Professional mistakes
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The Lockhorns, 3/12/25
Why do you think Loretta is in the room with Leroy as he gets his physical? Is it just so she can do little bits like this? If I were H. Blog, M.D., the Lockhorns’ longtime and long-suffering physician, I would simply begin insisting that I would only see them one at a time, although maybe he hopes that in the process of doing bits the spouse not currently being examined will let slip important medical information. This is the first he’s hearing that Leroy’s in an underground fight club, for instance.
Judge Parker, 3/12/25
I’d like to imagine that Randy is giving this flabbergasted reaction in the second panel because, despite being a judge himself, this is the first he’s hearing about the concept of a “plea bargain.” “Wait, you mean when all those people just give up and tell me at the beginning of the trial that they did it, I’m supposed to be sentencing them to less time in prison? Aw crap have I been doing this wrong!!!”
77 replies to “Professional mistakes”
JP:
“Two years?! — reading this strip seems like an eternity!”
Lockhorns: The Doc takes one look at Loretta and concludes it’s a couples only Fight Club.
Shlockhorns – Leyroy’s joint pain comes from losing his weed connection….
JP – I don’t follow the strip, but I hope she’s phoning from Turkey….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Lockhorns: Loretta hopes that if she keeps repeating “joint” enough, she can subliminally influence the doctor into prescribing medical cannabis.
JP: The best part of this arc has been Judge Randy’s increasingly flabbergasted reactions every time a basic legal concept comes up: “You can be charged with different crimes… in different places?!?!?” I assume him growing up with no legal consequences for anyone around him meant he figured a judge’s job was to hand money to the richest person in the room.
JP: “And one of those crucial names was April. Uh, gotta go. Bye!”
LOCKHORNS: It’s an ongoing gag that the stubborn man won’t go to the doctor without the prodding of his devoted spouse. Blondie has to escort Dagwood, Lois drags a reluctant Hi, and Edda and Amos BOTH manage to undress in the exam room. The Keane family just bundles in en masse.
Emotion update: Leroy and Loretta are now capable of exhibiting some, having drained all Dr. Blog has to give.
RMMD:
“Say, ‘Officer’: aren’t you William Conrad’s ‘Cannon’? — gosh, Ozempic has really helped you!”
I take it they also leave a wet spot and a jizz towel behind.
Why is Randy holding his phone so daintily, using only the tips of his fingers?
Was he in the middle of eating a messy meal? Were his palms sweating in anticipation of this call? Did he leave his phone plugged in too long and now the battery got really hot?
The way Judge Parker time syncs with real world time, he’s right to be apoplectic. The Sun will have consumed the Earth by the time she’s released!
FC: “Who’s dat, Billy?”
DtM: Talking about free streaming is Dennis’ first step in getting Joey to wear a dog cone around the neighborhood.
MW: That second panel, legit chills down my spine. Mary gets in her bag (as the kids say) and gives us the line we’ve all been waiting for…
Also pleased that Wilbur at least stopped shoving muffins into his gaping maw long enough to reward our queen with the requisite praise, as opposed to spitting dry crumbs everywhere…
JUDGE PARKER: Why yes, this storyline has been sputtering on for about two years. Frankly I’m flabbergasted too.
H&L: Lois tsks in disdain; “Prolix”
The Lockhorns: Ah, Loretta, seems you don’t know that “joint” and “rejoinder” come from the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to join,” which gives us words like yoke and conjugal, but also jostle, joust, subjugate and jugular. Go for the jugular, not the joint, Loretta! It is your etymological destiny!
Judge Parker: “Anyhoo, this call is costing you just $75.00 in reverse charges, thanks to a predatory prison telecommunications industry! See how easy that is?”
Cthulhu’s letter of the day: J.
LUANN: So Luann’s “brilliant plan” is to give out coupons to everyone and donate the profits from this commercial establishment. Sorry, Tiffany, because this stunning astute acumen shows that the wrong person is taking finance classes (it needs to be Luann’s mom, so she can learn how to run a successful business instead of leaving it to her unemployed nitwit daughter to run into the ground.)
LUANN (2): Luann: “We’re offering a quiet area…which is easy to do since no one ever comes to this dump!”
Gil Thorp – The cheerleaders at Milford exist in a colorless void. The laws of gravity apply somewhat, and they get all their best cheers from a movie created before they were born. This all tracks.
