I’m Tgreen, and this is Happy Friday, your one-stop shop for the same four jokes since 1995.

This week a car full of subway commuters was trapped without air conditioning for 30 minutes after a woman released a box of live roaches and crickets on the train. Fortunately, the MTA was able to leap into action because it already has a name for exactly this situation. It’s called Wednesday.

This week Speedo dropped its sponsorship of Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte in the wake of his false story about what happened to him in Rio. A Speedo spokesperson said they had no choice but to drop Lochte, because “there’s no room for a lie in a Speedo. Seriously, have you seen one of these things? There’s literally no room for anything in there, much less a lie.”

Brazilian authorities have ordered Lochte to return to Rio to face charges for making a false police report, which means he’s now facing a choice between possible jail time in Rio or a season on Dancing With the Stars. It’s a harder choice than you might think.

Former Presidential candidate Michelle Bachman announced this week that she’s advising Republican candidate Donald Trump on foreign policy. Bachman said she foresees no problem with this new job despite the fact that her knowledge of foreign policy mainly comes from a Star Trek-branded copy of Risk she picked up on the cheap at a yard sale.

We also learned this week that a 12-year-old boy is running the Trump campaign’s ground operation in Colorado. Around the campaign he’s known as the overqualified one.

Louisiana lawmakers Steve Scalise, Bill Cassidy and John Fleming, who voted against a $50.5-billion relief package for Superstorm Sandy victims, signed a letter to President Obama this week asking for a disaster declaration for their state after last week’s historic floods. They figure it will be pretty easy to get emergency funds because they don’t have to worry about any assholes from Louisiana voting against them.

Police in Western New York are looking for a man dressed in a Batman mask and Captain America  costume who stole two 18-packs of beer. And in related news, Tony Stark has apparently fallen off the wagon again.

This week the FBI revealed that 15,000 more emails that Hillary Clinton didn’t hand over to investigators will be released in October. Since more than half of them involve correspondence with a prince from Nigeria asking for money, they’re obviously related to her State Department work.

This week the price of an EpiPen spiked from about $100 to more than $600. Mylan, the manufacturer, blamed the price hike on changes in insurance, but after it was revealed that their CEO gave herself a $18-million raise last year, the company announced that it would offer discounts to customers. Which is better than their original plan — a smaller EpiPen filled with a sedative to ease the shock of the price increase on the regular EpiPen.

This week NASA announced that it had found a spacecraft that was lost in space for two years. They were able to find it when their radios began picking up a broadcast that kept repeating “Danger, Will Robinson!”

According to the Associated Press, more than half of those who met with Hillary Clinton as a Cabinet Secretary gave money to the Clinton Foundation. A Clinton Foundation spokesperson said that this was entirely unacceptable and someone was going to be fired over it, because the original deal was supposed to be for no less than 90%.

Campaign documents show that the Trump campaign paid $356 to the speechwriter who wrote Melania Trump’s RNC speech. Which means that after Michelle Obama gets her cut, the speechwriter isn’t taking home very much at all.

A new study revealed that working less might make people more productive. And in related news, it appears I’ve worked with some of the most productive people in the world.

This week former new York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told people who want to find out the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health to Google it. And let me tell you, this is a very efficient method because after you’re done looking up Hillary’s health you can catch up on the latest Bigfoot sightings.

Just be sure not to Google “Donald Trump rape”, though, because of all the information you can find with Google, I doubt Rudy wants you to read about that.

I have to say, Rudy was a lot less prone to falling for conspiracy theories back when he still had the combover. Did he keep some tinfoil tucked under that thing?

In response to recent stories that former Met and Yankee pitcher Dwight Gooden was once again doing cocaine, the New York Yankees offered to pay for his rehab if he would only get help for himself. The Mets wanted to help too, but they told Dwight he’d have to see if Bobby Bonilla had any spare cash to give him.

Scientists announced this week that they may have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our own. And in related news, Donald Trump announced he’s gonna need a taller wall.

They say the planet is “Earth-like”. Does that mean the people who live there are hell-bent on destroying the place and each other? Or does it mean something different to scientists?

A baby born on a Cebu Pacific flight was granted 1 million air miles in honor of the birth. No free WiFi, First Class upgrade or extra carryon bag, though. You have to be triplets or better to score that kind of swag.

