At a poorly attended Los Angeles gallery exhibition this week of the photographs of little-known celebrity photographer Howard Busgang, one image stood out among the rushed compositions of unwelcome encounters: a heretofore unseen photograph of Marlon Brando with his head in a cast.

Today’s comic is based on an ongoing joke my wife and I have between us. Back when we were dating a million years ago, we saw several documentaries on the Apocalypse (as if a program about the Apocalypse could really be classified as a documentary). Several of the prophets of doom prepared maps of what the world would look like afterward, and one of the amusing constants was that Montana was always miraculously spared. The seas rose, the mountains crumbled, but Montana was always safe in the middle of it all, fiddling while the world burned.

Tabitha Nostrand resides in a small farming community near the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, with her partner, three cats, four dogs, a jackrabbit, and a stoat (look it up). Her day job involves repairing tractor engines. Her night job involves her partner, Glenda. Her new novella, The Sweet Dark Envelope, will appear this fall in the Androgyrotic 6 anthology from Northern Mascot Press.

Every weekend, I go to my favorite coffee shop for writing time. I hate driving there – it’s only two miles and comes with a residual guilt of being lazy, wasting gas and adding to our carbon footprint. Still, two miles is a long walk and time consuming because of all the major roads.

So I bought a bike. I figured this was a fantastic solution – I checked online and it should only take about fifteen minutes to bike up. There’s no pollution involved and this would be an excellent source of exercise. Needless to say, I was thrilled with my decision and was looking forward to incorporating this bike ride into my writing schedule.

Contrary to popular belief, and also cartoons, ants do not ruin picnics. Mosquitoes do. Ants try to eat your food, but mosquitoes try to eat YOU, which is a whole lot worse. Where I live, the summers are pretty humid, and mosquitoes rule the night, and also the evening, and also the better part of the afternoon. Its hard to enjoy the outdoors when your children are being drained of what little blood they have.