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Gasoline Alley, Herb and Jamaal, and Kudzu, 10/5/05

There’s nothing that brings out humor better than the interplay of two opposing minds! Yes, it’s the back and forth between two different points of view, and the zingers that well-formed characters can throw back and forth at one another when they’re versed in each other foibles, that really form the core of sparkling wit — nay, heart the comedic enterprise itself.

Or, you know, you could just have three or four panels of some character talking or thinking to herself, with nobody else in sight. Your call, cartoonists!

The saddest thing about this Herb and Jamaal is that, since Mrs. Herb here (I forget her name … Peaches?) spends half the comic mentally rehashing what her husband said, the comic could just as easily been written with the miserly Herb speaking for himself. And maybe Mrs. Slim (I forget her name too … Jim?) is showing some sort of meta-awareness of her soliloquy by reminding us that we’re never really alone, what with the omnipresent LORD always listening in on our conversations. As for Doris the Parakeet … well, I’ve always found it to be a good policy to say as little about Doris the Parakeet as possible.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/4/05

And yet if I walked into a police station and started shouting “THE GIRLS IN APARTMENT 3-G ARE STALKING ME, I SWEAR TO GOD” — as I would be well within my rights to do — they’d put me away. There ain’t no justice in this world, I tell you what.

Better not encourage Professor Beardopopolous, Lu Ann, as he apparently has an entire bookshelf full of enormous, folio-sized, 1930s-era ALBUMs — and since he has the arm strength to pull one off the shelf one-handed, you know he shows them off a lot. Will you still think it’s beautiful three hours from now? (“And this is what the backyard looked like in 1951, when my mother tried to plant some bougainvillea. That didn’t really work out so well…”) You may not have to pay to honeymoon there, but nothing’s free.

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Say, is there anyone out there who’s skilled in setting up WordPress and interpreting arcane SQL error messages and who’s been thinking, “I love that gosh darn Comics Curmudgeon — what can I do to make his life easier?” Well, here’s your chance. I’ve made a couple stabs at installing the SpamKarma plug-in, which everyone just raves and raves about as a killer of loathsome comment spam (I’ve had a bunch the last few days that featured the word “torture” a lot, so that’s another word that will get your comment put into a queue — sorry about that). But every time I activate it, posting a comment causes the blog to barf out a truly impressive SQL error message of some kind. If anyone would like to help me interpret said error message and possibly get SpamKarma working, e-mail me, please.

For those of you for whom the previous paragraph read like “Blah, blah, blah, blah, boring, stupid computer crap,” I apologize. Here, why not enjoy this image from yesterday’s post?

Ha, ha! Jeff has hairy arms!

Update: Upon further reflection I think I need a WordPress guru. WordPress in theory is supposed to hide all interactions with the SQL database from morons like myself. I can look at the error message and get the gist of what’s going on — there are some tables that WordPress and/or SpamKarma expect to find that they’re not finding, or that they’ve found and the permissions are wrong — but I have no idea why they haven’t been created and/or have the wrong permissions, and I’m really pretty sure that I shouldn’t be mucking around in the database directly, but rather fixing WordPress’s interaction with it (if possible). If you do know a WordPress guru, though, be sure to point them my way.

Yeah, apologies for the further dorkery. Look, the freaky Heat-Miser-hair dude from Gil Thorp has furry arms too!

(Thanks for Kevin Spencer for the cuttin’ ‘n’ pastin’.)