The message this week in The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan is that children don’t come with owner’s manuals or safety warnings:

Kind of wish they came with washing instructions, though.

Something’s a-FOOT (and I don’t mean 30.48 centimetres, either)…

     Please excuse the dearth of recent updates on activities in and around the Fortress of Funitude and the Greater Funsville Area. Sparky and I have been aiding and abetting Mr. Cousins, M.A. (Master of Arts or Mildly Amusing, take your pick) in his final preparations for a presentation at the Festival of Original Theatre (known to all and sundry by the catchy acronym FOOT) at the University of Toronto (known to those who take that sort of thing seriously as the academic home of Marshall McLuhan). In this case, the medium actually is the message, because: A) The Cousins Lad will be regaling one and all with a few well-chosen words (scrupulously vetted by Yours Truly) on what it’s like to be an allegedly real person who embodies allegedly fictional  personas in the virtual and incorporeally ethereal space of The Radio Continuum; and B) “medium” is the size of t-shirts and jockey shorts that The Cousins wears, even after half a lifetime of lucullan dissipation.

     Here’s a link to the website for the entire festival…

Festival of Original Theatre

     …and a link to the description of Mr. Cousins’ part of the FOOT experience (probably the metatarsal arch, or some such thing).

The Cousins at the FOOT

     …and a link to the master schedule, so you know the date and time it’s happening.

When to see The Cousins at the FOOT

     If you happen to be in Toronto during the first weekend in February, it’s well worth going to—and completely free to you, the general public. My personal vested interest compels me to shill for Mr. Cousins’ contribution in particular. For those of you who’ve been wondering just exactly what goes on in a mind like his, this is an excellent chance to enlighten yourselves, without lightening your wallets in the process. Rumour has it that Sparky and I may put in an appearance…modesty and a flair for suspense prevent me from either confirming or denying this.

     We’ll continue our one-sided chats via The Great Worldwide Internet once the hurly-burly of all of this is done. Until then, I remain, as always, yours,

Uncle Fun

P.S. To whet your appetite for a possible appearance by myself and Sparky at FOOT, I’ll also leave you with another instalment in our highly informative and instructional series “How Not To Do It”. You know what those blue letters in the last sentence are for. Click and enjoy.

More wordlessness this week in The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan:

This picture is worth a thousand of something…Air Miles, I guess. 

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, shouldn’t those who practise it be known as “flattery-cats”?

     Well, I guess the fact that you can see Sparky and Count Boguslav Boguslavsky having this discussion on narratological verisimilitude means that we haven’t been shut down yet. Those of you who follow this blog—I have it on good authority that our regular readership has grown in recent months by 50%, so this goes out to all three of you—anyway, you’ll have seen that, in his latest naïve and misguided attempt at humour, Mr. Cousins uploaded an old, unpublishable cartoon of his, which bore a distinct resemblance to something you’d see in Calvin and Hobbes:

     Before we touch off an internet firestorm of the kind the fellow who draws The Oatmeal starts whenever he gets out of the wrong side of bed, we wish to offer an abject and cowardly third-party apology to all those who hold Calvin and Hobbes near and dear, especially to all those who hold its intellectual property rights near and dear, and even more especially in this respect to its creator, Bill Watterson. Mr. Watterson is justifiably protective of his legacy…although not so much so that people (if Sparky is enough of a representative sample to base that assumption on, and of course he isn’t) don’t get him confused with another famous person with a similar name:

      Now that we know which Wat’s what, we want to stress that our mea culpa (“nostra culpa”, for you Latin majors) doesn’t really have anything to do with the originality of the material in question. There are only so many jokes out there, so it’s not when you do them, but how well. The trouble is that Bill Watterson was the Michelangelo of snowman sight gags, so they almost qualify as his personal trademark. What we’re doing, then, is grovelling out of self-interest, since Watterson’s attitude towards the authorized use of all things Calvin and Hobbes has less to do with the letters “TM” than the letters “OCD”. Plus, his father was a patent lawyer, so copyright statutes may have figured in young Bill’s bedtime reading.  

(Ya brot this kinda ribbin’ on yerself, Billy-o. All ya hadda do was license a lousy t-shirt er coffee mug, like Gary Larson, and ya’d have nipp’d all them obseen knock-offs in th’ bud. It ain’t a question’a who owns whut an’ gets ta do whut wit’ it, itza question’a nobuddy likes a spoilsport. –Sparky.) 

    Er, yes, well…no matter what’s at issue as far as Sparky’s razor-sharp legal mind is concerned, I will hedge our kowtowing with the caveat that the idea of pairing a boy with an anthropomorphic stuffed tiger is hardly anything new…

     Maybe this is why Mr. Watterson has been laying low all these years. Conspiracy theorists whisper in darkened corners about a secret “cease and desist” order delivered to him by hired muscle for the House of Mouse.

     As with so many other things in this confusing world of ours, the appropriateness of intellectual property appropriation is in the eye of the beholder.

     This could make backstage at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony a very interesting place to be.  

Uncle Fun 

This week, The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan is a concession to the inevitability of winter…

 

…and to the inevitability that every cartoonist will eventually come up with something that looks like Calvin and Hobbes.

