Friday is for drugs
Post Content
Wizard of Id, 10/3/25
It absolutely makes sense that people hear “New York” and think of New York City — the city is a world cultural capital, is the economic engine of the state and indeed much of the country, and a majority of the state population lives either in the city itself or its immediately adjacent suburbs. Still, when you grow up (like I did) in a very different kind of city that happens to be at the complete opposite end of the state, you get a little whiplash when you hear about things happening in “New York.” For instance, when New York legalized marijuana for recreational use, I was already living in Los Angeles, another megacity that was ahead of the curve on that one, so the idea of people in Brooklyn or Manhattan being able to buy weed at some high-end hipster dispensary absolutely made sense. But legalization was a state decision, not a city one, and going home to the Buffalo area and seeing janky stores in suburban strip malls near where my parents live named things like “The Devil’s Lettuce” was significantly weirder. Anyway, that’s kind of how I feel about newspaper comics doing weed legalization jokes. This topic belongs in alternative comics on the seedy internet! Not in the newspaper in front of God and everybody!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/3/25
I was trying to imagine what hedonistic and shocking activity the assembled Ameripolitans would be engaged in when Rex and June turn around and sneak back to the wedding as it gets later and wilder to see if they can make off with enough wedding cake to satiate their greedy children. Honestly doesn’t seem like an orgy crowd, but maybe … cocaine? Hard rocking country musicians, many of whom are older guys who probably came of age in the ’80s … they’ve moved on from booze to coke at this point, right? Never mind what I said up above about the Wizard of Id, I’m a blogger on the seedy internet and I’m allowed to make these jokes.
Mary Worth, 10/3/25
Damn, Mary, can’t you just be pleased and satisfied that these dogs Incredible Journeyed it here to see you? Do you need their drippy human owners to show up too? Why is nothing anyone does ever good enough for you?
150 replies to “Friday is for drugs”
MW:
“But I don’t see Saul or Eve!…OMG — it’s the Amimalocalypse ! They’ve devoured Saul and Eve, and now they’re coming for us!”
Wizard of Id:
“Ow, wow! — look! I’ve conjured a classic Slylock Fox tableau, with random, disconnected and fractured things strewn all over the place!”
Mary Worth Mashups: I added a few more panels to amp up the drama a bit. Which do you prefer?
“Neither of us were ever in the entertainment business”–we know, Rex, we know!
RMMD:
“Neither of us were ever in the entertainment business, though!”
“Oh, I don’t know, Rex. I’ve always thought that you consider all those sigmoidoscope probes of yours to be pretty entertaining!”
MW:
“Max! Greta! Go cross-panel and get fellow comic strip character Krypto, from Superman, right away! I mean, there’s no way you can jump this high to retrieve us, and you can’t fly, but he can!”
MW: Stanley asks if Max happens to have one of those brandy casks around his neck.
@Baja Gaijin: The first one is excellent—although I do like a good bomb now and then.
Id: “This topic belongs in alternative comics on the seedy internet!” I disagree. It belongs in Alice, which is for square newspaper comics and seedy alternative comics what the Rosetta stone is for Ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
RMMD: When I see “the entertainment business” in bold as an obvious euphemism like that, I don’t think of roots rockabilly Ameripolitan. I think of stripping and/or porn. It makes sense that Rex and June aren’t involved – I don’t think there are any boredom fetishists hardcore enough – but I dread to think about what Mud Mountain videos are like.
I appreciate your honesty at least.
Wizard of I’d: At first glance, I thought the wizard had conjured up a panel from “Alice.”
MW: Loath as I am to find fault with The Amazing Olive, her telepathic message should have been, “Get help.” Now she has two cheerfully clueless dogs waiting for a treat, while their antediluvian owners have long since collapsed in the woods.
MW: Just in time, too. Judging from P2, Mary is down to her last gummy.
The fact that Olive was consciously attempting to reach Max and Greta, and there are four other humans to confirm what happened, makes me wonder what kind of quote about life’s mysteries/shutting the fuck up when the reporters arrive Mary is going to have to deploy to prevent this strip switching genres to sci-fi like the Funkverese did.
MW: Meanwhile, several miles away, Saul and Eve speed toward the vast, dense forest as they frantically scan their surroundings looking for Max and Greta, but instead of the dogs, they spy some Golden Arches, remember they have some senior discount coupons in the glove compartment, and decide to stop for lunch and a Big Gulp.
Realistically how many miles (if not *tens of miles*) would these dogs had to have run to get from a suburban dog park to forest in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception? Any Santa Barbarans here who can provide insight? These dogs are basically Olympian-level athletes.
RMMD — It’s hard to imagine a more smug, condescending, and self-congratulatory conversation than the one the Morgans are having in the first panel. It’s sort of compensated for in panel two where Rex is glumly realizing that he’ll never hear the end of not bringing back cake for his demon spawn.
