Cheesebo

Halle the cat watches me color a comic. OK, the comic was already done, but I thought it was so funny the way she just patiently watches me work that I held my iPhone in one hand while drawing with the other. That’s the kind of expert production values you get here at Cheesebo.

I think I made this for my old website, but never used it. I found it recently and kind of like it. I’m not sure why it has a monster vibe.

Above is my lovely wife Rachel holding a lovely, squeezable bottle of Marmite. How did this mysterious object make its way across the Atlantic Ocean and deposit its contents into the depths of my intestines? The answer is simple. Cartoonists are the most sharing and kind people on the planet when it comes to spreading yeast products.

D. M. Rolfe, creator of the wonderful webcomic The Mighty Monocle wrote about spreading Marmite on his toast. Darren (or ROLFE, as he signs his name) lives in the UK, which my American education of world geography tells me stands for “unknown”. After a little research on Darren I found out that he really lives in Britain. Britain is in the continent of Europe, even though it looks like an island, and Europe is a continent that pretends it’s in no way a conjoined twin with Asia.

I actually pride myself on my English heritage. The Beals’ go way back to the early colonization of America and I’ve always maintained that I should be allowed to visit England for free on the basis that we never used our return ticket.

Marmite instantly fascinated me. If I ever make it to England, I need to be able to talk the talk and walk the walk. Surely, eating something like Marmite correctly and without hesitation would make me a part of the club. I could be leaving the airport, casually tossing a bottle of Marmite into the air, and everyone would assume I was a native.

That was my thinking when Darren offered to send me a bottle. In fact, I’m going to throw my reputation as somebody you’ve never heard of into the wind and say that anticipating Marmite was the highlight of my early Spring. Yes, I’m either extremely eccentric or extremely boring (answer: both) but I had Marmite Fever there for awhile.

Then the Marmite arrived. From England. The Homeland Of My Ancestors. I could tell it was from a different land instantly, because the date was written all funny the way they do Over There. They write the month first, then the day, then the year…or is it the year, day, month? Maybe it’s the time, year of their birth, then the day of the last full moon. Whatever, the date was on there and I didn’t recognize it.

I was in the office working when the Marmite arrived. I found out later that my wife (above) took a sneaky taste of it before I had a chance. Did I mention that their slogan is “Love It Or Hate It”? You see, Rachel (again, above) is smiling in that picture because she’s only holding the bottle and not actually consuming its contents.

Here’s my first taste, as I described it to Darren: Rachel was asleep by the time I got home, so I had to go it alone!  I was a bit …. stunned. I’m a little sensitive to salt and this reminded me of soy sauce with an additional pound of salt. My salivary glands constricted so suddenly and tightly that I might have oral bruises. My immediate thought was “My god, no wonder the English could hold their own against Hitler for so long! This is what they eat for BREAKFAST”

I’m pretty good at acquiring new tastes and I don’t give up easily. What I wound up putting it on (ever so lightly) was potatoes. I really liked that, even though there was some aftertaste. Of course, I have to wait twelve months since I used up my yearly sodium intake with that one potato, but I’m going to try  it again.

Darren told me that there are Marmite chips in England. If I become hooked on this stuff, I’m going to have a real problem tracking it down over here. I may have to fly to England, which would make for an interesting airport customs exchange:

“What’s the purpose of your visit?”

“Marmite.”

“I see.” (waves over gun-wielding officer)

I have to conclude that “Love It Or Hate It!” has to be one of the most honest slogans I’ve ever heard. It’s pretty smart of the people at Marmite, really. If your product causes a strong reaction, use it.

The real treat for us was the note that Darren attached to the Marmite. I’m a huge fan of his work, so an original sketch by him is worth a thousand bottles of Marmite (maybe I should rephrase that, depending on taste). If you feel adventurous, spread some Marmite on toast and read Mighty Monocle. Or just read Mighty Monocle and skip the Marmite. You’ll be happy either way.

What’s uniquely American that I could send Darren? I’m still struggling with that.

I inherited good teeth from my father (better than money, really), but I haven’t been to the dentist for an embarrassingly long time. In fact, I think my dentist retired a long time ago.

Anyway, I need to go. They’re in good shape, but the hull of the Titanic has probably been more thoroughly examined in recent years than my teeth. Sketching out an expected dental visit prepares me for the experience.

I hate talking on the phone, but I have to if I want to doodle bunnies.

My drawings generally reflect the tone of my conversation, too. If I’m having a nice conversation, I may draw a bunny balancing on a basketball while eating cookies. If I’m having a more serious conversation, the bunny may be holding the basketball with a scowl on his face that says, “This is MY court, so BACK OFF!”

I’m not sure how these drawings would ever be interpreted if something mysterious happened to me. Say I’m the subject of one of the many, vaguely similar forensic shows that populate cable TV like an edible fungus:

“Stephen Beals is missing and hasn’t been seen since leaving the Dairy Queen restroom with what security camera footage clearly shows is part of a Peanut Buster Parfait  stuck to his forehead.” That’s typical. There’s nothing unusual to worry my immediate family members.

But if people actually conclude that I’m missing, police will sift through my papers for clues as to what I was up to before my disappearance. They’re going to assume I was a) participating in some sort of black market bunny-fighting ring or b) very unbalanced and drawing the same small dog with a spiked collar over and over in some obsessive ritual or even c) not worth the money the police department would have to spend in finding me.

