Can’t I enjoy my glass of wine and [squints] potato undisturbed
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Crock, 9/29/25
The point of this joke is of course that it’s annoying when a telemarketer (perhaps one offering you a “banking credit card”) interrupts you while you eat dinner, and what if someone a little less bound by social convention than you were to say something that might truly shock and discomfit said telemarketer? Wouldn’t that give you a delightful little thrill? Unfortunately, I feel the whole scenario is undermined by the fact that Crock is in fact depicted as a cruel tyrant who does deserve to face justice for his many crimes. Sadly, that day has never come, for every wrong he commits he commits in the name of the French imperial project, and even when the Fourth Republic collapses in the wake of that project’s failure, no French prosecutor will ever bring charges against him.
Hi and Lois, 9/29/25
I love how stricken everyone’s facial expressions are here! Oh no Dot has somehow learned about feminism somebody call the fuckin police
65 replies to “Can’t I enjoy my glass of wine and [squints] potato undisturbed”
Mary Worth Mashups: What do the dogs hear? Which Missing Final Panel seems most likely?
Family Circus: Based on Dolly’s expression, Thel’s not getting chocolate to help with her extremely premature PMS.
Hi and Lois:
“I dunno. Maybe so that they can fleece them during the divorce proceedings?”
“Dad, you mindless cynic, you.”
Crock: Fourth Republic? Please. We know Crock is one of Petain’s boys and a supporter of the Vichy regime. I hope he gets his head shaved when we take Paris back.
H&L: It goes from bad to worse when Ditto asks why he can’t be the princess.
Crock I like the little quotes around “click”, which to me indicates that the telemarketer is saying it out loud, in a kind of sassy way. It’s not the first time these two have crossed swords, and now it’s banter!
H&L Why don’t you tell them the story about the little boy and girl who were sent to live inside a giant spaghetti squash? Im a bit curious about that one myself.
Crock: The caller could care less if the Jury finds Crock guilty or not guilty of whatever crimes he may have committed. There is no credit card. There is no bank. The caller is making sure Crock is at his desk as the drone comes through the window.
“Honey, it’s because the princes actually have a chance of being elected president one day! That metaphor is super mangled, but hey, I’m a crappy father.”
Crock: You can tell that CROCK is a rerun strip, because modern telemarketers are completely undaunted by this sort of thing. They’ll just ask for the expected verdict date, and call you again the next day.
Hi and Lois:
Fairy tales can come true
It can happen to you
If you’re young at snark
For it’s scarred, you can find, to be harrowed of mind
If you’re young at snark
You can go to extremes with implausible means
You can laugh when your reams fall apart at the screams
And tripe gets more inviting with each sassing day
And drubbin’s either in your snark or on the way
Don’t you know that is worth every treasure on earth
To be young at snark?
For as titched as you are, it’s much better by far
To be young at snark
And if you should connive to a hundred, and jive
Look at all you’l derive out of being on drive
And here is the best mark; you’ll have a head spark
If you are among the very young at snark
[instrumental bridge]
And if you should connive till a hundred, and jive
Look at all you’ll derive out of being on drive
And here is the best mark; you’ll have a head spark
If you are among the very young at snark
I just keep waiting for that clam on Crock’s plate to burst into song, thus somehow making Crock cool. I will always be waiting.
The Flagstons can see the curved line encroaching in the background and hear the darnedest thing coming from Dot’s mouth. They are about to get trapped in The Family Circus and they are not happy.
MW: OK, so now what? Greta and Max draw a map in the dirt? Greta takes over Saul’s mind and begins to speak?
H&L: ” Go next door and talk to Mrs Thurston. She’ll tell you what NOT to do.”
B. Bailey: I would have thought that a broken cellphone lying in pieces on a desk would be one of easier things to draw in a comic strip. I have a lot to learn.
MW: Max and Greta both squat in a trance like state and do their business. Meanwhile, Olive thinks; “Man, I really have to go.”
Crock – A well-placed enemy of the French government, especially a Soviet agent, could play on Crock’s cruelty by faking being a flustered telemarketer and having Crock confess his many crimes thinking he’s tormenting a hapless low-level employee. This would give propaganda to the anti-Western causes and ended with Crock in The Hague on war crimes charges.
