WALLYWARE

Kids, caffeine and Jesus.

Here’s a joke I came up with ten years ago when “Wally” was a weekly cartoon in the Canyon Courier here in Evergreen, CO.  It’s a bit of a soap-box message, but I really like the way it is drawn and the meaning is clear and to the point.  I received an email this week from the prestigious Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research asking if they could have a fresh link to this cartoon as my old website used to feature it.  You bet, Dr. Bonkers!  So I think I’ll reissue this classic design next month.  They will be available on mugs, plates and bowls in my online store the second week in September.

For the past month I’ve been sending out weekly emails with goofy specials for my fans.  Some of these items are still available in “Wally’s Bargain Basement” in my online store, and this week I’m giving a FREE CRAZY MUSIC CD to everyone who places an order.  But quite possibly the best special of the month expires this Sunday, 08/28/11.  If you order any custom item, you can get it without paying the $5.00 – $8.00 customizing fee!  Just go to the “Custom Orders” section of this website to get some pointers on how to place an order.  It’s pretty simple and a great way to create something really unique.  We received a wonderful custom order yesterday from a very talented ten year old who lives in North Carolina.  Kaylee sent in this superb drawing of a coffee-crazed pig, to be recreated on a mug:

And last but not least, we rolled out a kiln yesterday with a couple of the “Jesus is coming and he’s bringing the bean dip” chip and dip ensembles.  I’ve made these over the years and since the Jesus bowl has been selling better than ever this year (should we be worried?), I figured it would be good to make this item available to all now.  The rim of the plate underneath measures twelve inches in diameter and the set looks great piled high with tortilla chips and filled with salsa.  What better way to celebrate the end of the world as we know it?  The set sells for $110.00 and is available in my online store.

You can be one of the first to own this authentic commemorative war mug.

In the documentary, “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” lion tamer Dave Hoover explains why those in his profession use a chair to keep the lions at bay.  It turns out that the cat brain can only focus on one thing in its immediate field of vision, so the four chair legs circling in front of the lion’s eyes put the kitty’s brain into gridlock and thus prevent an attack.  This is how I feel about the news these days.  I don’t know about you, but I’m totally hypnotized by it all: the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and crippled nuclear reactor, people all over the world rising up in places that never rose up before, the still-flailing U.S. economy, the brand spanking new Tea Party governors going on ape-shit crazy power binges and on and on and on.  So last week when our president started a war with Libya I marveled at the absurdity of it all.  Wasn’t this the guy who got elected by telling us that we shouldn’t outstretch our military reach?  His speech on Monday sounded like vintage George W. Bush minus the Texas accent, mispronounced words and utterances of the word “freedom” every couple of minutes.  I think the Obama Doctrine is the same the way many of us attempt to fix our broken TV sets: just keep banging on it until it works.  I’m excited about this mug and I think it’s helped to get me out of my catatonic stupor.  You can buy it at my online store.

For a GRRRRREAT night’s sleep!!

I’ve always been a sucker for those Lunesta ads.  Seeing that psychedelic neon green butterfly floating above the rooftops and fluttering in through the open window totally piques my curiosity every time it magically appears on our flat screen TV.  I suffer from insomnia from time to time, but the warning labels on those sleep drugs scare the heck out me so I’m never going to try any of them.  Thank goodness Wally can do the things I can’t do.  This latest adventure is both silly and serious.  I just can’t believe that we live in a society where powerful psychoactive drugs are pedaled like breakfast cereal! Were we all asleep when this legislation got approved?  I guess so.  At any rate, I’m pretty sure this new design is going to be a hit as the artwork and concept are spot-on.  Mugs, plates and bowls with this design will be out of the kiln on Wednesday and I’ll have them for sale in the online store that afternoon.  Sleep tight, and don’t let the bed bugs bite.  Hmmmmm… where can Wally go with that one?

BRAIN-EATING SPACE MONSTERS!!

FINALLY!  A new Wally cartoon!  I’d been beating my head against the wall for a long time, trying to come up with a good Tea Party joke and nothing seemed to hit the mark. This weekend I was brainstorming ideas and setting goals for the week.  I simply had to have a new joke on the pots for this week’s firing.  I’d come up with a pretty good one with Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent winning the 2012 Presidential ticket, but it didn’t seem quite right.  There’s an old saying in the cartoon world, “When you wrestle with a cartoon, the cartoon usually wins.”  So the next thing that happened was a minor miracle.  I woke up at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning with the perfect joke in my head.  The basic idea, composition and words “brain-eating space monsters” were all in the dream.  How cool is that?!!  A good Wally cartoon is like an entire movie in one panel and one sentence.  What I love about this one is the series of multiple ironies: Wally is using his smarts to act stupid to stay alive, the guy about to get eaten works for a government agency that loves outer space, the slogan “Don’t tread on me” is getting a whole new meaning, and even a few more if you think about it.  I think this one is going to be a hit!  If you wish to purchase a mug, plate or bowl with this design, head on over to my online store and place an order.

Memoirs of a 2010 census worker

Note: this is my contribution to our family holiday newsletter for 2010.  It is all true and not embellished at all.

If there is any better proof that I chose one of the least financially gainful and secure career cards in The Game of Life, it’s the fact that I had to take a job with the 2010 U.S. Census in order to pay my bills this year.  Sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents per hour was my main motivation for doing a three month stint with the government, but in the end I managed to get a whole lot more: a collection of crazy stories that illustrate the current collective psyche of our nation.

