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Gasoline Alley, 1/20/24

Longtime faithful readers know that in most of the strips I comment on here, there’s at least one character upon whom I wish every ill. In Gasoline Alley that’s obviously Slim, but I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the strip’s creators also love to torment him. Why else would his plan to murder teenagers with a meteorite go awry and his house get haunted by inane ghosts? Anyway, you may remember the time he got an erotic concussion, and now we’re back to another unsettling tale of his place in our collective sexual dreamscape. His wife found a mysterious love note in his pocket that he doesn’t remember getting; could it be that Saint Agnes, who famously was to be married against her will and then punished for her Christianity by being sent to a brothel but God protected her by making her hair grow over her body and striking her would-be rapists dead, is telling Slim that his own chastity is in danger? Will his ordeal finally be ended with a knife to the throat, with eager believers soaking up his blood with handkerchiefs in memory of his martyrdom? I have frankly never wished for anything more in regards to this strip.

Pluggers, 1/20/24

Because I’m a hip young person with the cutting edge job of “blogger,” my calendar is on my computer and backed up to the cloud, but somehow I had never really thought to use the calendar’s search function before, and the other day while looking for something I discovered to my surprise — and, frankly, delight — that everything I’ve ever put in there, going back to 2003, has been retained! I can see all my quotidian appointments for the last two decades! Only today, in seeing this panel, did I realize that I have become truly one of the most unsettling beings of all: the cyber-plugger.