The Farmers’ Almanac is the real victim of the smartphone era
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Mary Worth, 4/25/26

Remember when Dr. Jeff, who’s allergic to cats, discovered that he wasn’t allergic to hypoallergenic cats, so Mary immediately got a cat? And many of us suspected that this was not because she actually wanted a cat, but was instead some kind of power move? Well, I think that instinct has been proven right with today’s strip, in which Mary is returning from a visit to Dr. Jeff’s house, on which she has brought her cat along, something that (as a longtime cat guy, I can say this with some authority) most cats would not enjoy at all, and you would only ever do it to prove some kind of point, and even then only if you were a bad person. Anyway, I don’t particularly remember Jeff having a “big house in the woods,” but I suppose the forest will make for a dramatic setting when “Trixie,” still on the run from the scam compound, bursts out of the trees and then Mary hits him with her car.
Pluggers, 4/25/26

Based on the image, I assumed that the caption on this one was going to be along the lines of “pluggers still have a basket of reading material in their bathroom” (laudatory, we as a society lost something when smartphones stopped us from reading months-old Reader’s Digests or The Big Book of Fun Facts while we’re on the can) or “pluggers still carpet their toilets for some reason” (gross, extremely gross). Instead it’s “pluggers feel the need to impose their preferences on everyone else,” which does track, I guess.
Wizard of Id, 4/25/26

Here’s today’s Wizard of Id. It’s about a witch with a terrible drinking problem! There’s not a “joke” in it per se.


56 replies to “The Farmers’ Almanac is the real victim of the smartphone era”
Hey, those three witches got mean drunk, totally ruined that Macbeth guy’s life, and Gertie just couldn’t turn it off after it was over. Consumed with guilt, THEY’RE the ones with problems!
WoI: I guess she had too many brews.
MW: Who exactly says that, Mary? Yogi Berra instructed “When you see a fork in the road, take it!” I’m guessing she and the doc self-prescribed and consumed some edibles at the forest compound. To misquote Jonah Ray, “I’m not high but my cat is and so am I!”
Hell with the toilet, who in God’s name has a carpeted floor in their bathroom? I’m just gonna tell myself that’s grass, and Andy Bear set up a toilet on the veld somewhere, with a chunk of wall, the better to depict his existential dislocation between two worlds.
WofI: There’s an recent photo floating around on Twitter or Bluesky of a matador being gored and the bull’s horn a full six inches up the matador’s rectum. Just saying this comic could have been a lot more interesting.
Gentle, Observational Humor
– A&J: quiet chuckles every day so you may get like
– BETTY: Yesterday and today, home remodeling
– CURTIS: Didn’t we all dream? Do we now?
(Kinda funny– last night I dreamed I was living inside a PHANTOM arc, it was kinda cool)
MW: Coincidentally, “The bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn” is also the epitaph on Aldo Kelrast’s tombstone.
Wizard of Id: Wizard team, we need to talk about working out how much text you need before drawing the speech bubble.
That’s…a harness contraption on the cat, yes? In the car. I assume it can be found on a website called I’m The Asshole? I’ll go classic Simpsons: “This leash demeans us both.”
Mary Worth:
So Mary has “visit”ed Dr. Jeff’s “big house” “in the woods”? — is that what the geriatrics are calling it these days?
MW: After Mary leaves Jeff at his big house in the woods, Jeff hooks up with Laura Ingalls at her little house in the big woods.
Crankshaft : Oh my gosh, the snarker’s “In the late 70s, I was invited to my first Chalk Talk where I would be one of the speakers. Chester Gould, one of my idols, was in attendance and in the front row. After I had given my Chalk Talk, Chester Gould announced that this had been the last Chalk Talk he’d ever attend, and that he was also retiring from the comic industry” was a BETTER TOLD version of the story Bat
iukTON THOMAS was trying to tell here!Like, that’s what it is! “I wanted to meet Chester Gould and talk to him, but I only ever met him once, when he was in attendance at a speech I was giving, and I didn’t jump at the opportunity because I didn’t realise at the time, but this would be the ONLY time I’d meet him before he retired, and then died.”
*************
Pluggers : Yeah, if you’re gonna do a joke about being obessed what way the toilet paper faces, you should make the toilet paper the focal point of the art instead of something hidden in the corner of the panel. And maybe bring back the Charmin Bear from April Fools Day.
*************
Wizard of Id : I thought that when a witch climbed her broom like that, it wasn’t a sign that she was intoxicated, it was a sign that she was INCREDIBLY HORNY.
Pluggers:
You’re a plugger if your reading material at the commode is back issues of National Geographic magazine.
MW: Muffin will do Olive and the dogs one better, after Mary misses the turn, crashes her car into a ravine, and must rely on her cat to get out of the halter, unlock the car door, and run back to Jeff for help.