The forty-hour training week quickly morphed into a group therapy session for failed entrepreneurs.  My fellow enumerators told a variety of life stories with one common theme: “Business totally sucks these days”.  But our supervisors livened things up with their passion for government service (really!) and their passion for the opposite sex.  I’m not making this up.  Picture a stocky southern woman with bright red hair constantly getting sidetracked and telling us the most bizarre stories of her life.   We learned the sad origin of her teenage grandson’s tattoo, the miracle diet and exercise regimen that allowed her to loose over two hundred pounds in less than a year and, over and over, how much she loves to look at hunky guys.  If I had gotten it all on tape, it would have made a valid sexual harassment lawsuit.  One of the many jaw-droppers of the week was coming back from lunch to find her giving one of the men in our group a back rub.  It’s your tax dollars at work, folks!

While the job of collecting census data is pretty low-key and easy by many standards, there is one significant downside: tea-party zealots.  Apparently we have a lot of them here in Colorado and oddly they all have the same script down for making the census workers’ task more difficult.  It’s a weird mix of extreme hostility towards the government and simplistic romanticism about the U.S. Constitution and the founding fathers.  Every time I tried to explain to these stubborn fanatics that what I was doing is in the constitution and has been going on since 1790, they simply regurgitated a bunch of random Glenn Beck rhetoric.  It turns out Mr. Beck did a long anti-census rant on air last spring and it became these morons’ mantra on how to deal with people like me.  One woman actually said the words, “take away our oppressive government and let the magic of capitalism save this great nation of ours”.  The winner of anti-government freak award was a really tough biker dude who immediately yelled at me when I pulled my car into his driveway.  His house looked like a fortress with animal skulls everywhere, and I later learned from his neighbors that he routinely shoots out the streetlights at the fire station across the street from his home.

So if you are looking for cheap thrills in the year 2020, I highly recommend taking a job with the U.S. Census.

Unicorn farts, etc.

Last week’s firing had a lot of new items, and I finally got them all loaded into the online store!  This first mug is a fun one: it’s a dense collage of some of my favorite images with the words, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” on the front.  You can read into it whatever you want here (and that’s the intention), but my take on it is that we live in a world where there we have lots of free will and a there are a ton of places for your mind to go.  Anybody out there care to give me a better explanation?

Next up: a new Wally design!  I admit it, this is a bit of a “soap box” statement about multi-level marketing systems.  I’m always amazed with a friend or acquaintance will try and sell me something like “Juice Plus” and it’s totally awkward for me to turn them down.  So Wally has found a canine get rich quick scheme:

The inspiration for my latest funny mug came from a dismal op ed piece about fracking, the environmentally unfriendly way to get coal out of the ground.  Since half of our electricity comes from coal, the electric car isn’t quite as magical as it seems.  This mug is selling really well in my online store, and I figure anything with rainbows and unicorns has to be a hit!

And last but not least, a cool new deluxe funny mug that takes paranoia to dizzying heights.  I’ll let the mug speak for itself:

Wally goes to college.

The basic premise of Wally is that he can go anywhere and do anything.  Over the years he’s gone to hell, interacted with countless celebrities and done things you and I can only dream of.  This week finds him in college at CU Boulder.  Woo-Hoo!  And he’s found his true passion in life: beer pong.  I’m drawing this design on oversize mugs (14 oz.) and they are for sale in our online store for the same cost as the regular mugs ($28.00).  And yes, we can customize it for whatever center of higher learning you desire.  Just place the order online, and tell us what college you want Wally to go to.  Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery.  It’s the perfect gift for that kid that is costing you $40K a year for a bachelor’s degree!

And as if that weren’t enough, here’s a new deluxe funny mug about the future.  It’s based on that great Arthur C. Clarke quote, “The future isn’t what it used to be.”

Could somebody please put a straight jacket on that juggling jogger!

Wow!  For the second time this year, I got one of my funny running memoirs printed front and center in “The Lighter Side” section of Colorado Runner.  This one is from a collection of stories about “My Craziest Races”:

At age 47, I was feeling pretty good about myself by qualifying for the A wave of the Boulder Boulder 10K.  Two miles into the race I was running comfortable 6:05 minute miles when I passed a college age guy who was JUGGLING TENNIS BALLS AS HE RAN!  It totally burst my bubble and I suddenly realized how one person’s race pace is another person’s easy clip.  I managed to stay ahead of him for the rest of the race, and the high point of the day for me was beating the legendary Bill Rodgers who finished a minute and a half behind me.  I don’t know how Bill did against the tennis ball guy.

And I just discovered a really cool database for runners that allows you, with the click of a button, to compile a list of all your race results over that past few decades.  Athlinks is perfect for the running geek who wants to instantly calculate the average time of his or her marathons, half marathons, 10Ks or whatever.  Check it out!

Here’s a nice shot Lori took at last month’s Mt. Evans Ascent.  It’s a 14.5 mile race that starts at 10,600 ft. elevation and finishes at 14,264 ft.  The weather was perfect and I felt pretty strong considering the high elevation.  I’m the runner in the yellow shirt:

Celebrating one’s abusive muse.

Here’s a unique cup and saucer designed for the artist who has to has to force himself to get to work.  Is it semi-autobiographical? You bet! I only have one of these in stock, so head on over to the online store to to snap it up.

In other words, decaf is a false idol.

Java is a time honored theme in my work.  It’s no secret that a coffee mug with a good joke about caffeine, the joy of guzzling your morning brew, or the horrors of decaf will have a solid fan base.  100 million Americans drink 350 million cups of coffee each day, which explains why roughly half of the pots I make are coffee mugs.  To get your hands on this new religious object, speed on over to the online store!