Small & Big

News flash: May 1st is Free Comic Book Day . I got the news from Dave of David Wasting Paper (he doesn't). For details and a comic-book store locator, go to the Free Comic Book Day website . As Dave puts it, “comic books are a great tool to get kids interested in reading, plus these ones are FREE!” The awesome illustration shown above is by Mad Magazine’s awesome Sergio Aragonés. You can get it on an awesome t-shirt. Click here for the t-shirt buying page. Part of proceeds go to charity. Want to learn more about comic artists? Do check out David Wasting Paper for tons of artist interviews.

Contest details here. No purchase necessary. Ends at the stroke of May 1st. Winner announced next week. Will it be you? WILL IT?!

I’m no Miss Marple but I think I can solve the mystery of A Secret In The Litter Box : See those two kitties on the left there? They (spoiler alert!) deposited solid and liquid “secrets” in the box of litter and attempted to cover it up. And it definitely started before 1974. All over the United States. Case closed.

Let us consider the antonym . An antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word. (It sounds like it starts with anti , like it’s against something.) Like, “A soiled tank top stretched over a moth-eaten mannequin torso in the picked-over trash heap that is Building 19 is the antonym of sexy. 77.” Thankfully you cannot see the coating of dust and stale Wonder Bread crumbs. Sandwich, anyone?

Slasturd. That’s the word Blogger asked me to type for “word verification” purposes. (It has always given me made-up words so I’m not sure about that “verification” part.) I was commenting about a crocheted meerkat over at Water Rose when Blogger told me to type “slasturd” into its little box there. This is an awesome word! Awesome, I type convincingly with no evidence to support my claim other than the awesomeness of the word itself. Look at it. It glows. Plus, it is proof that computers have intelligence, as measured by the Amusezinger Scale of Justice, a world-renowned scientific and philosophical theorem I made up. People, I want to open the diction-ary and find this listed as a real, live word. Like “Pinocchio,” which, until it appeared in that Disney cartoon, wasn’t a real word. Some ideas on what we could use slasturd for: An annoying person with a knife Okay I can’t think of anything else. But I’m sure you can. (As Homer Simpson put it, you're “s-m-r-t.”) Define...

Orange juice is made from lemons. At least it is at my local grocery market. Also, mashed potatoes? 100% Twizzlers.

S.B.D., Silent But Deadly, woulda been an awesome name for a bomb business but some other company is already using it (see below). How my weaponry would work is, first you pull my finger.... Guess I'll go with Skunk Works instead.

Go ahead, ask him, “Why do cats do that?” This is the Rare-Books cat who lives in Plymouth, MA. If your doggie is on the sidewalk in front of his store he’ll come out and chase it to the opposite sidewalk. He’s old-school prejudiced like that.

Cartoon by Dave Walker . He's got all sorts of cartoons you can use on your blog for free at We Blog Cartoons . It will make you a famous blogger.

It's official. My first cartoon appeared in this month's issue of The Pet Gazette , a free monthly newspaper because animals don't have money and rarely read. If you've visited Small & Big before you may have seen this cartoon before, here , only now it's all dolled up with colors and proper formatting and what-not. In the newspaper the cartoon is printed in black and white. I found I couldn't just convert the full-color cartoon into grayscale — the grays got all muddled together — so I fiddled with them. Like, look at the litter box. In the color version it's green but in grayscale it's white. So, um, yah.