Phantom:
Worubu began with chagrin
Decrying the trouble she’s in
But Kit got involved —
Her problem’s now solved:
She sports a coprophagous grin
Zits: I have never heard of any high school with an “anatomy class”. In high school it’s simply biology. Surprised they didn’t make this class even more specific and say it was a gynecology class.
Wizard of Id
There are a number of things I find objectionable about today’s Wizard of Id. First, while I appreciate that these witches are looking out for their friend’s overall wellbeing, they should really be talking to her about the fact that she’s drunk and driving/flying, which is a more immediate concern. Second, why is Gertie sitting on her broom backwards? Are drunk people supposed to get in their cars backwards or something? I don’t think they do. Finally, why is Gertie the only one not wearing high heels????
MW – Forget the harness contraption for Muffin. Mary doesn’t look like she’s wearing her seatbelt. Or else it’s blended in with her dress, which would mean that she’s color coordinated her outfit with the color of her seatbelt. What a twatmuffin.
MW: Smart of Mary to cut herself off before naming the author of said quote or it would have lost all credibility.
“As it’s been said
by Wilbur…”Mary Worth:
Mary displays the “10-2” position at the wheel that she insisted that Dr. Jeff’s hands be in throughout her visit.
Pluggers: Are the Pluggers, or their pets, the felines who unravel TP?
Blondie: Dagwood needs to find a new pizza place. If the box doesn’t have a stereotypical pizza guy saying It’s the Greatest!, I have grave doubts.
FC: Finding her inner Jane Jacobs, Thel is regretting the modern far-flung American suburb and kids’ organized sports, wondering why there aren’t enough kids in their own neighborhood to play a pickup game of anything.
MW: Mary never got the callback to be a driving instructor. The traffic school determined that the last thing our roads need are more teenagers who learned piloting a car via Mary’s feelings and aphorism instead of physics.
Have we ever seen Mary Worth drive a car before? Pretty sure I haven’t. On the other hand, I can’t recall her ever taking the bus or anything, either. She just… appears, wherever there’s meddling to be done. (And while I’m at it, WTF with that car? Who has an H-shaped steering wheel??? And modern cars have no place to put your purse except on the passenger seat, so how exactly does she have room for a cat in a box? Why doesn’t she have a pet carrier like a normal person??? I don’t think this artist is at all familiar with cars.)
Pluggers: …and boy, do you use a lot of bathrooms.
Mary Worth:
“Wow! — this is like John Ford’s Stagecoach,” muses Muffin.
The “””joke””” in Wizard of Id is that Gertie’s broom is backwards compared to the others, even though that’s extremely subtle and also there’s no real reason for witches’ brooms to be pointed one way or the other, the whole broom is enchanted, it’s not like the straw end is an exhaust pipe where mana waste products come out or something.
(At least this Gertie doesn’t make her whole life about broom racing.)
MW: With a heavy heart, the owner of the Bum Boat restaurant lowered the window shades for the last time and affixed the “Permanently Closed” sign on the door, after realizing that his two customers had chosen another venue for their regular recap, thereby ruining his paper-thin profit margin and forcing him into immediate bankruptcy.
WoI: “I’m not drunk. Something, something NASCAR!”
MW – “After snacking on children who stumbled across Dr. Jeff’s big house in the woods, Mary and Toonc — er, Muffin – drive home.”
MW: ??? No post-mortem? Is it so we can move directly into “Mary Gets Abducted By Aliens One Dark Night?”
RMMD: She is SO hitting on you, Mud, stop looking with horror at your plate.
(Oh, and it’s eels and snails)
WIZ: This is Boozehead Gertie. She’s obsessed with pro broom racing and pub crawls.
PLUGGERS: If one has a fluffy toilet cover, one may be unaware that cell phones exist.
Pluggers: Could a human sized toilet actually accommodate a full grown grizzly bear? The answer is probably not as their waste is much larger and there would be fur also clogging the plumbing. Also bears can easily weigh 900lbs so this porcelain toilet would be shattered and toilet paper is going to be ineffective to clean a bear’s fur covered rectum. None of this is pleasant to think about but Pluggers keeps insisting on showing these animals in the bathroom so maybe they should at least consider the logistics.
MW: I don’t know how you might finally end a long-running strip like Mary Worth, but if tomorrow Mary failed to make the next turn and went careening into the ocean, I would be ok with that.
Pluggers are anal when it comes to bathroom preferences
I’m wondering if Brigman got a cat and just can’t resist drawing all the accessories. I won’t defend the plotline of taking the cat everywhere, but when it comes to the art…
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: It’s a double colourist error – look closely and you see that Brigman drew lines for the belt across the window back to the attachment point as well as across Mary’s torso. Colourist flooded the ones against the window in blue and against the torso in mauve. Or Mary has a transparent plastic safety belt – a newly-approved material we can only hope will horribly fail because they didn’t properly test how it would rapidly degrade in cars parked in the California sun/heat!
@Twinkles the Elf: The steering wheel is a circle with the “crossbar” part, it’s seen somewhat from the side and the full arc is a bit off-panel but you can see some curvature at the bottom.