Oh, did you think he was going to go back to the reception? No way is Rex Morgan going to inconvenience himself, especially at the late, late hour of eight o’clock. . .
MW: to tone down the criticism of Olive, what I f I foresee she will go to Tanzania as a young woman to study and live with primates? Jane G apparently had a special bond with animals too. Note, Mary and balloonivator are still fair game.
BETTY: Mom, get your fricking feet off the freekin’ furniture! And does anyone know what Bubba is referring to?
MW: Luckily, Saul shows up in the all-terrain electric wheelchair he keeps in his trunk. Wide-eyed, Mary shields Olive’s view from Saul’s erection when Eve gets off his lap.
MW: The forest doesn’t look as dense (gulp!) as Saul said. More “parklike” from what we see today, with wide grassy stretches between the trees. At least it will make it easier to take the puce Buick off-road for the thrilling rescue.
@Charterstoned:
#11. I see your machine has as hardcore “I” autoincorrect as mine.
Wizard of Id: Why did you agree to legalizing this stuff, you ask? Because your core readership is aging and needs groovy patterns, man, for their crippling arthritis, glaucoma and chemo side effects, that’s why! (Also, the one dude called you a fink.)
RMMD Pfft! Just swing by your local Big Chain grocery’s bakery and grab one of those large single cake slices – they usually have white with white icing – and not only will the kids be none the wiser, it’s probably better than whatever the diner came up with!
You don’t see Saul or Eve because they’re trapped in the wreckage of their car, which Saul failed to drive through a tree. Next.
Wizard of Id, alt joke: Why did you agree to legalizing this stuff, you ask? Well, if you’re like most local governments, it was to increase tax revenue and redirect policing away from petty drug dealers to important stuff. You know, mid-level drug dealers and tamping down protests.
WoI: Is “that stuff” drugs or just dark magic? I always wondered why a (presumably) Christian king would permit such blasphemy in his court. Oh, right: money. Carry on.
RMMD: Ha, just look at Rex’s change in expression between those two panels. He is absolutely crestfallen at the thought of interacting with other people again this evening. Seriously June, you should probably be the one driving back or you might find yourselves ‘accidently’ in a ditch beside the highway.
MW: /Olive uses her psychic powers to see a horrific image of Saul and Eve being devoured by a bear/ “Uh…they’re fine, probably…”
@Activist: Huh. Didn’t notice that. I don’t often comment on that strip, but will probably miss it again next time. ?
WoI: I don’t get the point of the pitchforks. Are they part of the Wizard’s hallucination or has the revolution finally come? (Or do they just want some of the Wiz’s stash?)
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV:
I was going with the idea that the King legalized it because he thought the peasants were going to become too stoned to be revolting, or at least to put up a fight against his troops.
Instead, it turns out all his loyalists are blitzed out of their minds while the angry mob is stone cold sober. OOPS!
The irony is that the King of Id thought that legalizing weed would mellow out the hordes of angry peasants. Instead, they’ve just added “excessive excise tax on cannabis” to their list of grievances.
MT So instead of correcting Cherry that she’d be reporting about the hunters, not becoming one, the editor is equally deluded that the two are the same thing. Makes you wonder how they have any news reports about illegal activities in their world.
Curtis *Is* this canon? Barry was skipped a grade ahead of his older brother (minimum two grades even if they’re barely a year apart in age, but based on how they act, it’s more than that)?? You’d think it would come up in the strips with school stories all the time (like the bullies teasing Curtis about his wee little brother in the grade above them?).
Mary Worth: “But I don’t see Saul or Eve…” That’s because they’re both like 4’10” and struggling to raise a ladder below you, lady. Be patient!
Pluggers don’t like waiting rooms. No one else can say that.
MW: “I don’t see Saul or Eve, but wait!. Oh, there’s the top of Charterstone roof and the parking lot. I can see my car. To think, we were home all the time and didn’t realize it. My, oh my, now there’s a life lesson for you, Olive. Olive? Olive? Oh, you are already down and almost at the parking lot.”
@But What Do I Know?: It’s hard to imagine a more smug, condescending, and self-congratulatory conversation than the one the Morgans are having in the first panel.
Clearly you haven’t read Crankshaft yet.
@Gareth Klieber: The fact that Olive was consciously attempting to reach Max and Greta, and there are four other humans to confirm what happened.
They can’t confirm the important part. All they know is that these dogs ran to them when they needed to be rescued. There are all kinds of stories like that floating around the Internet pet-stories-o-sophere. None of them are attributed to a teenage girl being really, really special.
WoI – The Devil’s Apprentice – Your Fired!!!
RMMD – Famous last words – Let them eat cake….