None of that will probably happen. There won’t be any mystery behind my doodles other than why I haven’t thrown many of them away.

I always see weird things when driving back from funerals. Maybe it’s because I’m in a contemplative state of mind and I’m just looking at the world in a different way, but I don’t think so. People die and I see weird things. The day my father died I had to stop the car because an ostrich was crossing the road.

This isn’t as bad as that, but it did make me just stare in wonderment.

Is that a good plug? Ok, the kids tell me I shouldn’t use the word “stupid”, but the title of the book is BookSmarts. If you’re smart, you’ll click here and immediately plop down 20 bucks before they’re gone.

Tom Racine has put together a collection of his comics and I’m just as excited to have it as any other highly anticipated book. True, I can’t purchase much these days. I have to really weigh what I buy and save my money for the things that are truly keepers.

This is one of the best strips I’ve read all year. I like simple gags as much as anybody, but Tom takes it a step further and actually makes you delve into whatever knowledge you have about fairy tales, movies, literature and more to truly appreciate the joke. In short, it’s smart humor.

I don’t want to give away jokes, but the secret behind Arthur removing the sword from the stone, Alice’s trips to places other than Wonderland, Edgar Allan Poe’s other career attempts, and fairly accurate portrayals of George Lucas’ state of mind literally had me howling with laughter.

I usually don’t howl, folks. No, what I did with these strips was read, pause, laugh, and then reread. The really great comics make me do that.

The only troubling part is that Tom describes himself as a mediocre cartoonist. If that’s true, then I’m in real trouble. In fact, a lot of us are in real trouble. Because it’s rare that great drawings are combined with such funny material. Usually a strip is lacking in one area or the other. This has it all.

If I seem like I’m giving too much praise, it’s because I get frustrated. I feel like it’s my duty to yell from the mountain top about good books. I visit a lot of bookstores, and the lousy quality of many items that manage to find themselves on a shelf for the casual browser can be depressing. Meanwhile, something as clever and well made as BookSmarts can go unnoticed.

Tom’s too busy and has too many diverse skills to make more cartoons, so this may be it for him. The competitive side of me should be happy, because I can’t compete with this, but I’ve never been able to be competitive when it comes to something I love. These are great, smart comics and I hope they stick around forever. I hope Tom’s the Herman Melville of comics and becomes assigned reading in college.

Thank you, Tom. A publisher could make a tidy profit by giving this wider distribution. Publishing something yourself is pretty time consuming and I’m very glad you did this.

Remember the old “Hooked On Phonics” commercial? “People judge you by the words you speak!” Well, I think I judge by adjectives.

Take “humdinger”. Wow, you really don’t hear that one anymore unless you’re watching old Andy Griffith reruns. But I like that word. “Man, you missed a humdinger of a time last night!” You just know the person is talking about an event where people had fun in a family friendly kind of way. It wasn’t the drunk and naked kind of fun. Nobody has a humdinger of a time at the Ozzy Osbourne concert, not even Andy Griffith.

Umptedoo. That doesn’t even show up in a Google search. How do you even spell umptedoo? “We haven’t seen her in umpteedo years!” I made the mistake of using that word in an office setting once. They all stared at me until somebody said, “Wow, you sound like my grandmother!”

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. There’s the person who did go to the Ozzy Osbourne concert. They have about five adjectives and all of them are curse words. Those words are used to describe anything from a pink dress they’re purchasing for their daughter to the act of getting punched in the stomach.

I have no problem with curse words. Let’s demystify them. No biggie. However, you can immediately judge a person who meets you for the first time and uses a string of cussing. They obviously don’t care who you are. You could be deeply religious, a teacher who avoids cursing, or a person like me who saves the cursing for the people I love the most (kind of funny how that works).

I come from the school of thought that you kind of have to figure out who you’re talking to before you unleash the hounds, but there are many who have no perception of social boundaries. We make “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs for them or get them jobs in Hollywood. The Andy Griffith show has been off the air for a long time.

Of course, you can immediately peg a comic book geek by his adjectives. Maybe it depends on the era of the comic book geek. My era was filled with “Super”, “Spectacular”,  “Amazing” and pretty much anything Spider-Man did. Later on, post-Stephen if you will, “Awesome” was used until it was banned in some cities.

But more than the obvious hyperbole, I think comic book readers have better adjectives all around. They’re just more descriptive people. I could say the same about people who regularly read books, but comics go the extra mile to punch up language.

That’s why I firmly believe that if you’re quick enough you can think of a good insult without using average, everyday, “No Shirt, No Service” curse words. One of my favorites casts me in a bad light, but I’ll let it be known.

Years ago, my long-time girlfriend Candy (not my wife) was doing something that I thought was disgusting. It’s not worth mentioning what it was, because it might seem stupid to you and it was just a way she was eating her food. I blurted out that she was a “feces-eating dog”.

Her response was classic. “What??? What am I??” I, of course, backpedaled right through the wall. It quickly became a funny joke between us. So when we were dining with a group of people we didn’t know that well, she decided to tell the charming story of how Stephen called her a feces-eating dog.

The happy table was immediately soundless. Their heads just kind of fell into a shocked, blank slate and they turned to me at the same time. Candy was laughing. We never really hung out with them after that.

I guess that means that you can come up with insults without using curse words that are still impolite to use unless you know the people you’re around. Personally, I consider that a challenge.