Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for October 05, 2017

The world is to busy focusing on politics right now to worry about rat.

Trust us, Rat, life would like very much to leave you alone.

I read that as “life is pickles and gruel.” Which would be cruel.

If your name is Rex, it is just your turn, just grab your cheeks and say, “Thank you Sir, may I have another”.

I never got that saying. “Everything happens for a reason”? So in other words, I deserve all this manure I’m shoveling through? Was I a mass murderer in a previous life or something?

Just wait till a Cat finds you, Rat.

Nailed it!

Get real, Rat, life is all about me, not you!

And some of the bad stuff that happens to us is self inflicted. Though it is so easy to blame someone or something else.

And sometimes the reason is that you’re stupid and you make bad decisions.

This strip resonates with me. I just re-read Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” It’s a story about a computer with deity-level powers who hates humanity for having created it. So it has killed every person on earth except for five people that it has made immortal just so it can torture them for all eternity. Talk about bleak….

This has been a BAD YEAR for a whole lot of people!!

To quote a wise man: “The Isla Vista shooter believed he deserved pretty women; the Alexandria shooter who tried to kill GOP congressmen believed he deserved a world where his party was in charge. The Columbine killers believed they deserved a world where they would never feel ostracized.” Truth is, it’s better to assume the world owes you nothing, because otherwise it may owe you a daily atomic wedgie.

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s only fair. It evens out when good things happen to bad people.

“…je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.” – Camus

Is any body else bothered constantly by this pop-up from GoComics asking that you turn off your adblocker the help a starving artist?

Life, it beats the alternative.

Rat’s life may reflect his feeling for only a day, and then you eat the rat poison, or get ur rear caught in a trap, and you long for the good old days. Boo Who!

Know that in life feces occurs.

We create our own luck, good or bad, by our actions (or more often our inactions.) If, for example, you get in an accident because you were texting, you can’t blame bad luck.

I’m sorry to say that your comic isn’t that funny anymore and I’ve been a devoted fan for a long time. It’s sort of repetitive and boring these days. It’s just Rat being snide almost every day. What’s funny about that? It’s the funniest when you do the Crocs and you hardly do them any more. And it’s been a very long time since you did a continuing story line. You have so many other characters to explore. Enough of Rat already!

Hear, hear rat! I know how you feel.

Rat’s understanding of life is not too subtle, but it serves his drunken purposes. Just let him brood, Goat. And rant. Rant and brood. That’s the Rat way to do Life!

What goes around, comes around.

Life is tough for all of us, Rat. Get over it.

xxx

1980’s Man should have a Che Guevara t-shirt like Ralph in “Mother Goose and Grimm” has today.

My life is cruel…but still cool!

Some confuse reason with cause. The rationale behind ‘everything happens for a reason’ is that the phrase is offered as a consolation, that there’s a justified purpose (‘reason’) behind some incomprehensible act, a purpose that is meant to remain unknown to the sufferer who is pointing out to some unfair, cruel or horrendous event. As consolations go, it’s a very weak and shallow one.