MW – Ida Know…maybe if it was Andy from old school MT, I’d take some comfort, but not this pair….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
The King should be more worried: the Wizard has been recruited by theOrder of Assassins with the lure of hashish! Soon he will kill Christian Monarchs that threaten the Ismaili faith! On the other hand, if the Assassins think Id is a threat to them, maybe they are not very competent. Must be the hashish
Look at his face. Rex is miserable that he has to interact with his children now instead of setting down some sugar-laden treats and retiring to his den. This is a man who certainly has a den and not some nonsense like a “man cave”.
***
Look at her face. Mary is just now realizing that Olive’s psychic powers are very real but terrifying in the hands of an absolute doorknob who didn’t think of maybe for calling for human help instead. Well, once this is over that’s going to be a problem for the scientists at the CIA black site the girl will be spending the rest of her life in, Mary will be washing her hands of this whole thing.
MW: Yesterday Josh commented on the ” vast, dense forest, with no cell reception” where the balloon has crashed. Yet Greta and her tiny little dachshund legs got to the crash site in about ten minutes, which both suggests that it is in fact a postage stamp of a park near the condos, and that Saul is simply lost and taking the long way around through Laguna Beach to avoid that big, busy intersection out by the Costco.
GT: “Adam Schefter here. In NFL Transactions, the Indianapolis Colts instantly traded quarterback Daniel Jones to the Milford Mudlarks in exchange for Torch, no last name ever given, after Leo Atazhoon (number 4) was injured while wearing number 5’s helmet. Sources hope that some ice will be enough to get Leo back in the game once his headache subsides and he dons his actual helmet, as number 5 has a small head. There is confusion, however, as the medevac helicopter usually stationed at Mudlark games has been replaced by a nurse on-call. We’ll get back to you when Nurse Twill gets through traffic. This is Adam Schefter, ESPN News.”
RMMD – Remember when comic books used to have ads with Spider-Man™ hawking Hostess snack cakes and fruit pies? Well, whichever ad agency has that account has decided the comics idea was good, but the approach needs to be WAY less exciting. You get a
big delightmild pleasure in every bite!“Max! Greta! And you brought friends! Lots of friends! Big doggies! Or are those wolves? Big . . . wolves? Wargs? With goblins on their backs? They’re singing a pretty catchy tune about burning birds in trees? Oh, my. Mary, you’re pretty grey, do you think you can channel your inner Gandalf right about now?”
Dustin A strip where everybody’s mission statement is the same: “Always be an asshole.”
Crankshaft:
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“On a Friday? Wouldn’t think of it.”
(h/t Walt Kelly, who knew how to use the word funny in a comic)
FC: Daddy Keane misses the opportunity to put Jeffy on the carousel and not claim him.
Zits: “And this Coach Thorp guy is pretty cool!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Phew! This heat wave is unprecedented!”
“And the air conditioning is off because the power grid is overloaded!”
“The whole city is suffocating! What can we do?”
“I own a private beach…”
“Now, to business… How to profit from these conditions!”
MARY WORTH: As if their dumbass human owners are going to do anything other than look expectantly toward their dogs for advice.
“But I don’t see Saul or Eve.” TFW the play about the Old Testament you bought tickets for is a very loose adaptation and frankly quite bad
RMMD-Hey, folks, remember this guy? The guy the comic strip is named after.
MW-“Oh, thank me,” Mary says.
MW-Saul and Eve came across a Rusty Trail and are now taking it fishing.
MW-And then with a loud engine roar Saul and Eve come plowing through the trees.
FC-Jeffy, you are the sort who would grow up to make “alligator” skin suitcases.
MW:
Moy puts down her sitar and explains:
This story appears to take place in an impossibly small area; but in the quantum world, all places are the same place. Only in Newtonian physics does that place seem large.
She adds: Is anyone else hungry? Got any chips?
@Ettorre: That comment should ride the float, if not head it.
@Ettorre:
Wait, in one of the Assassin’s Creed games, you play as a stupid-looking muppet wizard that constantly makes “Take my wife… PLEASE” jokes that would have been sub-par even back when that kind of joke was
tolerablepopular?…Guess I should have paid more attention to that series…
FC: Jeffy asks why he doesn’t have a handle.
“Because you’re not a suitcase. Now, get on!“
@Bob Tice: Ha, got me thinking about way back with the cartoon Freakazoid, there was another segment about a British superhero named “Lord Bravery” and the joke is that he gets no respect (because he’s lame, apparently)
One skit, there is a guy trapped in a sewer.
Lord Bravery: Do not worry Citizen, I’ll rescue you!
Guy in sewer: Are you Superman?
Lord Bravery: No
Guy in sewer: Can you get Superman?
Lord Bravery: No, I cannot, my name is Lord Bravery and I will rescue you!
Guy in sewer: How about you get those Ninja Turtle guys, I heard they rather like it down here.
@Charterstoned:
#11(?). Early morning I tried to type “if” with a capital I three times, before giving up to let auto incorrect win.
