Happy 4th of July! This week begins a small storyline in honor of our next live appearance. We’ll be showing all next weekend at Tokyo in Tulsa and selling books, shirts, caricatures and whatever else one might be willing to pay for 
Come by and see us! For details, click here.
Thanks to the popular trend of alarmist, panic inducing, emotional reaction inciting journalism that has become the 
standard for any discussion of current events, I am allowed, as you my loyal readers know, to give full vent to any fears, concerns, discomforts, or outrages caused by anything that strikes me as being different, unusual, or in anyway threatening. This is a great boon to me, for without serious journalists freaking out over whether birth weight is related to the development of leukemia or what the loss of sea-grass will do to the world I would never feel free to declare the need for the public to take radical steps to change a situation that few other people have ever even noticed. Indeed, if not for the constant panic that our news agencies attempt to keep the general public in I would be too wary of demanding that you, my loyal readers, join me in creating fake art.
And that is exactly what I am demanding of you, my loyal readers, that you immediately set about creating fake art.
For you see, dear reader, we are being inundated with a plague as dire as any other plague that has faced us since the loss of our vital sea-grass, the plague of the artist.
That is right my friends. We have too many artists. And they are wrecking lives, the economy, and art itself.
Somehow over the last thirty odd years or so a massive portion of our population has become convinced that they have a creative vision. And that is nonsense.
While this is a nonsense that people in previous generations may have believed at one point or another in their lives, they recognized that the proper outlet for their delusions of creativity was in the appreciation of what real artists could do or in small creative efforts that could be hidden away from public view.
But now we are nearly being swept under with all manner of people who are self-described artists, thinkers, and idea-men, people who are in reality merely desperate to prove to themselves that they are something special and have something that is worthwhile to share with other people.
These folks are found all the time now putting up art shows that are practically indistinguishable from each other with every piece they produce looking like a piece of garbage that Jackson Pollock threw up on. You see them all the time, carrying their sketchpads in their messenger bags, wearing their “Che” t-shirts (like Che Guevara wouldn’t shoot the freaking hippies in disgust at their bourgeois background) and everyone of them thinks that what they are creating is ART!
Well I say bullcrap! Just because you have a beret, a tattoo of a barcode, a scooter, a job that pays nothing, an organic hemp thong, and a gallery at a pizza parlor doesn’t mean that you are an artist!
Unfortunately the liberal arts college education that most of these “I’m a graphic designer but what I really am about is using photography to capture the language of the trees” types have had prevents them from realizing that the sheer level of suck proves that what they produce is not art. It is almost impossible to prove to those kinds of people that “the idea” is not enough to justify them satisfying their creative impulses, but rather that they need to learn how to freakin’ do what they are doing right!
And it is time that we, the not creative, prove it to them.
If we, the regular people of the world, gathered together and began to produce “art” (and it doesn’t matter what kind of art) and pretended that what we were doing really was art (even though we know that it isn’t) and began to demand space in galleries for our watercolors of kittens and flowers and sculptures of people we knew in high school then perhaps when everyone is unable to distinguish between our poorly conceived and hastily executed trash and the “art” of the wannabees, then maybe some of those darn fools will leave behind their jobs as baristas and get a job welding pieces of metal into something useful.
But it will take you, dear reader, actually putting pencil to paper and drawing what you think Superman would look like as a priest, or beating a trash can with a rock, or performing a song about the injustices of the PTA to a coffee shop of hipsters to make that worthless sack of pretentious culture droppings with the dreds to stop working on his screenplay and get that job as an accountant.
Don’t let me down.
-Bob
Listen, I know I kinda promised to use this weeks blog to help us all get a bit richer by coming up with idea for useful 
tasks we could train vermin to do for us at a profit. And, no that is not nuts, that is genius so shut up! But then Michael Jackson died. And there is no way I can ignore the passing of such a… person without making at least a few comments on the matter. It also doesn’t hurt to change my topic seeing as how after thinking and thinking about it that the only jobs I can think of for vermin to do were preparing newspaper for recycling by shredding it and cleaning up little bits of crud by carrying it to their dens and both of those ideas would be ruined by the little nasties habit of peeing everywhere they go. Still the theory is sound I say! If our society saw fit we could totally find a use for these pests.
