Unless you’re a junior high bully or a drill sergeant, coming up with good nicknames is hard. It requires more than wit; you need the cooperation of others in perpetuity for a nickname to stick. If you come up with one or two permanent nicknames in a lifetime, count yourself lucky. Besides, the better you are at nicknaming, the higher the risk of getting nicknamed in retribution.

I prefer to give people what I call “quicknames,” disposable, generally action-based, descriptors that go for immediate gratification. Here’s a formula I like: “blank-y Mc-blank-blank,” where the first and third “blanks” are either verbs or descriptors. You can even leave out the “-y” and go for a two-syllable opening “blank.” Be creative!

For example, if your friend can’t help but spill baked beans down his shirt when he eats, you could call him “Drippy McBean-Splat.” Maybe that wasn’t a great example, so let’s try some more. See if you can guess the celebrity by their quickname:

- Drunky McJew-Hate
- Hair-Mess McPeople-Fire
- Creepy McBaby-Dangle
- Love-Freak McCouch-Jump

See how easy it is? Now go… and may you never use this power for evil…ish.

Dear Huitzilopochtli,

The holiday season this year is so overbearing for me. If only I could relax and enjoy the good cheer, but the pressure of finding all the presents my children want is ruining Christmas. All they want is the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3, but no matter where I go and no matter how hard I look, I can’t find them anywhere! What should I do?

Sincerely,

Stressed-Out Shopper

Dear Stressed-Out. You worm! You gutless, spineless, weak-willed maggot! You have become a slave to your wretched offspring! Children serve but two purposes: to remain silent and perform routine well maintenance. If they are lucky enough to receive any gift it should be a Junior Sword or a broom. Their insignificant whims are to be scoffed at and ignored. But, if you really need one of those electronic devices, simply slaughter a newborn panda bear at a stone altar on the midnight of the next full moon and mix its blood with dried iris root and bear semen. I’ll see what I can do.-–Huitzilopochtli

Illustration Friday “Help” entry.

If you dig on this, check out more Sheep Walker, along with the rest of our comic line-up: Wish You Were Here, Conrad Steele and Frontier Justice.

For the first time ever, while driving to work this morning, a hearse drove up behind me and passed me on the left. I couldn’t help but think: “That guy must be dying to get somewhere.”

You ever run into people so stupid, so selfish, so out-of-their-minds insane that you wonder how they ever had the sense to actually head the right way out of the womb? We each can probably point to a group of folks deserving of that characterization. Certain politicians, or that gaggle of morons from high school, or your cousins from Boise with the collection of dead chipmunks in their fridge, maybe white supremacists, or perhaps the Yankees. And while I try to live my life as loathing-free as possible (road rage excluded, of course), there is a designation of people that I absolutely despise. These idiots, as far as I’m concerned, should be hauled off and locked up, obviated from anything resembling habeas corpus, and forced to hand-wash urinal cakes for the rest of their lives.They are the DAPWBKRMs—Dumb-Ass Parents Who Bring Kids to R-rated Movies—and they suck.

I’m not talking about parents and their 14-year-olds going to see an action movie. I’m referring to the people whole drag their little, little kids, toddlers to like eight-year-olds, to wildly inappropriate film matter.

Example time. A few years back, a friend and I settled in for Kiss of the Dragon, the raw and ultra-violent Jet Li flick that found him stabbing a fat guy in the neck with chopsticks, breaking legs and necks, blowing goons in half with a grenade, even dispatching some poor sap with a CGI pool ball.

Several rows down from us, some contestants for Parents of the Year brought their small children with them to drink up the mayhem. Perhaps some of the sequences went by too fast or they were distracted by what they had excavated from their nose, but I didn’t notice any reactions from the little ones (the likely scenario is that watching extreme movie violence was old hat). (more…)