CS: I’m honestly shocked at how much of a middle finger this week has been to anyone who might actually enjoy Crankshaft. I haven’t seen a work try this hard to insult its audience since Springtime For Hitler.
REX MORGAN M.D.:
Well given that we already saw that a bunch of tween boys attended this bar wedding, it’s clearly something very, very naughty (like drinking Ovaltine after dark! How scandalous!)
REX MORGAN M.D. (2): Why…one could say the cake is a lie! (No they couldn’t, because that’s a reference that came after 1959 and therefore way too timely and forward-thinking for this strip.)
REX MORGAN M.D. (3): Rex: “Neither of us are in the entertainment industry. We are in the medical industry though and had our wedding while doing side-to-side hernia operations. (That’s how it works right. everyone’s wedding day is obsessively themed around whatever their occupation is?)”
June: “The ring was so lovely once you finally got in lodged from out of there.”
@Banana Jr. 6000: This is sure to offend all one of them!
@CanuckDownSouth: Well, if Barry is “such a genius” that he’s a grade above Curtis, that means that he’d be a grade above the bullies as well. That would make them rather hypocritical to make fun of him for that.
Unless, the bullies have been held back like… for three-five years. To the point where it would mean nothing to them personally, but could still use it to bully Curtis with.
@Voshkod: Thanks
@Anonymous: The first one is not available on Switch, so I missed it
MW: Great, now soon we’ll have five people and two dogs lost in the woods with no mobile phone reception. I guess in a month or two we’ll get to see who eats whom first.
@The Rambling Otter: I’m all for further humiliating Curtis though, how about Billingsly pulls a Doogie Howser and has Barry sent off to college, becomes a surgeon, makes a fortune causing Greg to all but abandon Curtis in favor of his rich successful son.
MW: Saul and Eve are three miles back, stuck on an incline that their offroad-unworthy Buick was not able to handle. Now Olive is going to need to contact someone else’s pet to rescue them too. Think Willa can get a message across to Wilbur in time?
RMMD: Look at how depressed Rex is. He was just starting to enjoy being freed from the thing he hates most in the world (ie. social contact with others), and now June is going to force him to turn around and go back into the fray, and for what? More sugar for the little ankle-biters running around his house? He’s committed to doing the absolute bare minimum as a parent, and his wife needs to respect that, dammit!
WoI: Pffft, legalizing marijuana? That’s so 2000. The hip states have moved on to legalizing psychedelics. Congrats to Wizard of Id for managing to be marginally trendy for a change.
@Banana Jr. 6000: There’s a term for this which escapes me – when people imagine scenarios about instantly winning an argument with a few clever sentences. If they make the mistake of trying it, they generally lose quickly when the other party rudely doesn’t follow the script.
Batuik has the advantage here of writing both sides, so can depict Crankshaft as unable to counter Batton’s brilliant points. The actual responses would be more like the comments section here.
@Anonymous: Are you certain that’s not one of the targets?
Like in Skyrim when you join the Dark Brotherhood (Assassin guild) and one target is to kill an Orc bard, who is such a terrible singer that pretty much half the country requested them to take him out.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
I think the author actually resents his own work for being more popular than his masterpiece Funky Winkerbean. A bit like Conan Doyle hating Sherlock Holmes, except for, y’know, the talent part.
@Ken: I’m not certain if you’re talking about thinking of a snappy comeback long after the argument is over.
The term for that according to TvTropes is called
“Comeback Tomorrow”
@Uncle Lumpy: If he thinks that Crankshaft is the “more popular” comic and he wants to screw over his “fans” so much, one would assume that he’d keep Funky Winkerbean and drop Crankshaft.
@TheDiva:
In one of Dave Barry’s novels, a hurricane is approaching Miami. A local news station sends out a reporter to stand in the rain and warn people how dangerous it is. He gets hurt, so the station sends out another news van to cover that story – which crashes in the storm. By the end of the novel they’d lost three vans and two helicopters.
If Moy decides to escalate like that, it will slightly redeem this story.
@Ken:
Is it “counterfactual argument rehearsal”? “Repartee fantasy”?
@The Rambling Otter:
I’m guessing it wasn’t a choice—or at least not the author’s choice.
FC – Not one of those suitcases has wheels. I’m guessing this one first ran in the 1970s. Jef does a half assed job of turning console TVs into flat screens, but he couldn’t be bothered to add wheels to at least a couple of those suitcases? Oh, well, those golf balls won’t hit themselves.
JP – ” …[A] stupid thing I did.” Well, that narrows it down.
MW – Instead of having crazy eyes, Mary should be rolling her eyes back into her head like the rest of us.
@Baja Gaijin: Mashups – I love the first one, but the last one is more in line with how I feel about this story.
@The Rambling Otter: AKA l’esprit d’escalier, but not quite – I’m thinking of when someone comes up with the snappy comebacks before the argument, but doesn’t get a chance to use them because the other person doesn’t behave as planned.