This is one of the many reasons the Soviet Unions lack for free speech and the press, especially morning zoo radio shows and their pranks, harms human rights everywhere.
Hi and Lois – Dot’s innocent question will inevitably result in Lois asking some serious questions that leads to divorce. Hi and Lois will split into two strips, with separate Hi and Lois strips sharing custody of the children.
@MKay:
That’s been tormenting me, too! I’m actually legit curious how Moy is going to have two idiot dogs convey to two idiot humans that Mary, Olive and the balloonivator (we’re keeping this) are trapped in some trees. Charades? A Stephen Hawking keyboard they find in the park under utter contrivance? And even then, wouldn’t they just type ‘woof?’
Crock:
“I’m afraid you’re confusing the American legal system with the French legal system, Monsieur Telemarketer — the latter, not the former, of which we’re dealing with in this strip. A jury doesn’t render a conventional ‘not guilty’ verdict; instead, a panel of twelve persons, three of them judges and nine lay persons, answer a series of questions from which the judge determines the result; balloting on the questions is in secret, and a simple majority vote is needed for conviction.”
“No. Don’t say it, sir.”
“Yep. This is ‘Croque,’ ‘Monsieur‘ !”
FC: Thel grows suspicious when she sees the Ks in ‘Chokolate crinkle cookies’ are all bolded.
Years later, when Dot came out as a lesbian, the family decided that, upon reflection, the signs were always there.
@matt w: Nah, Dolly would never be caught dead asking that question. Nothing approaching that sort of subversive feminism is allowed anywhere near the Keane Kompound. That’s how you can tell this isn’t the Family Circus.
H&L: “You’ll never hear little Dolly Keane asking questions like that. Now go to your room and practice your malapropisms.”
@A Grave Mind: Moy can’t possibly intend for the dogs to somehow point out a route to drive to the balloon crash, right? Good Grief, the balloon tree is in the dog park area, walkable from where Max and Greta are, isn’t it? Yet somehow also beyond the edge of cell-phone civilization and too far for people in the park to have seen it come down!
MW: Eve has become so off model that she wasn’t hit by the ugly stick but rather the entire tree. Meanwhile Olive seems to be the only person in the basket which is a perfect metaphor to her self centered personality.
@CanuckDownSouth:
It’s beginning to look that way. However, ridiculous as that is, would you rather sit through roughly two weeks of Max and Greta slowly leading Saul and Eve through the woods?
@CanuckDownSouth: The only theory that I’ll buy about the cell phones not working is that none of these morons know that you’re supposed to charge the battery. Which when you consider that every single character has no idea how a cell phone actually functions is a far more plausible theory than it should be.
Phantom Dude! Sure, we’re being startled by our coworker disappearing but watch where you’re flinging that thing, you clipped my ear!
S4th With Halloween on a Friday this year, there are fewer October weekends before it than usual. Not only are there plenty of decorations going up in the last bit of September, but locally I’ve seen that spooky attractions like farms’ haunted hayrides started in September instead of October.
And I’m pretty sure an animatronic murderous clown is now a bog-standard item you could order… yup. Spirit Halloween, Oriental Trading, Halloween Express (don’t Google it, Baja!)…
There is nothing over-the-top about Ted’s plans here. The world has finally caught up with his enthusiasm for the season!
Crock: “There comes a time when dishonesty becomes silence, that’s in Fanon, oui?”
Crock: Facebook gives me adverts from criminals selling stolen cloned credit cards worryingly often. Have we considered the possibility that the card-skimmers have moved onto telemarketing, and they hung up because they heard “not guilty” and were horrified to be wasting their time cold-calling the innocent? In their defence, if you were looking for a petty criminal in the phone directory, your first guess would probably be the guy called “Vermin”.
(Appropriately named) Crock – So…this is Hitler, and apparently there are things even Swiss bankers just won’t do. Who knew….
H&L – This is a job for the Christian Dare Program. Um…gender fluidity is bad, ‘kay….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Mary Worth – This is literally the third day in a row of showing Olive psychically attempting to tell the dogs she needs help. God help us all if Moy ever gets hired to do a Lassie reboot.
S Fox – We always knew that someday the forest animal overlords would eliminate the remaining humans who survived the Great Animal Uprising. But I never suspected Sir Hound, the most regal and civilized animal citizen, to initiate the discussion. But I guess the headless suit of armor and chipped battle ax are not so much a relic but a macabre trophy of Sir Hound’s past conquests over Mankind.