As for where the cat is, it’s the usual console where the cupholders go. Lots of cars have them.
Plugging — Another submission from Indiana, PA? I call schenanigans. . .
@A Grave Mind: Way back at the turn of the millennium one of my grad school friends rented an apartment with a carpeted bathroom floor. We all agreed that was the worst design issue amongst all the cheapo rentals we knew of, but I think it was A Thing back around the 70s and I’d assume some of those persist to this day.
@Anonymous: On CS – I can make it even better: ‘Because I’m a coward, this was a non-event I learned nothing from which I’m now desperately trying to spin into some kind of folksy learning opportunity.’
JP: Okay, *fine*, Santy Bogdan isn’t dead. But he better have movie amnesia or else be about to shout ‘Behind you!!’ when they rip that stupid gag off his face.
MW: Is this going to be a remake of “Harry and Tonto”? Did Mary pack an electric blender?
H&L Since Comics Time has now shifted the Thurston marriage from 20-some years back from the 60s, the 80s, the 00s … to now 25 years ago in 2001, the joke can no longer be divorce is disastrous / practically unheard of in our social strata, so we’ve grimly gotten along with each other for a quarter-century rather than upend our lives in unthinkable ways but instead must be we married in the aftermath of 9/11 figuring we needed to band up with someone – anyone – to survive the dangerous new world and our own personal assessment of the world has never backed away from Defcon 1, we literally have been dodging terrorists, wars, and plagues and are so exhausted that we’re discussing not fighting back on the next wave and just … let it happen, y’know
DT – Oh no! This is the part where we find out Mumbles is a Thomas Batton fanboy isn’t it?!?!
MW – Awwww. Mary misses Aldo Kelrast too.
I don’t need to change the direction of my TP – it’s always over the top because I am not an unhinged lunatic.
Pluggers toilet decor always has fecal ridden carpet on them
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: What did you call her?!?! Do you really want her showing up at your door with a basket of those? How will you explain it to Madame Ovary?
“Hey honey, remember how you said you wanted to eat out tonight?”
MW: “Big house in the woods” sounds like the combo health spa sanitarium where Dr Jeff dupes his rich clientele with bogus wellness cures. Mary heads home after administering the yogurt enemas.
MW: You know, I think Josh is right here. There’s no reason for the abrupt shift from Harv and Sharon “re-connecting” to Mary driving, unless Mary’s going to
run overfind John “Loose End” Long in those woods. I wonder if she’ll drag him to Harv’s apartment so she can do a victory gloat — “I was right, your ‘Trixie’ was a scam!”@CanuckDownSouth: You make Thirsty’s drinking almost. . . explicable.
Pluggers: When the purple fungus in your bathroom gets ankle deep, grab the TP and run into he woods.
@Hibbleton: Does he insist on doing the kale douches himself?
@CanuckDownSouth:
That is crazy. And really gross. I wonder. The house I grew up in was 70s as all Hell (avocado green toilets, anyone?), mercifully the bathroom floors were still tile. Yes, there was a room with orange carpet.
MW: On the way home, Mary explains in her own way that she got “bended” by Dr Jeff —and she’s happy about it. Not sure what “failing to make the turn” means in that context unless she’s referring to the Doc’s previous wet noodles.
You’re a Plugger if you suffer from severe obsessive compulsive disorder.
Mary went to the Big House to gloat at Jeff, who’s in the Big House for running a pig butchering scam centre. “I needed the money to buy a container ship sized yacht in the hope that it would finally make Mary say yes,” he said, as police led him away.
Mary fails to make the turn, runs off the road, and accidentally runs over Trixie, who’s hiking across the countryafter getting away from his captors. She takes him home to meddle him back to health, but he’s sinking fast until Hardy Har Har pays a visit. As soon as Trixie sees the ascot, he asks for $200000 for spinal fusion surgery, takes it, jumps out of the window (softlanding on Wilbur who is stalking through the shrubbery as usual), and runs off, looking for a better strip. Unfortunately, his frantic sprint merely takes him to Glenwood and the clinic of Wrecks Moregone, Emm Dee.
Murky Tail:
Wise choice, Mark. Once Bill gets through with telling you what he thinks of your attempt to get his publication sued for libel you won’t have the get up and go for Cherry anymore.
Nooooooo, Mary! You’re a Baby Boomer, don’t you remember what happened to Christine Hinton?
Wrecks Moregone:
Well, this Jordan fellow is like the country, and he’s going to double his prices as soon as he discovers that Mud wants to be a regular. Ain’t nobody got time fo dat.
MW – Today’s Mary Worth secret bolding message: CHANGES NOT MAKE. Yes, change is bad! I’ve never felt so validated by Mary Worth before.
@A Grave Mind: Our basement was red shag with *dark* wood panelling, Harvest Gold washer/dryer, but thankfully no carpets in the bathrooms!