If the Magi had believed in re-gifting, O. Henry might have had to write a different story…

     Well, the last of the 2013 calendars have finally been hung here at the Fortress of Funitude, and a start has been made on the leftover laundry from our annual pre-Christmas“Come as you’d be if you had to pull your clothing out of a Hefty bag while blindfolded” party. This means, at long last, that the New Year has begun in earnest.

     This is not unusual for Funsville: right about now is the time when the festive season grinds to a halt, with the observance of The Alternate Epiphany; or Epiphany, Take Two; or Epiphany 2.0, if you're so inclined. For those in need of background, the original Epiphany is celebrated on January 6, and commemorates the arrival in Bethlehem of the Three Wise Men—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar—to present gifts to the baby Jesus, and do whatever else they did to justify the trip on their expense accounts.

     The Alternate Epiphany happens six days after that, and concerns a legendary Fourth Wise Man named Lenny, who somehow got separated from the rest of the group en route. It’s a day cherished by procrastinators, dawdlers, laggards, and people who just generally have a hard time getting their act together. In Funsville, we celebrate the occasion by opening the boxes of “to do list” note paper that are a traditional local Christmas gift, and writing out a first draft of our New Year’s resolutions. Then, at sundown, everyone gathers in Historic Funtown Square at the city centre, to crumple up their lists and toss them onto the annual “So Much for That Nonsense” bonfire.

     As for the unofficial patron saint of the feast, Lenny the Fourth Wise Man, here’s his story, as related in the beyond-apocryphal Gospel According to Eva Marie Saint:

     On the sixth day (or thereabouts) after the arrival (and departure) of the Wise Men and their gifts (the Wise Men departed, their gifts did not), there came unto Mary and Joseph a fourth Wise Man. This one went by the name of Lenny: he bore a parcel, profuse apologies, and a grudge toward the other Wise Men, who had ditched him at a Days Inn just outside Hebron, sticking him with the bill.

     “This is all I could find on short notice,” Lenny explained, as he handed over the parcel. In it was his great gift to the infant Jesus—a box of assorted caramels.

    

      For it had come to pass that as he reached the outskirts of Bethlehem, Lenny had met the other Wise Men, who were just leaving town. They told him the story of Mary, Joseph, the manger, and of the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh which they had brought to honour the only-begotten Son of God. “You fuckers,” Lenny spat at them, “You never told me we had to get presents.”

     The journey to the all-night Shoppers Drug Mart, where Lenny bought the assorted caramels, was long, arduous, and used up the last of Lenny’s ready cash. “Hope you like it,” he said, sheepishly. “I didn’t have a chance to get it wrapped.”

     Mary and Joseph gave each other a puzzled look: “Who gives caramels to a baby?” Mary asked. “He’s got no teeth,” Joseph added.

     “Sonofabitch,” thought Lenny to himself,“I knew I should have gotten them a gift certificate.”

     Religious purists may quibble that this story lacks the airtight plausibility that marks the rest of Holy Scripture. Indeed, scholars now agree that it is highly unlikely that Eva Marie Saint ever wrote the Gospel attributed to her. If she had, she most certainly would have mentioned North by Northwest somewhere in it. Still, as things to base a belief system on for one day go, it’s fairly harmless, and all in a good cause. For one thing, it keeps us from putting things off until we have to roll Groundhog Day, Valentine’s and Mardi Gras all into one. Those of us in Funsville who can remember what that was like aren’t eager to see it return any time soon.

Uncle Fun

P.S. Speaking of putting things off…I almost put off linking you to the latest instalment of “How Not To Do It”, starring myself, my esteemed colleague and tormentor Sparky, and his occasional voice of reason, Miss Moose. (Those blue letters in the previous sentence are your passport to two more minutes of drollery, so what have you got to lose by clicking on them?) It’s not exactly what I wanted to have Mr. Cousins upload for me…but I haven’t got around to getting the other thing ready yet.

To open 2013, The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan gives us a look at life after the fiscal cliff…

 

…or maybe this is just part of a slippery slope we’ve been on for some time now.   

Looks like Dick Clark picked the right year to finally take a breather…

 

     Yes, yes, I know, I know—it’s a scythe I’m holding, not a sickle. One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2013 is to get Sparky to check the facts and the spelling in his speech balloons a little more carefully. Another one is to get him to do a full diagnostic and tune-up on CyberSparky. When we asked Sparky’s aforementioned robot double for a few insights on what lay in store for us in the year ahead, green smoke poured out of its Predictatron module, and it began slaloming around the room, moaning “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” like something out of Lost in Space. After fifteen minutes of this, it started screeching “You know too much to live, Van Helsing!” like Renfield from the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, transitioned into a couple of choruses of “I’m An Old Cowhand”, spun around three times, and keeled over.

     The long and short of this is that there are no bold predictions for this year, which is probably just as well. There wouldn’t have been any funds for them in the new fiscal cliff bill anyway. Still, we don’t want to leave you completely empty-handed on this, the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of parcel post, so here’s a little tidbit we found gathering mildew in a damp, forgotten corner of the Fortress of Funitude. For all of you who may be in the throes of post-Christmas letdown, or have a touch of the “who was that kissing my date at midnight on New Year’s Eve?” blues, “How Not To Do It #4” will help you get back on an even psychological keel…in theory, at least.

     If not, well…there’s always 2014 to look forward to.

Uncle Fun