Hi and Lois: Come on, Hi: Princesses marry into high-status families to secure hereditary land rights through strategic clan/military alliances in otherwise tenuous economic circumstances. It’s either that or wait for rescue by a mushroom-tossing plumber. Did you even read that parenting book Lois gave you?
Also Crock: What, the vultures updating this strip to mine every last drop of its cultural capital and the Bill Rechin estate, but I repeat myself, had time to give Crock googly eyes in panel one but not add a phone cord?
Crock is giving the telemarketer waaaaay too much information. If a modern telemarketer knows the holder of a phone number has an upcoming court case, that’s enough infomration for them to take out a second mortgage in your name.
Something looks off with the text in the balloons
Slylock Fox-Wow! No comment on the proposed extermination for the last remaining humans?
FC-Those are special fancy chocolates.
@F M.R.: Hi and Lois
MW: Maybe we should start calling this strip Mary Sue Worth.
MW: Eve gets that horrified expression on her face every time Max goes on alert—look! a squirrel!! It’s one of the endearing habits that made Saul fall in tolerate with her.
You’re on your way, Dot, but the question is not “Why do princesses and princes?”, it’s always “Why are princesses and princes?” Viva la revolution.
***
Crock got me to thinking about it, and the only human telemarketers I hear from anymore (robocalls are an entirely different matter) are either corporations I already do business with wanting more of my money (bank, telecommunications) or scams. There’s a doors/windows/vents scam that calls all the time and sometimes I’ll waste their time, sometimes I’ll just click, but occasionally I’ll try to save them time by telling them I live in an apartment so they should put me on a do not call list and they just disconnect and I’ll keep getting calls.
Chix (sic): Sometimes the tree’s just gotta have it.
(If I had Baja skills, I’d add a pair of earbuds listening to Lola Young’s “One Thing.”)
I’m not sure what book Hi is reading to his kids. “Fairy Tails” sounds like he mixed up his porn collection with the “Fairy Tales” he should be reading to children.
G. *(&#$@! Thorp – If you’re going to do the lame H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, why not just go with “If You See Kay.” I look forward to Old Bag telling Gil “See You Next Tuesday.”
H&L – Is it the institution of marriage that bothers Dot, or the heteronormative narrative? Meanwhile, Ditto wonders why his father is reading him and his sister lame books that are several reading levels below their comprehension.
“Who do I have to blow to get some Harry Potter up in this joint”, is what Ditto is thinking.
@TK:
Hi was actually about to read them a chapter from the hit shonen manga by Hiro Mashima… which makes Dot’s question even more of a non-sequitur.
DT: Sure, why you are looking for a high voltage hook up, do you have a spare pistol and some ammo?
MW: the dog will now carefully draw out a topographical map showing where Olive, Mary and Stanley are trapped. Better yet, the dogs weird behavior lead their owners to join the search. The balloon company in the meanwhile has found Mary, Olive and Stanley. But now the dogs and their owners are lost in the woods.
Gasoline Alley: ? hairnets – that’s a fair cop.
Crock enjoys his last meal before the épuration sauvage. While tomorrow he will die for his crimes against France, tonight he will dine a Frenchman.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Mary herself is considered to be an “empath” despite the fact that her most well known quality is to tell people to do what she wants them to do. Empaths are often one of the most common Mary Sue abilities despite the fact that they’re so self absorbed that they wouldn’t know what empathy is if you smacked them in the face with it.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Olive is supposed to be an empath, too.
H&L: Wait’ll Dot figures out that Hansel and Gretel straight-up robbed and murdered that old woman.
Silly Dot! Princesses don’t need princes to be happy, but they need a male husband to sell the trad wife scam on Instagram and TikTok
@treetown: For this to work, animal telepathy needs a directional component — “Look, Max is tugging northwest now, toward the Santa Royale Remote Forest Edge™!” In which case, I eagerly await the scene of Saul and Eve working with the search-and-rescue team, drawing lines on a map and triangulating the crash site.
Hmm, I guess there’s another way it could work, if Olive is transmitting a vision of her location and the dogs have been in that part of the Santa Royale Remote Forest Edge™ and the dogs can match their eight-inches-off-the-ground memory with Olive’s thirty-feet-off-the-ground viewpoint. But that would be silly.
