Perverse Friday
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The Phantom, 2/20/26
Many years ago, the Jungle Patrol was all-male, until early 2008 when it got gender-integrated by a plucky lady cop/waitress duo. How’s that working out? Well, this young female officer is busy kicking a would-be warlord in the face, so that’s good, and the Patrol’s Unknown Commander is just kind of sitting there watching with a little smile on his face, which is a little unsettling. Is this sexual, for him? Is it even possible to understand what “sexual” means for a guy who’s the product of a 22-generation eugenic breeding program and who lives in Africa and wears a skintight spandex suit constantly?
Luann, 2/20/26
Speaking of sexual bits that newspaper comics have been doing since George W. Bush was president, Luann is doing a tale of ribaldry about Tiffany and Ox (he’s a new-ish character and his thing is he’s a gentle giant, don’t worry about it) washing Ox’s rescue puppy and getting deliciously wet in the process and I can’t believe I just typed that, gross. Anyway, I’m mostly posting this because I think the panel where Ox is sticking the hair dryer up his shirt is pretty funny. It’s just a weird angle! He’s warming his belly button specifically! Is this sexual, for him? Is it even possible to understand what “sexual” means for a guy who is a character in Luann, a realm beyond the sexuality event horizon where horniness is distorted by extreme levels of gravity into formations that scientists can’t even begin to describe?
106 replies to “Perverse Friday”
Tiffany thinks: “Good Grief. He’s using Dad’s fleshlight.”
MW: Clearly, Moy is burnt out writing Mary Worth. But instead of just retiring, or transitioning to another strip, she’s instead slowly trying to morph the strip from a soap into some sort of Garfield/Heathcliff/Marmaduke/Get Fuzzy “animals do the darndest things” comic.
JP: It appears Marciuliano read Richard Kelly’s unused script for Holes and decided that’s how gulags work.
Ox will complete his odd technique by sitting on the toaster, and sticking his head in the oven (oh, come on, people, it’s electric!).
DtM: Note to Alice: sitting one demitasse cup atop another a mug does not make.
I know he is a warlord who probably uses child soldiers, but it’s problematic that he is being stopped by a white woman! What a Karen!
JP: “What do you want, McHale, what, what, what?!”
Phantom’s dog (it’s a dog, right?), meanwhile, lurks behind the Phantom. Nothing turns the dog on like watching the Phantom get turned on by watching female-on-male violence.
I am sorry to inform you that Luann has become aware of the Himbo discourse popular in social media some years ago. Time to retire it
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — while showing off a woman’s ass — for ever.”
@A Grave Mind: Devil is a wolf.
MW: Rehome to a good owner if it doesn’t work out? How about push it on one of your Charterstone thralls.
@Hibbleton:
Clearly she’s had a few “helper pills,” leaving Dennis and Gina to get in some quality glue-huffing time. And by watching QVC, has apparently teleported to 1992.
That Jungle Patrol lady has a very long leg. How does she walk, when the other one is normal size? Is it, like, retractable?
@Lord Flatulence:
Fair enough, did…did he find a wolf in Africa? Actually, you know what? Nah. Just, nah.
Luann: Tiffany was a gorgeous sexpot who demanded all the hunky boys’ attention and was kind of a b to all the girls, especially Luann — so they made her pay for her sins by gaining ten pounds. So now she’s a bit less gorgeous (or a bit more, depending on your point of view), and it seems like they’re pushing her to make a final transition into normie-hood by having her settle for a nice, stocky guy with stubbly hair and pinpoint eyes. So Luann wins, I guess? It’s her name on the title, so if she ever makes it work with whichever dork she’s dating this week, she’ll go off in triumph. (Of course, the real b is Bernice, but her constant undermining is more subtle, no one ever seems to notice.)
FC: I’m with Billy on this one. He didn’t put on his best leisure suit to hold the door open for that twerp.
MW: “I want a pet like Bobo,” Mary tells the owner of PET STORE when she calls to order her new cat, only to receive a western lowland gorilla the next day.