@Uncle Lumpy: I don’t think either of those were the term I encountered, but they both sound good.
BCN: “We don’t know who she was, what she was like, or what she did. But we know she was a hero!” That’s…not how heroes work, really.
C’shaft: Question: who has more open contempt for their audience, Tom Batiuk or Brooke McEldowney?
Dustin: “I mean it, I’m starting to lose business thanks to you two. Do you know how many ‘Angel Shot’ requests you’ve inspired in the last week alone? Now get out of here and don’t come back until you’re deprogrammed from whatever manosphere redpill Reddit that’s convinced you you’re entitled to a woman’s interest.”
HotC: I may be in the minority on this, but I don’t give a crap how old a trick-or-treater is. Hell, I’ve got parents bringing their two year olds, and you KNOW that kid isn’t going to see any of those fun-size Snickers bars. My only demand is that they make some attempt at a costume. Grab a creepy mask and a plastic machete with blood painted on it from Spirit, I don’t care, just give me something to look at other than your sullen face as you thrust a pillow case of sugar in my direction.
JP: Why does their dining area look like a booth at Village Inn?
MT: So what, now you owe a life debt to feral hogs? They’re still the most destructive invasive species in the country.
Zits — Walt has 6 fingers?
Just a few minutes ago, I was reading an Archie comic, where Jughead joins a hippie commune.
That got me thinking about in “All in the Family” where Gloria eventually was given her own spinoff where she’s a single mother raising her son, because Mike abandoned them to join a hippie commune. This infuriated fans, because not only was this very out of character for Mike but it ruins every sweet scene they had together in the show proper.
Then not too long after, there was a dispute with Edith’s actress, in which she left All in the Family. So the writers killed her off.
Yet instead of ending the show earlier, on a good note, they just kept going.
Too many creators do this. And Batiuk is no exception, but he goes the extra mile to give the middle finger to his readers while he’s at it.
Just one simple question about the cross-species psychic message Olive sent out: GPS, or detailed “left-then-in-a-quarter-of-a-mile-you’ll-see-a-trail” instructions?
Crankshaft-But does your comic have to be constantly about you milking your dead wife?
@TheDiva:
Crankshaft-I would say Tom Batiuk because his stuff is published in newspapers. I don’t think Brook’s stuff is.
C’shaft: Batton Thomas, Cabinetmaker-Who-Follows-a-Different-Drummer: “Sorry….but I never got the memo about needing to measure the wood before cutting.”
Off-topic, but I want you all to know that I am such a comic strip nerd that when I saw a truck on the highway yesterday with a logo that said “Chadwell,” I immediately thought of Ted Forth.
@2+2=7: No, Crankshaft still has some legit fans, long after the world gave up on Funky Winkerbean. That’s another thing that strikes me about this: Batiuk isn’t telling off the snarkers. He’s telling off his sincere readers. He’s telling off people who expect the content of the comic to resemble its own past, and its written description.
@Ken: I think that’s way too specific. Tom Batiuk has a bad case of Walter Mitty Syndrome. He imagines himself the head of the Algonquin Round Table, even though he’s a terrible, amateurish writer. So you get things like today, where “Batton Thomas” smiles as if he just delivered the world’s most devastating putdown, when all he did was prop up a lame strawman that’s actually just an excuse for his own ineptitude.
@Baja Gaijin: #3 of course. Wipe ’em all out!
Wizard of Id: When I was in San Francisco recently, I visited the new Counterculture Museum at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. They had a few alt-comic books from the late ’60s and early ’70s, like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which was about some guys who loved drugs, and R. Crumb titles like Zap Comix, which were pretty obviously compiled under the influence of drugs. But none were so hilariously corny as the Mad Magazine comics from that era, which satirized drug users from the point of view of cynical middle-aged guys in a Manhattan office, and basically said, “Hey, look at those crazy hippies over there!” That, clearly, is the perspective that has stood the test of time and continues in today’s newspaper strips, no matter how many “Bud Station” and “Green Farmacy” storefronts show up on every neighborhood across America.
This won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t watched British comedies on PBS over the years – R.I.P. Patricia Routledge. She was Hyacinth “It’s pronounced Bouquet” Bucket on Keeping Up Appearances. She was 96.
@Uncle Lumpy: I think he resents his own work too, but for a different reason. Batiuk wasn’t interested in drama until he wrote that teen pregancy story in 1991. He got praised for it, and suddently decided he was a Serious Writer now. And has spent the last 34 years looking down his nose at gag a day strips, even though he kept doing them himself because it’s the only thing he knows how to do. He resents that his audience wants to see Crankshaft gags when he wants to write tedious, self-serving, badly-written Act III Funky Winkerbean crap.
DT: “Splendid, splendid! I think I can get you a job with the Trump organization pulverizing the sculptures at the Bonwit Teller building.”
