Square Root of Minus Garfield is going gangbusters, thanks to readers sending in lots of cool submissions! So much so that we’re increasing the update frequency from 3 to 4 times a week. You’ll now get an extra dose of Garfield wackiness on Thursdays. Enjoy!

We also have quite a few Lightning Made of Owls strips buffered at the moment, which is good, but we want to wait just a bit longer before we try increasing its update frequency as well.

Regular mezzacotta Café patron Rebecca Curtis sent in this photo she took of an M&M smoothie. She writes:

You can’t really see the little bits of M&M floating in the smoothie, so I put some on top of the whipped cream for added visual interest. This one is made with banana, vanilla ice cream, milk (rice, soy, or dairy will work), and peanut butter M&Ms in a blender; topped w/whipped cream and whole M&Ms. I could have added some peanut butter to the smoothie, but the peanut butter M&Ms took care of that. (Mmmmmmm… peanut butter banana….. Yummy!) Oh, and make sure to use an extra width straw, otherwise the M&M bits will get lodged in a regular sized one.

One of the Café’s less adventurous dishes, but still worth trying. Why don’t you check the menu now?

It’s been … four months since we launched a new webcomic. Far too long! So here’s a new comic for your delight and adulation: Awkward Fumbles.

This is following the concept started by Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) with his comic Whispered Apologies. The premise of Whispered Apologies was that anyone could send in an original comic strip without dialogue in it, and Ryan and his friends would write something clever to make it fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, Whispered Apologies suffered an untimely demise… until now! We’re resurrecting the concept right here on mezzacotta.

So if you have a hankering to create a cool comic strip, but no idea what words to put in it, send it to us and let us do the hard work for you!

Ha, we are so awesome - we have pulled off the greatest April Fool’s Day stunt ever. We very quietly removed every mezzacotta comic and replaced the entire archive with completely new material! Yes, that’s over 3,652,425,000,000,000 comics. Every single one of them removed and replaced with an entirely new, original, never-before-seen comic.

How awesome is that? This was no doubt the biggest April Fool’s Day website prank ever perpetrated. We removed over 180 million terabytes of data. Not only did we remove it, we replaced it, with all-new data! The comics were essentially from an entirely new, fictional universe. Astounding!

Imagine if all of xkcd was removed, and replaced with hundreds of brand new never-before-seen xkcd comics. Imagine if all of Sluggy Freelance was removed, and replaced with thousands of brand new never-before-seen Sluggy Freelance comics. That would be staggering! We did more than that! We replaced quadrillions of comics!

Unfortunately, it seems nobody noticed.

No further explanation needed.

The buffer of submissions for Lightning Made of Owls has slowly been being whittled away by our relentless five-a-week update schedule. To give the buffer a chance to recover, we’re changing the schedule to three updates a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully this will better match the ongoing rate of new submissions.

And in case that’s too subtle a hint: We need more submissions! Unleash your comic creative urges and send us your results!

1. When it rains lightly and variably, so the amount of rain on your car windscreen changes all the time, you have to keep fiddling with the wiper controls to ensure optimal clearance of rain from the screen, without having the wipers flapping and scraping the glass when it’s not really necessary. Why not remove the screen altogether, so it doesn’t get wet! You could have the windscreen retractable like the side door windows, and simply wind it down! You could even do this on a nice day just to enjoy the fresh air!
2. Cars should be able to communicate with one another. You could put infrared receivers and transmitters on all cars, and send signals back and forth. Control signals. If the guy in front of you leaves his turn signal on, you can switch it off for him! If he’s driving stupidly and you want to yell abuse, wind down his window first so he can hear you! If his hip-hop music is too damn loud, turn it down!

Yes, I did a lot of driving today.

We have launched the shiny new mezzacotta shop at CafePress. We’ve taken some of the all-time highest rated mezzacotta comic strips - and a few personal favourites of our own - and placed them on shirts and mugs for your purchasing pleasure.

We are selling all products at CafePress’s production cost price, plus US$1.00. We will donate the $1 markup* from every product purchased to The Jane Goodall Institute. You heard that right, folks. We are not making any profit whatsoever from this - it is entirely for charity.

[* i.e. We will not deduct any of CafePress's fees. We bear the entire cost of the fees and guarantee that we donate an unadulterated, full, complete, whole, every last red cent $1 for every product sold.]

If you have a favourite strip that you’d really like to buy but isn’t in the store, drop us an e-mail and we’ll add it.

Yep, we’re unable to resist the gleaming piles of cash any longer. We’ve started selling banner ad space on mezzacotta. You’ll see some of the fine products which are supporting mezzacotta at the top of the page.

We know ads suck, but we’ve very carefully selected advertisers we think will appeal to our readers*. So please consider supporting the advertisers with your hard-earned bucks. If you don’t, we’ll have to think about running huge animated graphics to catch more attention and dynamically modifying the ad space URL directory to get around your ad blocker.

* Or who are willing to pay extra.

And indeed she has been. Rebecca Curtis presents: peachy chops. She writes:

I chose pork chops rather than mutton chops. It came served atop mixed Chinese-style vegetables artistically placed upon a bed of black soybean pasta. The flavor was is the range of “sweet and pungent” - I could taste a hint of ginger that nicely complemented the peaches.