Panel one of The Phantom seems like a candidate for a recreation contest like Self-Clubbing Tyler, except for the potential for injury. Not fo the guy getting kicked in the face, I tried to think about what angle Ms. Patrol is coming in from and my hip broke.
MW: Uh oh, I sense that another ill-fated pet is headed Wilbur’s way.
GT: Doesn’t an arrest normally result in an athlete being booted from the team? Or at least suspended? So, wipe that smirk off your face and do your job, Coach.
9CL: I’m torn between wanting to know wtf is going on here and not wanting to barf up my breakfast. In other words, the way I usually feel about 9CL.
@BigTed: And I thought Tiffany was the property of Brad, and was confused. Thankful to realize that the Luann characters have not wormed all the way into my brain.
Luann: What elevates this to true Luann art status is that Tiffany is suggesting – nay, demanding – that Ox take off all his clothes and let her gently rub him down, surely the dream of every horny young man. But that would be far too simple for the baroque meta-para-quasi-sexuality of Luann. It’s much hotter to deny yourself the touch of a lover and instead just watch her pat a dog fully clothed while you stick a hairdryer up your wet clothes.
@matt w: Brad is married to Toni (and possibly also TJ — it’s hard to tell).
Phantom:
“How about a DVD, General?”
“A…unhhhh…DVD? Of what?”
” ‘Das Boot‘ !”
Luann:
“Hey, Tiffany! — do you like my new Jackson Pollock print shirt?”
Phantom:
“It doesn’t matter that, so far as I know, Patrolwoman Dai might be in mortal peril here! — there’s no limit to the amount of smart-alecky thoughts and word play I can conjure while I’m watching the drama unfold!”
Phantom:
The dots on Phantom’s leotard in today’s panel serve as powerful symbolism that the costume he wears is totally pointillist.
@matt w: I wouldn’t worry too much. Some triangulation based on the position of his arm and her hips suggests her leg is approximately half a mile long.
@BigTed: Tiffany is to Luann what Bull Bushka was to Funky Winkerbean. She inadvertently became the best character in the strip, because the creator’s storytelling priorities required all the other characters to be infantilized. High school villains Tiffany and Bull were forced to grow up, get jobs, and (justifiably) walk back their previous behavior, to stay on good terms with the main characters. The high school bullies were the only ones who proved capable of putting high school behind them. But the storytelling priorities didn’t change, so this genuine growth goes out the window whenever it’s convenient.
And this week Meet Ugly is a perfect example. Tiffany should want nothing to do with this bozo, and would have spotted his yellow flag behavior a mile away. As I said yesterday, Tiffany’s autophobia should make her highly resistant to uninvited guests. And a simple “no, thank you” would have been enough to stop him in his tracks. But no, the mean girl has to be humiliated for the things she did in high school, no matter how much she’s done to reinvent herself.
Because only Luann has inner beauty./sarcasm
Mark Trail: The security guard tells Rusty that for trespassing he’s going to be made to walk the plank; Rusty soon discovers this isn’t just a gimmicky euphemism for being taken to the security office, but his being forced to walk an actual plank into a body of water.
RMMD: At least it looks like they’ll be wrapping up this recap soon, unlike some OTHER strips…
Marvin: We can all agree, Marvin belongs in jail.
Beetle Bailey: That’s a fair criticism, Cookie, considering your arm hair alone being near food would make customers nervous.
Popeye: Not much gets said about this strip here, but I do agree with the recent storyline being about everyone deciding to pretend Wimpy isn’t there so as to discourage his mooching, and find something agreeable about his increasing frustration to the point he futilely punches Popeye.
Crankshaft: Speaking of belabored storylines dragged out too long, well at least it isn’t another long sequence of Batiuk’s stand-in talking about himself.
Luann:
“Since you have the mentation capacity of a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, is there a particular botanical fruit or culinary vegetable that you’d like to keep company with?”
“Well, Tiffany, it depends whose gourd is getting Ox!”
FC Good grief, Billy! Forget your petty rivalry, let Dolly through, and hurry up and get home before your mom’s underwear elastic realizes there’s celery in that grocery bag!