Dustin: Yep, I say this to bartenders all the time, too. In hopes the house buys my next drink out of pity.
FC: Do it, Bil! If Jeffy gets caught and mangled in the machinery, the airport could award you 200 pounds! Like a wish coming true.
@Ken, @Uncle Lumpy: Also a feature of Socratic dialogues. The strawman ignoramus voices his stupid opinion, then meekly submits while Socrates leads him by the nose to Socrates’s opinion, and at the conclusion immediately exclaims, “You’re absolutely right, Socrates! You are a brilliant genius and I’m an utter shithead!”
@Peanut Gallery: Excellent point, and you’ve prompted my memory – the context was, indeed, a post I read where the author was saying Socratic dialogues are easy because you write both sides, but in real life it never works that easily.
@Ukulele Ike: Re FC – The Keanes have already used their three wishes on the monkey’s paw. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot.
MW: In a classic crossover, the feral hogs from Mark Trail burst through the woods onto Max and Greta. Old Yeller antics ensue.
@Al of the Christian Singles Jungle Patrol: https://youtu.be/ElVzs0lEULs?si=d_q7oHwaTxh3X-MF
@MP: and assuming, logically, there are no roads in the immediate vicinity of the downed balloon, how the hell are Saul and Eve ever going to find them? It seems clear from the strip that the superpowered telepathic dogs were running faster than the car could go, at least 50 mph, so within an hour the dogs could conceivably have left cell phone range.
@Ukulele Ike: 200 pounds.
Pounds Bil once, pounds him twice, and again… and again…
Like that Bugs Bunny cartoon about wanting 200 bucks (Gets caught up in a stampede of deer)
MW: Oh, thank DOG!
BF – “I think our readers are getting a little miffed. They keep pushing me for some closure on the Benoit storyline.”
“We have readers?”
Unfortunately, Saul and Eve lack Olive’s telepathic gifts, so they’re just going to die in the forest where they’ve become hopelessly lost.
@Peanut Gallery, @Ken:
In all fairness, though, strawman ignoramus was an utter shithead.
MW: Yes, Max and Greta have made the hazardous trek to the balloon site in the remote (as well as vast and deep) forest edge of Santa Royale! I hate to spoil the magic here, but actually, my Intern dropped them off there this morning in our off-road limo. Listen, they are Big Stars, and can’t be expected to do their own stunts. It’s called ACTING!
You may be wondering about Saul and Eve. Unfortunately their agent didn’t want to chip in for gas for the limo, so they are still motoring along in the Buick, with Eve trying to figure where they are using a paper map from 1996. heh heh heh
GT: So, Lord God Coach Thorp couldn’t be parsed to tell that Jones kid in person he was being put into the game? He had to notify him through a middleman? Only the star players warrant an audience with His Holiness.
@s: That’s me of course.
@I speak Jive: My grandmother (d. 2014) and I used to watch that show. And Are You Being Served. I’m actually binging Father Ted at the moment.
GT: His name is Jones. He’s one of the Jones boys.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Never watched Father Ted. We recently binged Doc Martin, which we enjoyed, especially the early seasons. Mr. Jive has moved on to British mysteries. They have almost as many murders as Cabot Cove.
I loved Keeping Up Appearances.
LUANN: The repartee between Jack the Jock and Des is smart and good humored. Hope it continues.
FG: that Hiza is quite the looker. Plus an arresting personality! No wonder Bok is falling for her.
Sex Organ V.D.: Dr Sam Beckett looks appropriately annoyed to have leaped into Rex.
@Ken: As in the real life of Socrates, where his victims responded “Let’s waste that smug motherfucker!”
@Rube:
Socrates: “All men die. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates will die!”
Strawman Ignoramus: “Heh, heh, that’s an empirical question, asshole!”
Garfield has been making “legal weed” jokes since the 70s. How else do you explain how he always has the munchies?
Crank: If only that were true, Batty. If only that were true.
FC: Okay, but why are Big Daddy Keene and his dumbest child watching the suitcases go round and round, with no sign of the rest of the family, when it’s October and we’ve already had this year’s “The Keanes are going on vacation!” story?
JP: Oh my goodness, has Neddy forgotten that Abby’s the one who, against her better judgement, swung the babysitting gig? Is she about to launch into “So, I’ve somehow found myself looking after Judge Parker’s granddaughter even though I’m woefully unqualified to do so, because I’d got the idea he’d help me with my writing career, which he hasn’t. I wish I knew how I ended up in this mess without anybody noticing what a stupid idea it was from the beginning, but the point is I need your help to get out of it so I can go back to sitting around complaining we’re out of avacado.”
MW: Mary: “Oh, thank God!”
Olive: “You’re welcome.”
RMMD, meta: I question the idea that Rex and June’s concern that they forgot to take some wedding cake for the kids extends as far as going back and getting some. They’re nearly home! It’s almost getting late! There’ll be other weddings, probably!
