'The Oatmeal' is Better Than Breakfast

The Oatmeal is a brilliantly whimsical, yet oddly informative comic website by Seattleite Matthew Inman, a web designer, developer and online marketer by day. "He subsists on a steady diet of crickets and whiskey. He enjoys long walks on the beach, gravity, and breathing heavily through his mouth. His dislikes include scurvy, typhoons, and tapeworm medication," says his About page.

We first discovered The Oatmeal when we were sent a page entitled Seventeen Things Worth Knowing About Your Cat (excerpt above). Other surprisingly educational tidbits in that piece include "Your cat purrs at the same frequency as an idling diesel engine" and sketches of a couple of famous cat lovers and cat haters.

Intrigued, we continued through Inman's web of clever cartoons, including The Nine Types of Crappy Handshakes,

Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin,

and Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur Off Crack Cocaine.

The vaguely educational jokes remind us of reading the backs of cereal boxes in the morning as kids — only this delivers dry, matter of fact humor with every bite, at just the right pace for the morning.

We asked Inman, whose cell phone ringtone is the Banana Phone, what the purpose of site is. "The purpose is the site to enable me to make comics for a living meanwhile giving everyone great big lolcanic eruptions," he replied.

And so we encourage you, readers, to bookmark The Oatmeal and visit there in the AM to see if there's anything new. Everyone needs a little more weirdness in their day. Start it off right — and help this talented guy his comics seen.

Images from TheOatmeal.com used with permission of Matthew Inman.