JP Was this guy hiding in the curtains for the last 2 days of strips?
The Phantom – Put your hands together for everyone’s favorite German metal band: THRACK!.
CS: When you bring back a dog that hasn’t been seen in a decade, and that dog belongs to a 107-year-old man with dementia issues and a lack of interest in anything other than himself, you probably shouldn’t build jokes around forgetting to feed and water the dog.
Pluggers reach basic adulthood and middle-aged decrepitude at the same time.
@Menace the Dennis: They’ll be bigger in Germany than Muttley Cruh!
Luann – I refuse to read “Luann” now that it’s experienced a sexual awakening. Although to be fair, I refused to read it before that, too.
Phantom:
“After all of this martial arts action between you two uniformed combatants, the two of you must be totally fatigued. Get it? ‘[U]niformed’? ‘[F]atigued’? My goodness, isn’t my thought formulation linguistically clever in totally inappropriate contexts?”
Seriously though, in regards to the long-running strips like MW, JP, RMMD, etc. still running, boy do they drag, especially when you compare to earlier versions of the strips, or other long-runners from back in the day. The decline of the newspaper strip has been harsh and getting more stark.
I’d been using ComicsKingdom to go through the archives of some vintage strips like The Heart of Juliet Jones as well as Apartment 3-G and older Judge Parker, as well as reading a collection of a couple of storylines from “Mary Perkins On Stage”, that was put out by Blackthorne Publishing back in the 80s and a lot of these strips moved, they may have had long storylines but they did not tend to spend weeks on boring minutiae and recaps. Soapy strips like Jones, 3-G, Parker, etc. could take detours into other genres like adventure and not spend time spinning around, nor feel like
One current comic strip that doesn’t have this problem is Flash Gordon; the recaps are saved for Sundays, and usually from a character’s POV to make it interesting. One example from the strip that comes to mind was during a journey, Flash Gordon and Dale Arden’s bodies are accidentally swapped. Dan Schkade was able to get drama and suspense from this moment but ran through it in about a week, Flash, Dale and party simply did not have time for it, and the narrative moved on. Any other story comic these days would have never finished with the body swap, and just gone on and on.
Rex Morgan, M.D., spends weeks on storylines like an unknown adult man thinking Truck Tyler was his father and…he wasn’t. Mary Worth’s latest recapping of a recap is just the latest, consider that she spent over a week just preparing to go visit her little friend Olive in New York. A lot of self-indulgent, exposition-heavy, “plots” that carefully exclude anything interesting.
@Lauralot: If you’ve been reading this week’s Rex Morgan M.D. (which of course you haven’t because, Rex Morgan M.D.? Snore!), you’d know that plucky Sarah seems to be gunning for Mary’s job (or at least the tedious, repetitive, end-of-the-story recap portion of it.) So Moy has nothing to worry about if she’s concerned about someone being able to keep up the banality level that she has worked so hard to maintain.
Give Ox a break — not having any hair, his experience with hair dryers is limited.
Wrecks Moregone:
Punching, kicking, biting, etc are fine. Just no wrestling.
MW: You got to hand it to Jeff. He’s some awesome plastic surgeon. Mary’s boobs are starting to rival Thel’s jutting in the moonlight.
As always, Dustin has an uncanny grasp of how young people in the 21st Century talk and act.
Phantom:
“At times like this, General, with Patrolwoman Dai bearing down on you like this, it’s wise to recall the (somewhat adapted) words of Paul Revere and the Raiders: ‘And don’t it seem like/Kicks just keep gettin’ harder to mind/And all her kicks are zingin’ your piece of hind/Before you find out it’s too late/Churl, you better get straight’ !”
If we get Pirate Security Guy scolding Total Dickhead Glittery Hat Mark over his son’s idiot behavior, I might have to buy a print.
I genuinely love that the guy getting the boot to the face appears to have been kicked as he was doing a fun lil’ dance. Look at those arms! Lady, by all means, take this guy down, but let him have at least a little bit of Cabbage Patch before you podiatrically do away with his teeth. Just don’t let him transition into the Running Man, eh? Eh?? (Don’t get up, I’ll fire myself.)
