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Gil Thorp, 9/6/19

There’s an old joke/parable about a guy who’s trapped on his roof during a flood. As the waters rose, not once, not twice, but three times rescue boats motored by, but each time the man refused help, saying, “The Lord will provide.” Eventually, the waters rose up over the roof and he drowned, then found himself face-to-face with the Almighty. “I don’t understand!” he said. “You said you would provide for me in times of trouble!” And God replied, “Hey, I sent three boats.”

My point here is that just about every Gil Thorp plot involves Gil and/or his student-athletes and/or the Milford athletic department getting into a big mess, throughout which Gil just smirks smugly and reassures everyone that everything will work out for the best, and it usually does, thanks either to someone else doing most of the work or pure dumb luck. So you could see why Gil is serenely confident at this point that the Lord, or whatever the philosophical equivalent of an omnipotent deity is for a syndicated comic strip, is working tirelessly to rearrange reality in his favor. Unfortunately, when other people who believe they have free will turn out to be part of the Lord’s inscrutable plan, you can see how they might start to feel a little cranky and unappreciated after a while! Anyway, I hope this ends with Marty trying to rent B/Robby’s billboards to say more mean things about Gil, then finding out how much that costs, then just resorting to using WDIG’s photocopier to make a bunch of signs about how Gil is a jerk, which he’ll tape up on utility poles all over town.

Mary Worth, 9/6/19

Oh, man, communicating with a potential beau outside the internal SilverDaters messaging system is not recommended, both because it reduces the time-on-site metric SilverDaters uses to quantify customer engagement and because it reveals your real name and email address, opening you up to identity theft or whatever. I’m guessing that this latter route is where this storyline is going; this is going to make it awkward that Mary herself encouraged this online dating thing, since the final lesson will be that, once again, the internet is only good for desperate loners who deserve all the suffering they get. To counteract this negativity in advance, I would like to praise the SilverDaters user experience engineers who realized that an extra large font would be best for their targeted customer demographic.