelled, yanking it from the fire.

"You okay?" I asked, feigning care.

"Yeah.  I think it just burned off the hair on my wrist."

"Oh," I said, disappointed.

And that was that.

His right hand was still intact.

No end of Zits.  No end of Baby Blues.  No free newspaper slots for Pearls Before Swine.

And that wasn't even the worst part.  The worst part was this:

I had to pay for the marshmallows myself.

A Burning Question

The motto of Salem, Massachusetts is, "To the farthest port of the rich Indies."

I don't know what that means, but I do know this.

If you're walking around the town, don't ask them how many witches they burned.

It's a sensitive question.

"We didn't burn any witches," the tour guide says to me, "We hanged them."

They say it with pride, like a dog owner telling you he never hits his dog, but only chastises him.

"Of course, there was that one woman," the tour guide adds, "We crushed her with stones."

I could tell that even he was embarrassed by that one.

Armed with this knowledge, I continued my walk through Salem doing the one thing I simply had to do:

Ask as many people as I could how many witches they burned.

I can tell you from experience that if you try this little experiment, each and every Salemite you encounter will give you the same lecture about hanging (but never burning) the witches.  The only part that varies is whether or not they'll disclose the poor woman who got crushed by stones.

I was going to give the Salemites a pass on all these indiscretions, until I saw this thing.

That's right.  It's a statue of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The man whose only literary goal was to torture me in high school.

"This guy lived here?" I ask the tour guide.

"Yeah," he answers.  "In fact, the house that inspired The House of the Seven Gables is right down the street."

"So here you are burning all these innocent women —"

"Hanging," he interrupted.

"So here you are hanging all of these innocent women, and not one of you thinks to go after this guy?"

He didn't seem to understand.

"You have a good afternoon," he says and walks away.

I left the town with a thorough disdain for all the people of Salem and their sadly misplaced priorities.

I even thought of a new motto.

"Salem, Mass:  Where we burn all the wrong people."

The Watering Hole

A brand new Pearls animation is now up.  This was one of the more popular Pearls strips when it appeared in newspapers.

Click HERE for the animation.

(And if you like it when you're there, it gives you a little "subscribe" option.)

I Guess That's What I Get for Never Attending Sunday School

My nine year-old daughter and I were playing with her Playmobile boat on Sunday.

I put a bunch of Playmobile people on the boat and started dragging it around the carpet.

But the people looked bored.

"This boat needs a bar," I told my daughter.

"You can't put a bar on it," she said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"It's Noah's Ark."

Hey.  It was hard to tell without the animals.

There Will Be No Cure for Cancer (At Least Not Soon)

Spent the last week in Boston.

Toured everywhere, including the Freedom Trail, the Sam Adams' Brewery, Fenway Park, Salem, Plymouth, Harvard and…

…MIT.

I hesitate to tell you about MIT because it was there that I might have changed the fate of the world.

You see, the big brains there come up with equations that create powerful weapons and cure cancer and alter the cosmos.

I know this personally, because I walked into one of the buildings and saw a huge complex formula written on a whiteboard.

I'm not sure what it was a formula for, but I know it was important.  Because it looked important.

Until I did this:

That's right.  I picked up a pen and started drawing right in the middle of this confusing thing.

So if the cure for cancer is delayed a few years, at least know this.

It was a nice doodle.

A Brand New Pearls Animation

And quite funny if I do say so myself.

Click HERE to view.

My Daughter's Prediction for the Reubens

Every Memorial Day weekend, American cartoonists hold the Reubens, which is sort of the Oscars of cartooning.  I was lucky enough to be nominated for Best Cartoonist this year.

Watch HERE see who my daughter thinks is going to win.