Luann – I dated a guy who might have been the nephew of Sex-Negative Nelly when I was that age. He was raised with a religious belief that premarital sex was an express ticket to hell. Nicest guy on the planet. But there I was – a really cute 19 year old whose body would never look better, and I couldn’t get him to second base, meanwhile, the third base coach is waving him home… obviously, we split up eventually. My point is, Ox – when someone suggests you take your clothes off, do it!!!
@Lauralot: @Terry Rhoden: LUANN: Obviously, one thing that people in the comic world will never get tired of is writing G-rated porn scenarios!
Blondie-“The boss jumped all over me.” Literally. Another day another beating from Dithers.
MW-“And if the cat doesn’t work out I’ll give it to Wilbur.”
MW-Mary knows a nice butcher she can give a cat to if it doesn’t work out. No questions asked.
Luann-And here I was hoping for an ‘Of Mice and Men’ ending. “Tell me about the dogs, Les.”
One notable thing about hair dryers is that you don’t put them in the wet hair. RIP, Ox.
***
Look at this boot, isn’t it clean? It’s the cleanest boot that this soldier’s seen! Wouldn’t you think I’m the girl, the girl who cleans everything? Look at this boot, it’s in your face! I didn’t mean for you to taste lace! Tasting my footwear you’d think, oops, it’s in the wrong place!
mw; Mary knew she was incapable of love; anyone or anything. A pet, like the false facade Dr Jeff provides, could lure in more meddling victims and easily gotten rid of at any time to those two old fools who play pet dressup.
@A Grave Mind: We found a wolf-dog in Italy the other day.
He got out of the house to follow his owner to the Olympics cross country ski course.
And chased a couple of skiers across the finish line.
Good dog.
BG&SS: Doesn’t a fellow from Hootin’ Holler have too much genuine rural Americana in him to make it in today’s country music format?
H&L: Lois, we’re all getting a bit tired of winter. As many men have baseball, many women have gardening. Jes’ sayin’.
FC: This is a crossover with Slylock Fox where we spot the differences, right? The door in this drawing doesn’t have a jamb or hinges and appears to be floating in space.
RMMD: This week has been a palate cleanser which makes me not want the next course.
@Ettorre: The patrolwoman is named Dai Lu Han, so I’m going to assume she’s at least partially Chinese. Now, how did an East Asian woman wind up in an extrajudicial paramilitary organization in vaguely sub-Saharan Africa? Well, there’s a perfectly good explanation for that…
*pauses*
*runs away*
Little known fact, but today’s Phantom is exactly how they took down Idi Amin.
Luann: You just know Karen Evans had a long, long conversation with her father about why the hair dryer needed to be angled up.
Phantom: I’m impressed–the Ghost Who Makes Wry Internal Commentary is watching an Asian woman fighting with a Black man, and he’s not intervening. That has to go against every colonialist bone in his body!
@Old School Allie Cat: I think Ox’s refusal to take the hint, and inability to even detect the existence of the hint, as what we’re supposed to find charming about this. You’re absolutely right, though.
In any battle between a resistable force and a movable object, I bet on the movable object. As your story (and too many dating failures in my own life) illustrates.
FC: No need to hold the door, Billy. In every supermarket I’ve ever been in the doors open and shut automatically.
GT: Wait a minute. They used the Corvette? The strips last week clearly showed the third girl riding in the back seat. Vettes don’t have rear seats.
GT: Smart move, Keri. Commit your caper in a bright yellow Corvette. There’s probably no other high profile car like that within 20 miles of Milford.
GT: She had fun, fun, fun, till her daddy took the Corvette away.
MW: OK, folks, everything’s a go! I just got the Plot Outline from Ka— uh, The Ladies, and Mary will definitely get a hypoallergenic Cat – other characteristics pending. A few months of Feline hijinks will follow before Mary has to
removerehome our newest superstar.Did you get all that, Intern? We probably need to cast Bobo the Balinese, too, in case he shows up. I don’t think we have to worry about meeting expenses for the next quarter …. oh, run by The Drug Store at lunch and see if they still have the half-price chocolates.