“….hundred. Two hundred. Two hundred years. Ha ha, I’ll never have to see you again!”
Luann:
The only way this blood drive tale can be salvaged is if it attracts vampires. Someone please notify Count Dracula and Mircalla Gräfin von Karnstein.
Wary Morth:
Yes, you horrible hag, you love to give advice. Do the people you give advice to want to hear it?
Hagar: I get the feeling this gag was originally written for BG&SS but sold to the Hagar creative team. “Throw in a punch in the nose and you’re all set. That’ll be $2.50.”
MW: “Oh no no no, dear. I’LL let YOU know when you’re ready to return to it. Capeesh?”
JP: Evidently Randy was kept out of the loop on this because no one wanted him screwing it all up.
GT: That Mudlarks cheer is so stupid I wouldn’t begin to know how to snark on it.
Lockhorns: “I must be blunt, Dr. Blog, Leroy has joint pain so I thought to reefer him to you. Whatcha think the pain doobie?”
Randy is thinking of the kickbacks he gets from private prison corporations and is disgusted that she’s getting such a short sentence. Hell, he’s sent jaywalkers to the hoosegow for a decade to pay for his Riviera vacation.
Leroy’s second job as an intramuscular parasite is accidently revealed.
Blondie-“And if anybody asks the turning a cake into cake pops was our idea before those hacks at ‘Luann’.”
MW-“Therapeutic for me” Sounds like there is more going on with Mary than we know.
JP: Next week’s narration box – “Springtime comes to Cavelton, (just) two years later”
Why not? It’s not like we would have missed anything of interest in the meantime.
“Two years? How are we supposed to compete with seven seasons of Orange is the New Black if you only got two years? You’re going to have to speed-run through some penal abuse and lesbianism.”
GT: “BRR! It’s cold in here!
We’re in the arctic without any gear!
Ice and snow all around!
Or else we have no background!”
Luckily, in Judge Parker two years is the same as roughly 18 hours, so she’ll be out in no time. Or forever. I forget.
I like that the doctor is TV handsome. I like to imagine he’s actually the protagonist in an early 2000s drama about a doctor who also has a blog, because that would have been high concept at the time, and the Lockhorns are the comedy-driven B-plot patients we see for like 10 minutes every other season.
JP: The writer for JP needs to find a way to get the exposition across without making all his characters look like idiots. Did Sam represent Anne in the plea bargain? Wouldn’t Anne’s attorney communicate with Randy or the Judge, since I assume they are paying for the attorney? Why is everyone in the strip dumb?
JP: Once again Randy is flabbergasted by the idea of anyone in his family suffering a consequence.
The Lockhorns – Dr. Blog (born Blagojevich, no relation to the disgraced former Illinois governor) thought that by shortening his name and getting into the comics he would launch a media career like several famous TV doctors. Start as the recurring doctor in a widely circulated if unhip strip, expand into a medical advice column/blog, then the books and television appearances would come flowing in.
Look at that early comic Josh linked. Dr. Blog was raw, but young and full of life and promise. No joke to corny not to sell. He was happy to have an audience!
Now? Look at that face, he’s been beaten down. Outside of the daily comic, his career never really grew. While occasionally he appears in strip reprints in educational materials about doctor-patient interaction, he is reminded about his classmates who are published in the New England Journal of Medicine and other journals. They head hospitals, specialty departments, sit on the boards of medical schools, etc. His former roommate Brock “The Proc” Nesbit (nicknamed for his ‘studies’ in the art of butt chugging) is now Dean of a Top 10 medical school!
And the people he hoped to emulate? Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, and Dr. Oz have all fallen into disgrace, after years of peddling snake oil, then shifting into cynical partisan politics when they lost favor among their credible peers.
Even a pivot to being a medical correspondent to a news channel is out of the question, as budgets are cut and trust is dropping in both media and medicine.
He feels its too late to go back and try to start over again. He’s got to ride this out as long as the strip keeps going, and with the yearly decline in newspapers, he’s basically fallen into hospice care for his career.
In Mary Worth’s head, tens of thousands of Ask Wendy readers lustily cheer her every meddlesome musing and putrid platitude. In reality, tens of readers line their birdcages with it.
@Dan:
Far less depressing and cynical take than my own
@Dan: Every episode ends with him typing up that week’s cases into his blog, thinly veiled to protect medical privacy, as the credits roll.