SH: That … doesn’t really answer the question, dude.
MW: Tomorrow: Saul’s car upside down and crumpled at the bottom of Kelrast Kurve.
Well Josh, maybe the Wizard of Id artist is also from upstate New York? Maybe they will do a “Steamed Hams” joke next?
@The Rambling Otter: Interesting. I know there are, understandably, a lot of jokes about the biggest British TV shows being one season of six episodes (which isn’t always true – consider Doctor Who, which depending on how you count is either the longest running non-soap drama ever or the longest running and second-longest) but I think we’re right to usually end things after five years or so. (And then maybe bring it back ten years later.)
Having said that, it’s funny how many parallels there are with Til Death Us Do Part, the original to All In the Family, and especially the 80s sequel series In Sickness and In Health. Edith’s counterpart Else was written out of later seasons of Til Death by “going to Australia”, not because of a dispute, but because Dandy Nichols was too ill to film. She then appeared in one season of In Sickness before Nichols sadly died and Else died with her.
And Anthony Booth was utterly uninterested in returning to the role of Mike for the sequels, so at first it was said that Rita and Mike had moved to Liverpool, and there’d be occasional guest appearances Rita but he didn’t come with her because why would he? But eventually it was decided they’d got divorced as well, at around the point she also stopped appearing. I don’t think it was said he’d joined a hippie commune, though. (I’m not sure there were any in 1987.) And Alf Garnett definitely didn’t buy a pub at any point.
@I speak Jive: Thank you for posting that news. RIP Patricia Routledge. You were wonderful as Hyacinth and you provided a lot of merriment.
@MP: To paraphrase a joke:
Could you run 4 miles in 20 minutes? Sure, if I’m Kenyan and wearing a numbered racing bib.
JP: Thank you, Neddy, for this little reminder that while your sister is often irritating, you are the sister I’d like to drop-kick off the roof of Abbey’s stable.
Note for Baja Gaijin
You may want to rethink your decision if you feel like looking at tomorrow’s Bizarro.
DT: Okay, we’ve now established that the zap zap gun is ready to go and is fully charged. But again if this was legitimated VC funded effort and if Faust is a legitimate representative of Diet Smith Enterprises (Industries) shouldn’t the testing be done in some careful lab measuring energy outputs in electron volts or kilo joules or megawatts into some device determining the pattern of discharge? And then measuring how much energy is still in the gel and how much was put in; thereby creating an estimate of the efficiency of storage and discharge? Or did Faust just want to stuff get blown up?
RMMD: sounds like June and RM will need to make a cake run to the super market.
MW: calling shenanigans! No way those little pampered pooches scampered cross country in just a few strips!
GT: OK – so Milford has the ball in the first quarter(?) and got into the red zone (?). A QB run (?) and need to sub in for the dinged player (?)
MW: Honestly, my small oak woodland is a much better imitation of a vast, dense forest than this land. This land appears to consist of nursery-grown East Coast evergreens planted on a lawn close to a paved road. Hansel and Gretel would have to work very hard and possibly ingest drugs to get lost in it.
@120 Poteet:
Hansel and Gretel on drugs. Are you thinking about writing children’s books Poteet?
MW- “Max! Greta!” So you were expecting Puddles and Fred Basset?
@Baja Gaijin:
Ooh, I really like that first one!
@3 Baja Gaijin:
Yes. The Zippy the Pinhead dog.
@Gareth Klieber: Yeah, I was thinking of a similar scenario with the film “Big”
Josh (the character, not our lovely host) will either have to live a lie his entire life “I was kidnapped!” and be hounded by the police over the person who “kidnapped” him (doesn’t help that his Mom saw his older self’s face) go to mandatory therapy sessions, and probably end up outright miserable if not insane.
OR prove to the police and everyone else, that the machine literally does magically grant wishes. Which is a whole other can of worms as every bloodsucking leech in the media, government and well… everyone… will be killing each-other over the Zoltar machine, and whoever does get to it first… hopefully is altruistic.
@Treetown: “Sir, we have the report from our tech evaluation experts on that new energy storage gel gun.”
“And?”
“It blowed up real good!”
MW: The fact that Mary’s first reaction to seeing her elderly neighbors’ dogs is “Oh thank God!” rather than “What the fuck is going on here?” shows you how through the looking glass we are here.
RMMD: Now Rex and June have to make a uey back to the wedding reception, whereupon they will see things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Yes, ‘mudges, I mean people line-dancing to the polka version of “Muddy Boots”.
RMMD: Here’s the perfect excuse to tell the kids, June and Rex. Mud Mountain ate all the cake before you could get to it.
RMMD: Called it a few days ago. Rex would forget to bring the kids cake.
@The Rambling Otter: #125: Shortly after the movie “Big” was released Tom Hanks guest hosted SNL. They did a spoof of the movie with an alternate ending. Instead of going to the big city and living as an adult he went back to his kid life with his adult body and became the school bully.