And finally, this week McDonalds removed a device that tracked physical activity from its Happy Meals. Not because this was an invasion of privacy or anything like that. No, it was just that after three weeks, they hadn’t tracked any activity.

If you’ve gone anywhere near a movie theater lately, you’ve no doubt seen that superhero movies are the big thing. This summer we had Batman v Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and Suicide Squad, with Doctor Strange following this fall and dozens more on the schedule for the next 10 years or so. All this might make you think that the comic book industry is booming, but that’s not what’s happening at all. No, the comic book industry is in dire straits thanks to an aging fan base that has squeezed out the children who used to be the primary customers. Things have gotten so bad that publishers are being forced to update many of their classic titles in order to give this audience a more relatable reading experience, as you’ll see when you take a glance at…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Comic Books Designed to Appeal to an Aging Fan Base:

10. Ol’ Archie

9. Silver Scooter

8. Peter Parker, the Spectacular Middle Manager

7. The Elongated Prostate

6. The Fantastic Four Hours of Seep Before Having to Get Up to Pee

5. The Uncanny Ex-Wives

4. Plastic Surgeon

3. The Really-Really-Really-Post-Teen Titans

2. Crazy Cat Woman

1. Assisted Suicide Squad

And that’s all we have time for this week. Come back next time for the same jokes, just in a slightly different order. Until then, keep it out of the tall grass, don’t fall, if you must fall at least be sure Molly says something funny after you do it, play your cards right, don’t install anything fishy on your phone, keep your ice in your cup and not in the street, stay out of Rio jail, don’t feed anyone after midnight, admit that you would totally buy an issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Middle Manager, start your wagering about whether or not I can keep this thing going until Election Day and, as always, have a Happy Friday!

T “All-new, All-Different” green

Since I don’t know if I’ll ever do another Greetings from Shokanaw strip, but I was inspired enough to do this one last month, I figured this was as good a place as any to post it. Besides Facebook, of course, where it originally lived.

25 years ago next week, during my last semester as a senior in high school, I created a comic strip for my friends. Sgt. Suarez and his Howling Commandos was poorly drawn, crudely lettered, and barely plotted, with a title that was a huge copyright violation all by itself. It was a mix of action and comedy designed to make fun of my classmates while kind of commenting on what was going on in the world at the time. Then final product wasn’t anything great, but the period of April-June 1986 is one of those crazy, ultra-creative periods of my life, and I’m happy with what I produced back then, eye-straining artwork and all.

The reason I’m thinking about this strip now, and writing about it here in this blog, is because of the massive case of deja vu I had when I realized this was its 25th anniversary. As I mentioned, the strip included current events in between the bad jokes at my friends’ expense. And two 1986 events that got major play in the strip were the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the bombings of Libya. And this week, as I contemplate a 25-year-old comic strip, what’s dominating the news? A nuclear disaster in Japan and the bombing of Libya. The more things change, huh?

Near as I can recall, in the comic strip an invasion of Libya accidentally led to a war with Canada, and somewhere in the middle of that the title character gains some sort of super power after being involved in a nuclear accident. Hey, I said it was barely plotted, and it’s probably been at least a decade since I read the damn thing. But nuclear disaster and Libya were definitely in there.

Later this week I’m gonna have to dig out the old strips and read them so I can see how all of this is gonna work out. I could scan some of them in and post them, but they’re so bad looking I’m not sure I should. And considering some of the stuff I’ve been willing to share with the world, that’s gotta tell you how bad these really must be. And yet they unknowingly offered a peek at the future, so that should count for something.

If only I could match that 1986 level of creativity and work in 2011. Then I’d have something.

Way too much time on my hands, or fingers, at work today. I have the same resources to do this from the iPad and yet now it’s iPhone 2, iPad 0. Gotta fix that. This is probably first in a series. You’ve been warned.

Note: Neither Tgreen nor Father Reilly, God’s Angriest Servant, endorse using a firing squad to eliminate anyone from the cast of American Idol. They’re all national treasures and we wish them long lives and much happiness, and if a firing squad happened to maybe accidentally wing one of them, but not actually kill them, we would be upset but would find a way to soldier on.