JP: “Of course, those two years for fraud are after I serve the consecutive sentences for multiple counts of grand theft auto, extortion, embezzlement, grand larceny, forgery, and all the rest. So the copping a plea on the fraud charges will extend my sentence from 728 years to 730, but that’s a whole lot better than the full 735, I think you’ll agree!”
Dustin: “Someone doing something nice for me? That’s not normal.”
GT: Is it easier or harder to do cheer routines in the formless void?
HotC: Also Lee’s Muslim, and offering her food in the middle of the day during Ramadan would be kind of a dick move.
Luann: So let me make sure I understand this. When Kip is involved, Tiffany is unappreciated nice girl who he needs to date instead of his awful cheerleader girlfriend. When Luann is involved, Tiffany is the man-hungry trollop who will do anything to get her claws into Luann’s rightful beau. Is that right?
MW: It’s nice of Wilbur to go along with the fiction that Mary is perfectly okay with giving up “Ask Wendy” at any time, and has no intention of cutting his brake line and sending him screaming over Kelrast Curve if he ever attempts to pry it from her.
Phantom: Dial it back, Heloise. Dolly Levi thinks you’re being a bit pushy with the matchmaking.
RMMD: “He’s not Black or Hispanic, is he? If so, say the word and he’ll be shot or deported faster than you can say ‘routine traffic stop’.”
Bad news, Leroy has advanced state syphilis! At least Loretta won’t get it!
The mysterious “cake pops” of Luann make a return appearance in Blondie. Blatant attempt by Big Cake Pop to normalize their weird product in the popular imagination.
BF: If you make them mad, Tim Horton will pee in your coffee.
DT: Neo Chicago has an admirably low crime rate if Park Corpse is still in the news after all these weeks.
Frazz: Horseshit. That chicken is going to be their dinner for the next four days. In 1929 Kansas, they ain’t gonna be phoning out for Chinese delivery.
JP: Like I said the other day, Ann is a sneaky little rat.
@A Grave Mind: #12
“The way Judge Parker time syncs with real world time, he’s right to be apoplectic. The Sun will have consumed the Earth by the time she’s released!”
*See note on “Turkish prisons”… as I cue the theme from “Midnight Express”…
@Ettorre: You underestimate the level of malice in the Lockhorn’s marriage; having an STD might be the only time male Lockhorn wants to have sex with female Lockhorn.
@Cleveland Mocks: #26
“GT: That Mudlarks cheer is so stupid I wouldn’t begin to know how to snark on it.”
Snark? I don’t even know how to *translate* it…what the heck is “ICE ICE ICE”???
GT: I know I’m a day late with this, but Tuesday’s GT with its mention of “losing,” “rigged” and “empathy” made me think of someone…
@Ukranazi Stepan: And Count Morgu.
Please bring back Count Morgu.
A&J: I’m with Gus here. Why is Arlo now waffling about the move? (except to create low-grade dramatic tension) Even before the plot device baby, it’s always made sense for them to move to “the coast” to be near the kids. While we don’t expect these characters to age as we do in real life, it’s realistic for them to consider The Future as a time they may need more family support.
I’ve only read this regularly for the last five years or so, and just occasionally before that. Did they ever have jobs they went to, social or religious groups they interacted with, close friends, neighbors, other relatives? Now that the housing situation is solved, what’s keeping them, mainly Arlo, from making what seems to be the obvious decision?
@nescio: #27
Dr Blog: “Hmmm…I’ll have to weed my medical journals for more insight…but at least my recommended treatments are GRAS…”
Don Abundio, translated:
“What did you think of my performance tonight?”
“I thought it was magnificent, stupendous, a once-in-a-lifetime performance, the best you’ve ever been!”
“Too bad you and I were the only ones watching”
Lockhorns: At least Dr. Blog isn’t wearing the Universal Cartoon Symbol mirrored headband.
GT: Are those girls levitating in the middle panel, or is Jesus taking them to heaven in the rapture?
I don’t know if this says more about my ADD or the skills displayed here for droning on but there’s a lot of tldr on this blog.
GT: The Milford cheerleader uniforms were specially designed so the girls can moonlight at the mall as Christmas elves every December.
The enormous hair ribbons are also a classy touch, influenced by “Little Iodine.”
@Philip: HEY! He’s NOT ‘disgraced former Illinois governor’ Rod Blagojevich.
