Small & Big

Two items very popular this time of year, only from Small & Big: Separated at birth? Yukon Cornelius and Kevin Youkilis Separated at birth? Mr. Potter and Dick Cheney Happy holidays.

An entire year's subscription to Funny Times magazine? This giveaway is worth over 2,500 pennies. 2,500! What am I, crazy? For you . Click here for details. Now back to our regularly scheduled program: Ugly Pile of Mushrooms.

Is there any more beautiful word in the English language than "free"? Enter my contest and you could yuck it up 12 times a year with a FREE 1-year subscription (a $25 value) to the cartoon- and humor-filled Funny Times newspaper ( funnytimes.com ). After you've gotten your chuckles galore this newspaper can be used for absorbing puppy piddle and for sending flies on to their next life. Also counts as "brown" in your composter. CONTEST RULES: You must have a U.S. mailing address (I cannot send the subscription overseas because I am a cheapskate). You must be able to post stuff to a blog or website. You must have no superhuman powers because that's cheating. This contest puts the "test" in "contest", especially since I don't know most of the answers. Ready? Here goes. Please answer each of the following: What body part is required when measuring one's wrist? What is Small & Big's preferred eating utensil? Is "O...

In case you call me, here's why you hear what you hear. If you solve the mystery without using witchcraft I will give you a nickel. (And yes, those who accidentally (or whatever) call me asking for prayers get prayed for.)

Well, more of illustrations than caricatures really. But it's my style and it's fun to draw. This was my first solo caricaturing event, and the first time I drew two people on one paper. (A: Yes, drawing two people is 250% more difficult than drawing one.) I drew 30 kids or more at the Decibels event . As usual, the kids were sweet and adorable and patient and greatly costumed. Here are snapshots of some caricatures. Two sisters, one a wee baby in a carriage Two movie-star looking tween-teen girls A ginghamed sister and her brother dressed as Thomas the Tank Engine This was kinda a threefer. I never thought of Thomas as creepy until I drew him. Thomas, you're creepy. I put the girl dressed as an iPod in the iPod And added an app that stretches out the ear. Two disabled children in wheelchairs The boy had the most beautiful eyes, with long, long lashes. But if I had put them in he woulda looked girly so I left them out, except in my mind. What was wonde...

Got plans for Sunday? C'mon by for a kid's costume party. I'll be the caricature artist at Sunday's Decibels Foundation event to benefit children with hearing loss. I'm very much looking forward to drawing scarrry childlings (2-year-olds dressed as puffy red spaceships!). As a kid I remember how adults always laughed at us but could never explain why. Now an old person, I still don't know why. Adults are weird, especially when you are one. [Note to self: Laugh with, not against.] Here's my Dear Diary entry about last year's event. And here's the lowdown from www.decibelsfoundation.org . Please come if you can, dressed as a can, so I'll know it's you.

From Small & Big's first month alive, in August of 2006: Separated At Birth? Stephen Colbert And My Cat Skunk Works Summer Dish, A Poem My, we were young.

A YouTube channel called Dancing Elephant Productions gets its name from the Small & Big story, You Are No Longer A Baby Elephant . Check out a Dancing Elephant’s song-video: The Internet is so cool. Thanks, Linda and Tim Sartain! See the Dancing Elephant Productions’ channel on YouTube.

A shout out to the folks at DatingSite.org, who included important Small & Big dating tips in their 45 Articles of Dating No No’s — What Not To Do, Say, or Wear . We come in #20 with “Short, funny list of comments to avoid saying on a first date, including shushing your date because you are texting.” Here’s the important tip list they featured: What Not To Say On The First Date . Looking for more dating tips? Click here for tips about dating men. Click here for tips about dating women. Click here for Small & Big’s Dating and Romance section. Click here to click here.

