Ziggy: Bullshit or Bulltruth

On his surface, Ziggy appears to be a pretty crappy one panel comic that just so happens to be in daily print in countless newspapers across America. The truth is Ziggy is not unlike a magic-eye puzzle; inside his painfully nondescript body lies a creation tale that is the very embodiment of anti-establishment.

Ziggy was created to be a symbol that stood for the antithesis of the Levi jean company.
Verdict: Bulltruth

Ziggy creator, Tom Wilson, tragically lost his son during a tour of a Levi jean factory. Evidence suggests that his son wandered from the tour group but this information is debatable because Tom always carried his son around in a backpack. The story Wilson championed in court described a macabre scene where his 14-year old son was plucked from his backpack by a Levi exec and thrown into whatever kind of machine makes jeans. Wilson’s story didn’t hold in court even after showing the jury a pair of jeans that bore an uncanny resemblance to his son. Shortly after, Ziggy was created. He was drawn with no pants as an effort to champion Americans to cast off the jeans manufactured by a murderous corporation. Instead, Ziggy wound up on greeting cards.

Ziggy is bald because the less specific features Ziggy has, the more universal he is.
Verdict: Bullshit

Tom Wilson just couldn’t draw hair. And let’s think about this for a second: Ziggy with hair? That shit would be weird.

Ziggy has been statistically proven to be the most depressing comic strip in existence.
Verdict: Bulltruth

At Penn State University, a study was done where random people were subjected to two images: a slid show of Ziggy comics and a superfast motion video of maggots devouring a dog. They were then told they would receive 10 dollars if they picked between the two images and observed it for 20 minutes. After three test groups of 100 people each, only one person picked to watch the Ziggy slideshow for the time period.

How do I leave a job with class?

Making your exit from an employer on your own terms is one of the few times that you experience the rush of breaking the shackles of your suppressors and believe that from now on things will be different. While things won't be different, that rush of quitting is the only time that fate will grant you the simple joy of 10-pound testicles. No matter if you are a boy or a girl or have previously experienced elephantitis of the nutsack in a job-leaving-related incident, it is a good feeling that you will never forget.

However, this rush must come naturally, and you cannot just take up jobs in hopes to leave them right away. Instead, you have to take a job, work it for at least five years. Everyday you work, just think about how great that feeling is going to be when you leave everyone behind. Do not tell any of your bosses your plan. They might promote you because you are so smart, and that will alienate you from coworkers.

So we know that leaving the job is fun, but it's how you do it that will turn those 10 pounds to 30 pounds. All of these are arranged to ensure you leave on the best terms possible.

The Domino Effect
Come in the day before and arrange pen boxes/toner cartridge boxes/anything monolithic in a domino pattern. Have fun with where it travels, but make sure it starts at the door and goes all the way to your bosses office. When your boss walks in, he will instinctively push the box and set the chaos into motion. It should take a good 15 minutes until it reaches your bosses office. When he goes into his office, he will notice that the dominos spell out "I'm outta here." He will then be treated to you laying naked on his desk whilst massaging his wife sensually with a picture of his son that he had laying around.

Magic Trick
When you come into work, clock in and go directly to your bosses office. Bring a magician's hat with you. Tell him that you have a magic trick prepared. This will generate squeals of excitement because, hey, magic is cool. Reach into your hat and pull out a live rabbit to establish that your magic is legit and harmless. After he is in his comfort zone, reach into your hat and pull out the urn of one of his parents. Show it around the room and do not waiver under anything he says to you. Then, proceed to eat the contents of the urn, keep it within you for 30 seconds, then throw it up on or around your boss. As he kicks you out, he'll notice the remnants of his parent(s) on the floor mixed with your breakfast, and how they are arranged to spell out "You can't fire me, I quit" in perfect Arial font.

The Gentleman
Dog doo in a fire bag. But the bag is made out of his dog.

Invasion of Privacy: My Mailman

The Survival Guide (like any other quantitative science) struggles to understand the world around us. And as you might imagine, this line of work that both Leon Firestone and I are a part of has allowed us not to only understand the world around us, but I’d go so far as to say it has made us the two understandiest people around. Even still, we are pioneers. And what I am pioneering today is a way that will better understand the individual. Arguments can be made that this is hardly a new fascination. Some may even argue that the focus on the individual is responsible for modern science.

Those people are wrong, although I believed the politically correct term is “retarded.”

My associate, Leon Firestone, conceptualized the idea only yesterday as we conversed over an episode of Nip/Tuck. We were talking about how boobs are awesome except for the times they’re being cut up by scalpels. In those instances, we agreed, breasts have what we call a “reverse boner” effect.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that I can probably get away with extreme invasions of privacy if I spin it as research that aspires to answer the daunting question of what exactly unites us all as individuals. Also, I could probably steal a lot of shit.

Long story short, I found out where my mailman lives and broke into his house while he was working. In a moment of ultimate irony, I was not home when he rang the doorbell to sign for a package because I was kicking down his screen door.