(I’ll let you make your own terrible “Michael Jackson as society’s pest” joke here as a transition.)
Michael Jackson was more than that horrible and totally inappropriate joke that you just thought! Michael Jackson was once a beloved icon and hero to lots of America.
Michael Jackson defined cool for us in the Nineteen Eighties.
Michael Jackson showed us how high a single individual could soar, how influential and powerful one person could become through the power of music.
Then Michael Jackson showed us how, almost overnight, Pepsi and a few botched surgeries could take all of that love and respect away.
Michael Jackson soon began to fill another role in our world, a role that was almost as important as being our beloved wunderkind, the role of being the nations creepy weirdo who lives just a little to close to our house.
After showing us how much we could love and desire to emulate one man for his talent and coolness Michael Jackson then showed us how far we could tolerate one man’s utter strangeness and creepiness without chasing him from our midst with lit torches like he was some sort of high voiced Frankenstein monster.
Michael Jackson let us test our national capacity to cut a guy some slack based entirely off of who he was before “that” happened.
In some ways, Micheal Jackson was like one of the Roman Emperors of old. After winning the love and admiration of a nation in his youth, MJ began to first show a few quirks and oddities, the single glove and the Elephant Man skeleton, that we could enjoy as eccentricities, odd ornaments of his character that bespoke of how he truly was not like us. But, again as with the Roman Emperors, with time his desires began to offend and disturb us with their expense and questionable morality, such as owning Neverland Ranch or being friends with Elizabeth Taylor, even as he ceased to look anything like the young man we had known and adored.
In time Jackson even became so strange and disturbing a figure that we had to take him out for offending and outraging every sensibility of society, just as the Praetorian Guard had to do to the Emperors. True we did it with jokes and investigations, and rightly so I might add cause that guy was weird. And, unlike the Emperors, Michael Jackson died from something other than being stabbed to death, so you got to give him that.
The point stands that for almost a good two decades Michael Jackson was our nation’s beloved, respected, admired, young hero turned strange, barely tolerated, powerful, creepy, weird guy in chief and was the standard of how much weird we would tolerate in the rich and famous.
Now with Michael Jackson gone who will we look to in order to be reminded of how far the innocent can fall and to measure the creepiness of other celebrities against so that their perverse and illegal lifestyles seem more palatable? 
Eh, Good enough for me.
-Bob
We have to find a use for vermin!
Seriously. We have to find a use for vermin! I am sick of them, Sick of every last one of them. And I have killed so many of them I do not know how many more I can kill. I have crushed the skulls and snapped the necks of every one of them I can get my hands on! And any of them I couldn’t get a hold of I have poisoned or trapped and starved to death! And I mean all of them! All of them, the rats, mice, roaches, snakes, wombats, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, and every other stinking animal pestilence that has ever been sent to carry disease into our homes. The stupid little vermin!
They try to get into my house all of the freaking time and I can’t stand it any longer. I am going to bait and lay so many freaking traps that there isn’t going to be a roach that doesn’t set off a rat trap! Unless I can find a way to start making these monsters do my bidding or at least find a use for them.
And it isn’t like they can help it. Stupid little, disgusting, parasitical, parasite ridden, property destroying monsters… They just want to nest in my walls for protection from the elements and feed off of my food, which is basically what I am doing myself. And if they are basically doing what I do in one respect, why can’t they do what I do in other respects, like be forced to turn a profit?
See so much of the problem is that killing these buggers just seems like such a waste. I mean, why kill something and dispose of its carcass when I could enslave it and use it‘s energies for my own profit? So much waste. And wherever there is waste there can be profit. If only I could find a use for the vermin why I could be rich.
But this isn’t just about money (although that SHOULD be good enough for anyone.) This is about reminding Mother Nature yet again who is in charge here! Here we have billions of organisms that we have been in contact with since creation and the best thing we have been able to conceive of doing with these foul things is to destroy them. What kind of masters and rulers over nature would we be if we could not bend every piece of our dominion to our will? And isn’t that what science is supposed to be used for, bending nature to our will?!