Cocaine isn’t a drug for middle-aged people who may have heart issues, so most likely alcohol is still the drug of choice, so the Rex Morgans will probably return to see at least one person puking.
@I speak Jive: Sad news. Fans of Patricia Routledge who only (or mostly) know her from Keeping Up Appearances might be interested in her frankly astonishing performances in the Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads episodes “A Woman of No Importance”, “A Lady of Letters”, and “Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet”. I am continually bewildered that “Alan Bennett monologue” is a byword in the UK for twee cosyness, because they’re really not.
@Charterstoned: Wizard of I’d: At first glance, I thought the wizard had conjured up a panel from “Alice.”
_______________________________
Alice doesn’t live in I’d anymore
@Sequitur: Yes. The Zippy the Pinhead dog.
_______________________
Yes,thirded!
C-Shaft: Crankshaft, if Battom is trying to get funny with you he’s failing. Badly.
DT: Tess is blowing up a mannequin with her zappy gun, much to the delight of the Smith Labs exec, but nobody is wearing eye or ear protection. At minimum, Dick can nail them for OSHA violations.
Dustin: Well it’s true that absence can make the heart grow fonder. As can absinthe, but Dustin and Fitch don’t look like they can swing that.
FC: This being Jeffy, it was a tossup whether his first reaction to the baggage carousel would be “Can I ride it?” or “Where are all the horses?”
JP: To be fair to Neddy, the problem is rooted in a whole string of idiotic decisions by multiple parties, so it’s a tall order for Abbey unless she’s sitting on some godlike powers.
Lockhorns: Okay, now they’re just trying to play to Josh’s whole “Lockhorns are Millennials” thing.
Luann: Is the 23-year-old cat one of the pets up for adoption? Because that would probably be less of a commitment when you think about it.
Phantom: One of the guards is getting beat on pro wrestling style while the other is being roped into an all-night game of fetch.
Late Thread Cuisine: I expect only Ike to like…this.
@Treetown:
I was thinking of that. The question is whether they can pick something up that can pass as wedding cake. I mean, they can buy a $3 sheet cake and it’ll convince the boys. Sarah’s another story.
@118 Sequitur: Thanks for the warning.
@135 Baja Gaijin:
If you were thinking President Eisenhower, he died in 1969. The copyright on this liver thing is 1973 so you can’t mean him.
I know you’re talking about Ukulele Ike and he’ll come up with some ridiculous reason we all have to try it. When he does that I go in the opposite direction and disregard anything he says.
@137 Baja Gaijin:
Yeah, it’s a bad one.
@Baja Gaijin:
Liver is a gift from God. Lemon, much less so. I’m all-in here anyway, let’s see where it ends!
@Baja Gaijin:
Don’t be silly. Liver is not served with lemon sauce*. It is served with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
*On what planet is lemon sauce loose stool brown?
@141 Anonymous: Yeah, that surprised me too. To be fair, the sauce has like 2 teaspoons of lemon juice.
@Baja Gaijin: Not me. I do enjoy kidneys and sweetbreads, and the occasional dish of chicken livers (sauteed in butter with shallots and vermouth, alongside scrambled eggs), but am not crazy over beef or calves’ liver.
@Sequitur: That’s why I prefer “Uke” to “Ike” from my pals here, to avoid confusion (plus, it’s funnier-sounding). Although years ago when I used this nick on the Straight Dope Message Board, I met up with a lady co-contributor at the Algonquin for a cocktail and she showed up wearing a 1950s political pin reading “I Like Ike and Dick.’
Oh, and you’re off the guest list next time I make my famous tuna noodle casserole, bub.
@Baja Gaijin:
2 teaspoons of lemon juice mixed with what?
@Anonymous: loose stool
@Horace Broon: I picked up a copy of Alan Bennett’s short novel The Uncommon Reader in a London bookshop some years ago, without realizing it was that Alan Bennett. Very entertaining, especially for bookworms.
@143 Ukulele Ike: OK, Uke, is your “famous tuna noodle casserole” actually made from “Tuna Helper”? I hear Hamburger Helper and Tuna Helper have seen dramatic sales rises in the past few months.
@144 Anonymous: Although Uke is correct based on looks, the recipe below reveals nothing untoward. The sauce probably shouldn’t have been named after one of its lesser ingredients by volume.
@Baja Gaijin:
#147. Baja, ok, the name of the sauce is honest and the sauce probably has a lemon tang. For presentation purposes, two half moons of sliced lemon should adorn edge of plate.
@Horace Broon: Twee cosiness? OMG Patricia Routledge was heartbreaking in A Woman of No impoertance! As was Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils. Alan Bennett saw the tragedy in the lives of women who don’t attract attention.
MW: Wonder what Mary’s relationship with her mother was like?