Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 16, 2020

That’s even worse than a broken home.

What a crappy story.

Have a home is something , for a pig . At least is not a pigpen .

Really more of a broken sty…

Pig heaven!

Reminds me of the line from Trading Places:

“You’re from a broken home of course?”

“Yeah, it was broke. So what?”

And that about as far as Pig ever gets talking about his childhood.

I lived for awhile where there wasn’t even a toilet at all. And the shower was outside. Lot of fun, actually, but not entirely conducive to getting a lot of work done: Chores eat quite a bit of time.

Happens with outhouses.

So he grew up in a pigsty, big deal.

Never would have happened in my family. Dad was a plumber.

Goat, you spoke too soon.

Outhouses, “The Unflushables”!

’Reminds ME of the late great Carrie Fisher – describing HER broken home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4bv9ZTSnLE

And as Kurt Vonnegut is wont to say:

Hi Ho

I thought Pig was raised in a barn.

I’m sure “pipe down” had a completely different meaning for Pig in his childhood.

Goat your turn to spill the beans . Were you a good little goat ? ;-) … Croc Power !

He was like a pig in $h1t.

Pig’s backstory is so sad…

Pig needs help! Everything is literal to him.

It looks like, of the two of them, only Pig has coffee. If you look closely, you can see the tip of the teabag on Goat’s mug.

Down here in eastern North Carolina, 9,000,000 pigs live indoors, their waste flushed through slats into open pits called lagoons. If you want to lose your appetite for all pig products, come by for a visit on a hot summer day. Or come by after a hurricane, when the lagoons have flooded. Or when it gets sprayed onto pastures as fertilizer. Industrial farming is unimaginably different from a family farm.

Pig’s dad did not want to have his plumbing fixed.

A total nightmare.

Be careful when drinking coffee and talking about a broken home when standing a few inches away from the edge of a cliff.

Stephan occasionally likes to invoke the song “Cats In the Cradle” in his work, so I thought it appropriate to take a moment to remember the man who wrote and performed the song, Harry Chapin. He was killed in a car accident 39 years ago today, at the age of 38. In addition to being a singer, he was an anti-hunger activist – in fact, the people behind “We Are the World” have cited him as an influence on that project. Perhaps if you are moved to do so, you might pay tribute to him by making a donation to the anti-hunger foundation he founded in 1975, still active today, at www.whyhunger.org.

The epitaph on his headstone, from one of his songs:

“If a man tried / To take his time on Earth / And prove before he died / What one man’s life could be worth / Well, I wonder what would happen to this world.”

I swear there are more cliff edges in comics than in real life.

Did the toilet have a fingerprint reader that doesn’t work with goat fingerprints?

We lived with no indoor plumbing for several months. Not fun. We didn’t even have an outhouse. Thankfully it was during late Spring and Summer so the bushes could hide you. Just watch out for the poison ivy. Yeah, that hellhole our parents moved us to scarred all 5 of us for life.

Pig isn’t that wrong. That’s a pretty good example of a dysfunctional Family to me.

So Pig was housebroken?

I was in a nursing home like that for a while.

Pig never talks about his childhood because he quit high school, whereas his four older brothers went to Notre Dame, Harvard, Clemson, & Grambling State. Unfortunately they went as footballs!

Sounds broken to me.

I’m housebroken.

Of course. He lived in a pig sty

Tolstoy I believe said that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Pig’s unhappy childhood was unhappy in its own weird, literalist way. He has his reasons for not discussing it.

Sounds broken to me, Goat. You are too caught up in idiom.

Sad story, Pig. Hope your family found a plumber….

We had to turn on the hose to fill the tank after flushing the toilet. It was a very old house

Sing along with the Tree: I was broken from a young age Taking my sulking to the masses,