It’s Citizen Rod Blagojevich who swam through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side….thanks to a Presidential Pardon restoring all of his rights, including his right to again run for public office singing the praises of the godlike figure who threw out those nasty, rigged corruption witch hunts.
Luann: I’m beginning to think that Phil and TJ should hook up. They’d make a more believable couple.
@Punky Meadows: After a while, you learn whose posts you can skip over without missing anything good. And a half-dozen short comments in one post (thank you TheDiva, Horace Broon, Artist Formerly Known as Ben) are always more amusing than a huge block o’ text about Mary Worth.
@Voshkod: Could be. I also hold the hypothesis that the only reason the Lockhorns do not divorce is because the hate-sex is AMAZING
@Daisy: GT; “What the heck is ICE ICE ICE?”
Either the Milford band is doing a Vanilla Ice tribute or the crowd is calling for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement folks to prosecute the ripoff of the trademarked Clover High cheers….or they want the cheerleader in the center of the panel deported….for “reasons”.
love is… pagan rituals for the whole family.
Lockhorns-“Well at least they know how to touch a man!”
The Lockhorns: In an attempt to recapture his pre-marriage youth, Leroy has been spending his evenings at hipster bars with very young adults. The joint pain comes from drinking way too many hard seltzers, as a high intake of carbonated beverages has been shown to reduce bone mineral density in older folks. But at least he’s been making new friends — most of whom think he’s the half-real-life, half-computer-animated Grumpy from the upcoming Snow White remake.
Blondie Spanish to English.
I regret that I have found no amusing anagrams for “H. Blog M.D.” Needs more vowels.
@Daisy:
I would argue that Sweet Stan Lane and Beautiful Bobby Eaton are the ONLY Midnight Express
CS: This bus driver shortage must really be bad, if they’re hiring people who would ask “How is paying kids cash to attend school supposed to work, anyway?” The answer is literally in the question.
REX MORGAN M.D.: Police: “Call us when Beardo stabs you or something. Then we might take action. Key word: might“
Lockhorns: “Aren’tcha gonna perform the palpatio per anum soon? I wanna watch the palpatio per anum.”
FC – Formal first name – Mom’s mad. Formal first name and middle name – You’re in deep shit. Formal first name, middle name, and last name – write your will.
JP – Is there any chance of a crossover with Pearls Before Swine? This strip has much more appropriate targets for Rat’s baseball bat.
A crossover with Sesame Street would also work, with The Count saying “Two! Two!” over and over.
Mary Worth – Another case of more appropriate targets for Rat’s baseball bat. If Rat is unavailable, could someone at least slap Mary?
Mary’s smug self regard is off the charts. She is so proud of those platitudes she churns out. Seriously, does the syndicate know that Wilbur isn’t writing the column and that his neighbor is filling in? Isn’t there a pesky thing called a “contract?”
6Chix – That can’t be Melody Mare. Where are the lush eyelashes?
From Yesterthread:
Luann: “No bands! No cookies! No fun! Just a quiet area and a coupon, with money going to the Red Cross!” If Luann ever ages, she’s going to be the Evansii version of Big Nate’s dad at Halloween.
Phantom: I think Heloise has a CK account. She’s the one who posted “I think Kit should hook up with the daughter of the Nomad for more interesting storylines.” (Paraphrased)
@Liam: Re MW – Meddlegasm.
@Ukulele Ike: Re cake pops – I’ve seen cake pops at several places. A local restaurant where we go for breakfast has them. The restaurant’s owner started out as a pastry chef, so I’m sure the cake pops are good. She made the best apple dumplings I have ever had.
I had one at a different place some time ago, and it was okay. I prefer other desserts.
@Banana Jr. 6000: CS: This bus driver shortage must really be bad, if they’re hiring people who would ask “How is paying kids cash to attend school supposed to work, anyway?” The answer is literally in the question.
Judging by Cranky’s daydream, he seems to think the bus driver has to pay the kids from his own funds. I hope this is how it plays out.
LOCKHORNS: Loretta: “Of course in this case Leroy’s joint just got arthritic due to decades of masturbation.
Today’s recipe is once again brought to us by Breaking Cat News.
@Punky Meadows: Maybe, but I’m often amused by chunks of creative writing riffing off some comic or a Josh comment. (Voshkod does some nice historical pulls.)