What I found:
Upon entering his home, the first thing I noticed was a giant collage of Johnny Depp. Collage is an unjust term to be honest, because it was not limited to two-dimensions. A giant cardboard cutout of Edward Scissors Hands jutted out of the center of the wall occupied by the collage. This cardboard cutout, in turn, was embracing an anatomically correct paper mache model of Depp (ala Sweeney Todd) made entirely out of ticket stubs. The door adjacent to this Depp beacon led to a room that was filled with giant rubber dildos. Each one of these was mounted on a plaque bases and named after a president of the United States. Located on a desk and underneath a ribbed little number named “Andrew Jackson,” I found a draft of my mailman’s autobiography with a working title of I’m Gay And No One Knows It: A Mailman’s Struggle.


What I learned:
My mailman has a deep appreciation for character actors and an affinity for both writing and making paper mache. Also, he had a 19-inch HD television in his bedroom, which conveniently fit in the front passenger seat in my car.

I wouldn’t go so far as to make sweeping generalizations, but I think we can all agree this was a big step for understanding mailmen across the globe.

Etiquette Excellence: Driving

This article was written for mass publication and was crafted in such a way that any newspaper can run the guide before any major holiday to remind the readership about safety.

With the upcoming holiday weekend, there will no doubt be thousands of motorists flooding our streets and highways in order to be home for such a joyous occasion. In fact, it's hard to talk about this particular without remembering this day and all of the celebrations it brings to us. The streets aglow with fireworks, kids running with valentines, and inside houses across the country, families share a turkey dinner while passing out fake dog doo. But before you honor our fallen soldier by dressing up as a whore-nurse, please keep the roads safe with some basic driving tips.

Traffic lights
The meaning of traffic lights have been embedded in our culture. From an early age, it is known that red means passion and aggressiveness and green means success and money. However, some states have adopted traffic lights with up to 17 different light colors in order to better help traffic flow. Blue means calmness and devotion, orange means vitality and alertness, and brown means the right turn lane is closed.

Lane merging
Whether on an expressway or sidestreet, lane merging always proves to be a balls-to-the-wall experience. In order to get into the correct lane, it is expected of you to turn on your turn signal and negotiate speed with the people in the desired lane. As someone in the desired lane, your job is to keep at perfect pace with the car in the lane over, even in the event of a full stop. While this might be a double-standard of understanding and assholery, you are really overlooking the worn down emotional state people drive with during this holiday weekend. They could be the nicest people ever off of the road, but you do not want to get between them and a night of BBQs and haunted houses.

Flashing your brights
Brights should only be flashed when you want to blind all traffic in front of you in a hope that they all fly off the road and burst into flames. If you think you are helping them with a small warning that their tail light is out, or that they forgot to turn their headlights on, or that there is a killer in the back seat, you are wrong.

4 way stops
Chances are if you just drive through them really fast, no one will hit you. I mean, they are going slow from all that stopping they had to do, and if they cannot react to you barreling down the road, then I guess they shouldn't be driving. Besides, for this holiday weekend, we all know that witnessing a man blow a 4-way stop means good luck, and that is the way its always been since the Dutch brought the day over to honor the Druid new year.

And as always, watch out for Trick and Treaters.

2-Minute Biography: The Dream Team

Did you know... these men have done more than you would ever do in a thousand lifetimes?

In the 1992 Olympic games, the USA fielded one of the most formidable basketball teams in history, referred to as The Dream Team. Consisting of the best players in the NBA, The Dream Team steamrolled every other team it came up against with an average margin of victory of 43.8 points. The team had an amazing amount of raw talent, but it also helped that many other countries had only found out about basketball a week prior.

But the question remains: were the members of The Dream Team good sports? The short answer: yes. After the Olympics, they set out to repair the damages their brutal ass- kickings caused.

Their first stop was Croatia, where their massive triumph over the Croatian team caused a complete dissolvement of the government and hundreds of ritual suicides. Upon getting off their jet, The Dream Team soon realized the damage they had caused might be too much for just one basketball team to fix. Charles Barkley, guilt-ridden with the deaths his amazing dunks had caused, vowed to stay behind and rebuild Croatia from the ground up. To this day, he rules the beautiful country with an iron fist.

The team next traveled to Angola to see what damage they had caused. It is not known what the specific damages to the South American country were because the one journalist who traveled with the team to document their philanthropy vomited himself to death after seeing what remained of the country from their plane.

Just as we don’t know what was wrong with Angola, we don’t know what The Dream Team did to rebuild the nation. All we know is that Angolans now speak a special dialect of Portuguese that sounds a lot like Michael Jordan.

The philanthropy tour ended with a return to the United States where the entire team (save for Barkley, who was the new Duke of Croatia) publicly apologized for any negative image they may have given the USA.

In a touching scene of self-sacrifice, they all burned their basketball shoes in the center of Time Square and never set foot on the court again.