That’s it. We can find a use for vermin. NO!!! We MUST find a use for vermin! And not just as science experiments or the basis for cartoon characters anymore! Real, day-in-day-out, profitable, marketable, easily understood by a mass audience uses. Do you here me Science! We need our best minds on this today so I can claim royalties from the idea tomorrow!
Flibberdeegibbets! I’ll bet that all of the best Scientists are reading this now and are going to come up with all sorts of uses for vermin and take all of the credit for their hard work and my idea.
So lets see here…
Uses for vermin…
Uses…
Uses…
DANGABIT!! Se me next week!
-Bob
NOW!
As I was saying last week, before the limitations of time and space so rudely interrupted me, contrary to 
popular belief writing is a very difficult medium in which to exactly communicate what is on your mind. Maybe not so hard to communicate what you have carefully and painstakingly crafted and honed into finely balanced literary work when taken seriously and given ample attention by a careful an interested audience, but, come on! How often does that happen for writer or reader? Especially of anything written on the internet?
It doesn’t! No! The internet is not used for careful reading! And certainly not for careful writing.
If anything internet writing is almost like a transcript of a persons thoughts, with all of the background noise, ill-defined context, and vague meanings that go along with the standard loosely constructed, shoot from the hip, internet style of writing.
That is why we have invented the Emoticon!
For you see in the slipshod world of quick internet writing a fellow can either continue to try to refine and rewrite his sentences, seeking to use a more accurate vocabulary and carefully delineated clauses and subclauses, in order to get the reader to feel the same consuming emotions that he, the writer, feels on the subject, or he can use a >:( . See. An angry face. That means the author is angry.
Likewise a writer can go plunging into his thesaurus to find enough synonyms to describe the outpouring of emotion he felt during his experience with what someone else wrote or he can write the acronym LOL. This means the reader/writer feels bad that what he read isn’t actually funny.
And which of these ways is easier?! Why the shortcut of the emoticon and the acronym of course, you stupid hillbilly! (Or O.C.Y.S.H! in acronymese.)
But there is, unfortunately a grievous lack actually useful acronyms and emoticons for us on the internet. Sure we have TTYL, and 
, but what we need is relevant internet shorthand. So I propose that we add the following letters and symbols to our vocabulary.
1.) WWIS? -What Was I Saying? Used when the writer loses his train of thought.
2.) GRRRRRR- I am angry. Used when the writer gets angry.
3.) ):DC – The backwards facing visage of a frowning samurai in full battle armor smiley. Used by the writer to display his disgust at the concept of cowardice.
4.) (ASIBIA)- All Said In Bad Italian Accent. Used when the Writer needs to clarify that his apparent misspellings and numerous references to la cosa nostra were part of a poorly thought out attempt to imitate the stereotypical Italian-American
5.) CQIMB- Chuckling Quietly Into My Beard. Used when the writer wishes to express that something has amused them enough chuckle quietly and that they have a beard.
6.) :Q – The so sleepy a little bit of drool came out of my mouth smiley. Used by the writer to indicate that he my need a wetnap to clean the corners of his mouth.
7.) OCOWHSNTNCTMF!- Oh Come On, Who Hasn’t Seen The Nineteen Thirty Nine Classic The Maltese Falcon! Used when the writer wants to express shock and horror at his audiences lack of exposure to classic cinema.
8.) =:)> – The Satyr Smiley. Used when the writer wishes to express in an innocent way to his readers that he currently feels like he would enjoy being a part goat man while romping through the fields and woods of ancient Greece while playing the flute, drinking large amounts of wine, and cavorting promiscuously with woodland nymphs.
9.) ICFTRKA- I Can’t Find The R Key Again. Used by a writer to explain why he no longer is using the letter “R” in any of his writing.
10.) b..d -The Muscular Smiley, the b and d are supposed to look like flexing arms beside a tiny head. Used by the writer to indicate that he is busy working out while he writes. (See last weeks blog.)
11.) TSCW- Too Sleepy Can’t Write. Use by lazy writers who won’t suck it up and finish what they thought was important enough to start, but was obviously not important enough to finish.
-Bob