FC: Is Mommy hinting at the fact that baby PJ can actually write?
Lois wouldn’t know the answer, she married Hi.
Crock: You can tell this is a rerun because absolutely nobody answers telemarketing calls any more. They just look at the unknown number on their phone and swipe “decline.”
H&L: Note that the book is titled Fairy Tails, indicating this is not an anthology of familiar folk narratives and fables but a book of ethereal sprites sporting a variety of animal tails. Dot’s question is her first tentative step towards the furry community.
H&L: “Well, there are other fairy tales where the princes get married.”
@TK: We were thisclose to seeing “fursona” in a legacy comic!
GT: H-E-Double Hockey Sticks? Hey, look everybody! It’s a sports reference in “Gil Thorp!”
C’shaft: Hey, if it isn’t the author’s barely disguised self-insert character, who everybody knows and loves for some strange reason!
Dustin: Question: does Dustdad think this guy is mentally incompetent because a) he believes cruelty, abuse, and disrespect are just part and parcel of a normal marriage or b) he’s confessed to feeling “love,” an emotion as alien to Dustdad as empathy or shame?
GT: Why is the spirit of recently deceased actor and indigenous activist Graham Greene levitating over Gil’s shoulder while wearing a grandma wig and glasses?
JP: Charlotte has already figured out that Neddy is a total pushover; she just needs to pull the sad-eyed “I miss my parents” routine and it’s ice cream three meals a day.
Luann: In further proof that the designated villains are the most interesting characters in this strip, Stef reveals herself to be an expert falconer.
MW: I can’t wait for the next week of Max and Greta leading their elderly owners through increasingly treacherous backcountry, oblivious to everything but Olive’s psychic summons.
GT: Yeah, he’s quipping, but he’s also going to get fired.
Luann: “Get me a five pound dog, and a falcon”, Stefani? How traumatizing do you want to make this halftime show?
Blondie: After all, what’s spiffier than a pince-nez? It does suit him.
Dustin is not the strip I read for the drama of unfaithful marriages even if the aggrieved party is some unnamed fellow we’ll never see again.
Zits: The teacher is wrong. While it’s never too early to learn how to starve as a failing musician, the music business has plenty of advancement opportunities for those willing to make musicians starve.
FC:Billy’s dream of ketamine-spiked chocolate will have to wait til high school chemistry lab. Spoiler alert: He wins first prize at the science fair!
MW: My guess is the Dogs Who Are Good will lead the Humans Who Are Dumb to a corner where an adorable little boy in an oversized cap is holding up a newspaper and yelling “Extree! Extree! Read all about it! Hot air balloon goes missing! Extree!’
The HWAD look at each other and realize that MUST be the balloon Mary ‘n Olive were in and race back to Charterstone to prepare for the arduous search and rescue. Meanwhile the professionals have already done their job and M’nO stroll up to the condo just as the HWAD barge out laden with mountain climbing gear.
‘But… but the dogs said….’
DT: “Third door on your left.”
C’shaft: “Can we pull up a couple of chairs and listen to lengthy anecdotes about your historic career? We’ve got nothing better to do for the next five hours!”
JP: I keep scrolling down for a non-existent final panel, thinking “This can’t be it.”
Crock: I’ve been seeing Crock comics all my life, and I never knew that Crock’s mustache could react to things he says and does. I’m still unsure, however, where the exact boundaries of his face are. Even in these three panels, it changes.
H&L: Ditto, you need to get on the phone to your agent. Didn’t they promise they were going to make you “the next Bart Simpson” with your own catchphrase and everything? “The strip’s breakout star,” isn’t that what they said? Well, look at the kind of material you’re actually getting. Not good, dude. Not good.
Apparently Olive got one of those “special” COVID vaccine shots that came with an embedded 5G chip, and she’s using that to communicate with the identity chips that Max and Greta have.
(It makes more sense than anything presented so far in this story. Which is, granted, an extremely low bar to clear.)
I love how Crock has a cell phone that looks exactly like the receiver of an old school Bakelite phone. Or, this drawing is from 1978 and they tried to update it by merely deleting the cord and base.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Officer! Don Abundio just crashed into a fire hydrant!”
“Good grief! And he needs my help?”
“No.”
“He won’t let me take a turn!”