Did we hear anything from Sunny and Rosie since they went on vacay?… What??? They got MARRIED?! I guess now they’re *really* f××king Parrots! heh heh heh
@TheDiva: Interesting. But are Chinese people actually white? The greatest thread in the history of the forum etc.
C’shaft: Oh, you mean the wall that has the BIG FREAKING HOLE in it that’s clearly large enough to shove the water dish through?
DT: No, no, no, Parker and Evans, the Youth of Today attempt to attract women through questionable and borderline sociopathic techniques gleaned from PUA Reddits, not cheesy Leisure Suit Larry-style one-liners. Get with the program!
FG: I mean yeah, that’s usually how screams work, even if the person doesn’t die.
GT: …..Antoinette?
JP: The wifi is down, you don’t need to be so dramatic about it!
MT: I’m pretty sure that even during the height of Vegas’ Theme Park Era (which, since we’re on the subject, was like thirty years ago), the security guards dressed like security guards and not pirates or ancient Egyptians or whatever.
MW: Great, so Mary’s going to foster a cat!…That is, she’s going to go to the animal shelter and volunteer to foster a cat, but only this one specific type of cat that her quasi-boyfriend isn’t allergic to. Somehow, this will not be a problem.
@A Grave Mind: The Ghost Who Watches — Sure, it doesn’t make much sense, but Devil is canonically a wolf. As kids, we used to repeat the Phantom’s line–he’s not a dog, he’s a wolf–which he would roll out whenever someone told him he couldn’t take a dog with him (a plane, a hotel, a restaurant, the UN, etc.) Obviously in the days before emotional support animals. . .
Daddy Daze: I feel that this whole ‘set fire to the lawn’ story explains something about ‘Daddy’s’ mental state and the probability that ‘Angus’ really exists. Wouldn’t it be funny if ‘Daddy’, post-institutionalization, carries around a slab of Angus beef in a onseie and talks to it.
MW: Jeff wakes up the next morning…
Something seemed off.
He hopped out of bed, scratched himself a little.
Walked down the hallway in his giant McMansion, it seemed even bigger.
That was when he saw Mary looming over him. “Mr. Tibbles! It’s time for your yums!”
Jeff looked in shock.
“The spell worked! I killed two birds with one stone” Mary said. “You can’t be allergic to cats, if you ARE the cat.”
Jeff meowed.
Onesie, dang it.
@ValdVin: #53: re-BG&SS: True. Most of today’s country-western stars are suburban metrosexuals who’ve had comfortable middle class upbringings. The closest they’ve been to a farm or ranch was a petting zoo.
@Ettorre: I mean, “white” is essentially an ever-shifting concept that has less to do with a shared history and cultural identity and more to do with conferring a sense of superiority and entitlement on those who are accepted under its banner, so you know, it could include China at some point. I mean, it worked for the Italians and the Irish…
Dustin: If you leave out the word ‘the’ before ‘ten’, moves into Epstein files territory.
@Twinkles the Elf: Lt. Han has that superpower. I have the feeling that we will see this pose again when Manley reuses the pencils for this scene for CIApril kicking the Warden in the face. Because DePaul gets the originals.
Sherman’s Lagoon: The Carol Burnett Show did this better.
Luann: Simple answers to tortured questions:
Q: “Is it even possible to understand what ‘sexual’ means for a guy who is a character in Luann, a realm beyond the sexuality event horizon where horniness is distorted by extreme levels of gravity into formations that scientists can’t even begin to describe?”
A: No. This has been another edition of Simple answers to tortured questions.
@TheDiva: #67: Because of their wartime alliance, the Nazis considered the Japanese honorary Aryans.
@Voshkod:
Exactly. Someone from Jungle Patrol punched him, and that was it.
Dustin: And the body of another local woman has been found chopped up in a dumpster. Film at eleven.
Speaking of perverse, looks like ModBot ate a comment for quoting from Josh’s post. Oh, well — or should I say Orwell?
