It's awesome, but doesn't run often enough... or didn't. Recently, Brock Heasley brought on Spooky Doofus and Boxcar Astronaut artist Marc La Pierre to draw while Brock writes, so they could put out 3 strips a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)! Marc's really shown himself to be an incredible comics artist and Brock's an amazing writer. The combo means more fun for all!

Here's a teaser poster for the new team-up...

And don't forget I've started a little webcomic of sorts. My wife and I are publishing the doodles we draw on our son's lunch bags at LunchaDoodle.

If you're not a fan of The Superfogeys, you should really check it out. It's the funniest comic strip about a superhero retirement home there is.

Click this banner to see my guest strip

Aren't all bouts with the flu unwanted? Who has a wanted bout with the flu?

I thought about how one might cook a whole cow, and for some reason, my thought went to Turducken. If you're not familiar with Turducken, it's a turkey, stuffed with a duck, that's stuffed with a chicken. I thought if you started with a cow, where would you go from there? Most likely you'd stuff a pig inside the cow, then stuff a lamb inside the pig.

But how would you cook it? Where would you find an oven big enough? You couldn't spit roast it because by the time the lamb cooked, the cow would be beef jerky. I realized that pit roasting (dig a pit, line it with hot rocks, put the animal in, cover it, then bury it, then dig it up 8-12 hours later) it would be the only way. Low and slow from sunup to sundown, with the right aromatics strategically placed in and around the animals.

It could work. I'm not the man for the job. Just no expertise in pit roasting a single animal, much less three. I think the closest I might come would be to make a meat loaf of ground beef and lamb, then wrap it in bacon. That wouldn't be too bad.

Hmmmm....

Wow... I didn't know you could use a negative as a tradition. In that case, I've got millions of traditions. Anything I've never done before, I've traditionally never done before. When people ask me why I haven't been to Kansas, I can say "it's a family tradition. Every year since I can remember, we didn't go to Kansas."

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

All I have to do is "kindly reconfirm to us, your genuine bank account details, to avoid making payment to a wrong person, attempt to divert your payment to a new account without your knowledge may have been done by your local representative with the assistance of some (CBN) Officials, of whom most of them are presently under our custody and will face prosecution under section 35A sub section 1-2-4 of the criminal code of United Kingdon Of Great Britain, pending on when we finish with our investigation."

Yup, just gotta fax over my bank details, and that thieving Peter Woo will get busted while I'll get my ten million bucks from Togo.

Too bad I don't have a fax machine. Oh well. Maybe I'll have better luck with that Nigerian prince.

They have stores there that you just don't see in the United States. Places with weird, foreign-sounding names like "Tim Horton's". So I was perplexed when a Canadian friend tweeted from that northern land of frost and ice: "I just want you all to know how delicious the first Tim Hortons IceCap of the year tastes."

An IceCap? Tim Horton's? These were unfamiliar terms to me. I've only been to Canada maybe 5 times. I stay in Hiltons and eat American-style food. I'd never been to a Tim Horton's or discovered the magical wonders inside. I always wondered if they served chili balls in fish syrup, crab and peanut butter cakes with cilantro vinegar, hamburgers with ketchup... you know, the weird exotic things you always hear they eat in Canada.

Thus I tweeted back: "For those of us who are Canadacally Impaired: What's a Tim Horton's Ice Cap?"

Another American friend (who I have since learned is secretly Canadian!) tweeted me a link that basically said "go look it up on Google" (but in a less kind way). Still, I wanted to hear it from the Canuck's mouth and eventually she tweeted back that an IceCap is an Iced Cappucino. Ha! Those wacky Canadians, shortening two words and cramming them together to make a cute product name... no wonder their leading export is marketing geniuses. Or is it actors? They do export a lot of actors. I secretly think they kick actors out because they lower property values, but I've heard Canadians are an exceptionally tolerant people... even toward actors.

Well, now I'm a bit less Canadacally Impaired than I was before. Please, if you have any more tidbits of amazing information about the dark and mysterious land known as Canada, post them in the comments below.

Giant burgers are nothing new, and the Travel Channel's "Man V. Food" has featured some bigger burgers in its hard-not-to-watch orgy of gluttony, but I guess this is the first time such a huge burger has been offered at a ballpark. Presumably added to the menu to get some press about its novelty, it did just that, making the wire services and getting stories in newspapers nationwide.

That attracted the attention of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Although dated April 1st, the open letter from dietitian Susan Levin was released to press sources yesterday and another round of press for the Whitecaps began almost immediately.

Levin asked for the following warning label: "WARNING – Eating meat is associated with increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and death."

I like a different quote from her letter that many of the press outlets ignored: "I venture to guess that your monster burger harbors more synthetic hormones than most professional baseball players."

Woo-hoo, the humorless killjoy tries to make a steroid joke, and almost pulls it off. Most of the letter, though, is about how too much meat and cheese causes most of society's medical ills and riffs on "what kind of example are we setting for the children?"

Honestly, I think this is just bandwagon PR. Look at how much mileage the PCRM got out of one little press release. Just like the story on the burger, it got on the wire services, got picked up by lots of outlets, and it's provoking a reaction. Used to be that the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was the best known food-issue grandstander. One of their more memorable campaigns was trying to expose all the dangers of movie theater popcorn. More recently, they've been suing beer makers over making caffeinated alcoholic beverages they're calling "alcospeed."

Still, good intentions aside, mercenary attempts to ride on the coattails of someone else's publicity aside, the claim that the burger needs a warning label is just insulting on so many levels, and that's probably what's made people take notice. It's not so much that the "food nazis" are at it again, but they're calling Joe the Plumber an idiot again. And people are getting pissed off at the arrogant, humorless twaddle coming out of activistville yet again.

Susan, this is why people hate you. You talk down to them. You think they're not capable of making their own decisions and need or want you to interfere. So here's my proposed warning label.

WARNING: There are some people in this country who believe you're potentially stupid enough to mistake a 4-pound burger with cheese, chili, and corn chips on it for health food. Humorless blowhards like this are known causes of irritation and stress. Please use extreme caution when listening to these pompous twits.

Volcano Smokey's Pizza Place by Greg Bulmash is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.brainhandles.com/contact-us.

At Volcano Smokey's pizza place
There was a din-o-saur meeting space
Where all the triceratops would go
To see the famous singing bronto
The T-rex would play the stand-up bass
While raptors on drums would rock the place
The dinosaurs danced with such grace
At Volcano Smokey's place

Pterodactyls flew through the dusky blue
Shining spotlights in the twilight
By the gingko roots they played silver flutes
On pizza they dined while the starlight did shine

The big sauropods stomped
Little fabrosauri romped
And the allosaurus chomped
On a big plate of pasta all covered in cheese

In moonlight, as the dino-band played, love entered the room
Indosaurus danced with Vulcanodon and swept away the gloom

They danced 'til night was done
And nobody had to run
All the dinos had some fun
At Volcano Smokey's great pizza place.

I had to create an ad for it.

Now that isn't all that amazing. What is amazing is that Hammond, Indiana is the hometown of Jean Shepherd, the author of "A Christmas Story", and is the town used as his model for the fictional town in the Christmas classic.

You'd think that kids in Hammond, of all places, would be wise to this dare.