Post Content

Mary Worth, 2/12/14

It looks like Mary’s encounter with a sad divorced woman and her child was only a warm-up meddle; she merely anonymously paid their dinner bill and moved on. No, Wilbur is about to put her back in the professional syndicated meddler game by once again begging her to take over his Ask Wendy column/persona. You might recall that, after Wilbur had a near-death experience, he started a column about how shlubs like him survive true horrors despite all logic, and so handed his advice column off to Mary, who naturally was driven mad by the power and influence it afforded her. Less than a year later, though, Wilbur had the nerve to eat Mary’s sandwiches but then ask for the column back, to distract him from the fact that his girlfriend had dumped him to spend more time with her meth-addict ex-con son. Mary acquiesced, but now Wilbur is trying to get her to take the column over again, like she doesn’t have anything better to do, which obviously she doesn’t, but still, it’s the principle of the thing. There have been hints this week that maybe Iris is back in Wilbur’s life, along with her amazing drug-dealer son, but we’ve been teased with the prospect before, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/12/14

By the 10th century, the Vikings had expanded their trade and plundering routes across a remarkably wide stretch of the globe, with Norse voyagers reaching Greenland in the northwest and Constantinople in the southeast. But it’s true, they traveled almost always over water, whether the open ocean in the case of the North Atlantic or the Russian river systems to reach the Black Sea. So, yes, Honi, the Mongols, landlocked deep in the Gobi, are probably not going to encounter any of your kinsmen, and thus are not included among your potential romantic partners. But what about the Finns? The Franks? The Inuit? The Celts? The Rus’? The Byzantines? The Bulgars? The Northumbrians? The Saxons? Why do we always want what we cannot have?