If there’s a smokey-haze mystery between you and your Memorial Day barbecue-beach-parade, haze that sometimes smells sweet, almost like smoke from cherry wood, this is smoke from huge fires in Canada. The Gulf Stream is carrying the smoke down at least as far as Boston’s South Shore. It’s going to stay this way until the Gulf Stream changes. I thought this would be a big news item on Google , but No. I called my local friendly Fire Department phone answerer, who knew immediately what the smoke monster was. Duxbury Fire Department, 1; Google, 0. We now return to our regularly scheduled pile of ugly mushrooms:

You may have noticed a reduction in drawings from yours truly. That’s a’cuz I’m attracting buyers for my cartoons (“buyers” being an overstatement) but, apparently, magazines and card companies prefer that they show my work first, in the form of you buying it. So... while you’re seeing less P.L. Frederick cartoon stuff here, think of it as an opportunity to see more Just Plain Suff (JPS) here. There’s a great big world of JPS and unnecessary acronyms on Small & Big, waiting just for you. Yours truly, P.L. Frederick, Esq. P.S. You’re still my favorite.

slas·turd  /ˈslæstərd / A guy or gal (gotta be modern!) who doesn't pay his/her child support. See: “slacker,” plus “turd,” and the “s” in the middle, we all know what that stands for. Right? Wow! It isn't every day a new word is defined. (Well maybe where you live, Dick Shunary, but not here in the real world.) A. Decker made a heroic effort against insurmountable odds, full of heart and maybe hangnails, to come up with thee perfect definition for the word slasturd . (Spielberg may option the story.) So I know you're dying to learn more about this Decker chap. He doesn't often speak to tabloids but, through fancy footwork, we have tidbits: His blog, Resonant Enigma at resonant-enigma.blogspot.com , began on February 10, 2007. The break-out post was It Is the Truth... , with wisdom from Krishnamurti to Yogi Berra. I particularly like Ghosties & Clouds & Blue Skies . There's a great description of himself (but it could about be any of us): ...

Ack. Just one more person needs to sign up for a cartooning class I wanna take. I've taken it before so I know it's awesome. If you're like me this may very well be the most enjoyable class you've ever taken, so if you wanna learn cartooning (you do!) and live in the area south of the Boston (or can helicopter in), please, please, please sign up. You can be a beginner — just as long as you know which end of a pen is the inky part. Hark!, here are thee details (and I hope to see you on Tuesday, which I will if you sign up): Cartooning for grown-ups Mat Brown, Instructor Tuesdays: 6:30pm – 8:30 pm (6 weeks, May 8 – June 15 new date ) Location: Duxbury Art Association at Ellison Center for the Arts, 64 St. George Street, Duxbury, MA (for map, see below) Designed for people who like to draw, this course teaches the conventions of cartooning, caricature, gag panels, comic strips and editorial cartoons from the perspective of a well known professional in the industry. ...

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

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...

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.

A painting by Andy Worhol sold for $43.7 million in November, 2009. The Work? 200 one dollar bills. That makes each dollar in it worth more than $218,000. Huzzah! This is awesome, because, Ahem... Step right up, folks! I want to introduce you to the Sale of the Century. What I have here is a genuine $5 bill, a bill of superb printing and quality, with nary a crease or a fold on it. Yes, nary a crease! Little lady, won’t you come up to the stage and give it a look-see? See that born-on date there? What does it say? 2004? 2004, folks. And is it a real bill, in your honest opinion? Yes? Yes. The little lady has spoken. Yes, my good neighbors, this is an honest-to-goodness paper bill manufactured in and by thee glorious United States of America. Now, you might expect to pay, how much for a bill of this quality... one-hundred, two-hundred thousand dollars? Two-hundred eighteen thousand dollars? Hah ha! Oh, no sir! Sure you’ll see them advertised for that, sure, sure. But not he...

A guy in Tokyo believes he can: he married a video game character. (Go to article.) That Cialis “male enhancement” drug there, it won't help.

If you’re near lovely Cohasset, Massachusetts this SUNday, near Boston’s South Shore, skedaddle your hiney over for an honest-to-goodness cartoon of yourself, drawn by Bill White. Wouldn’t any parent or grandparent love a funny drawing of you for the holidays? Sure! Frame it and it’ll make an affordable, memorable gift. Hot dawg! You might know Bill from his Ren & Stimpy animating stint, or you might know him as a Building 19 cartoonist. Either way, he’s one awesome draw-er. HOLLY-DAYS FAIR at the Our World Children’s Global Discovery Museum 100 Sohier Street Cohasset, MA 12 to 4 P.M. Admission: $5 per person ($20 per family) More details on Bill’s blog here: An Offer You Can’t Refuse

...to screech one’s writing to a halt. That, dear reader, is why I haven't been posting frequently. Sigh. On the up side, spammers have tweaked their email subject headings for the funnier. Today I received a pseudo-Viagra email founded on “weenie” and “oak tree.”