Luann: Ox accidently electrocutes himself and Tiffany has to call Gunther and Les to help dispose of the body.
GT: Looks like Gil is going to let precious Keri off easy and write it off as one of her “endearing quirks”.
@Guillermo el chiclero:
Luann: Ox accidently electrocutes himself
And then turns the incident into a humorous story he tells the entire town at the next City Fair. Luann is incredibly jealous that her “accidentally electrocuted my gonads with a hairdryer, and then told the entire town about it” thunder has been stolen.
Phantom – Pain an issue? I’ll administer a general anesthetic….
Luann – I’ve seen ‘tis movie before. The title is Tiffany Pays the Plumber….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
The Phantom-The Ghost Who Likes It Rough
The Phantom-“Oh that takes me back to my honeymoon night.”
@A Grave Mind: Devil is a MOUNTAIN WOLF, thankyouverymuch! Philistine!
@matt w: I feel like he re-used the art from ‘Heloise kicks Nomad in the face’ a few years ago.
Don Abundio, translated:
“I feel such a sense of anomie. If only there were some meaning to existence…”
“There’s no need to fear. Underdog is here!”
“Sorry… I forgot my line”
@Guillermo el chiclero: But the jolt of power massively expands his mind! Soon, with his genius intellect, he sees that he – and everyone around him in Luann is stalled and stagnate. He applies to and is accepted by Stanford and leaves Mooney U. behind. Sadly, though, his brilliance is short-lived, and eventually he finds himself back at Mooney, stupid and alienated, before he dies trying to shock his nether parts into genius again. That’s right – Luann is doing Flowers for AlgernOx.
@lynn:
Shucks, y’all, in my defense, I have never once pretended to read The Phantom. :)
@Lord Flatulence: I love a good Captain Binghamton reference!
For those of you complaining about the graphic violence in today’s ‘Phantom’, check out today’s ‘Curtis’
Comics Kingdom: Every strip I try to load reports an application error (specifically complaining about a css style being blocked). Anybody else having problems or is it just me?
`
BF – The art of the Friday cliffhanger. Tomorrow’s strip: “I’m going to tell you my suggestion…” “And I don’t want you to react right away…” “Take some time to think it over…” (Continued Monday)
LUANN: I was gonna say you’d get first degree burns all over yourself if you did what Ox is doing until I remembered some hair dryers have a setting where they simply blow non-heated air. So never mind.
9CL: I don’t know who the woman in the green swimsuit is, but she’s obviously related to the Joker, what with that enormous laughing mouth in panel 3.
@Will: I was getting a similar error because I had cookies blocked. I allowed cookies from comicskingdom.com and it started working again.
@TheDiva: I think there’s some conflating of biological races with social constructs of identity. There are three discrete human races – Caucasian, Asian, and African – with different characteristics. This isn’t limited to humans; for example, there are also three races of killer whales. Socioculturally, however, there’s a tendency to use “white” as a synonym for “Westernized.”
The bottom line is that the Phantom art team is clearly unwell.
@TheDiva: Exactly. The concept is completely constructed and attempts to match it to physical phenotypes are always arbitrary — it’s hard to distinguish a man from Sicily from one from Syria. Famously, Hitler wanted to establish biological criteria to distinguish Aryan from Jews for the Nuremberg Laws, but he had to give up and adopt the religious criterium because there was nothing to hang on
Luann: Tiffany, look! No more pubic hair!
@Ettorre: #92: Strangely, the Nazis considered Gypsies an inferior race due for extermination, despite their language, Roma, being the closest living language to ancient Sanskrit, making them the most Aryan of all people. Their Hungarian and Finnish allies were conveniently listed as Aryans, despite their languages being of the same family as Turkish and Mongolian.
@Dennis Jimenez: I think it’s Generic Horror Movie, since Tiffany is acting like Coed Murder Victim #4.
@Voshkod: COTW.
@BigTed: Nah, it’s basically a repeat on the strip’s focus of having the homeliest and/or most socially awkward guys in the strips get the sexy women they’ve been fixated on (in Ox’s case, since high school), while the women in the strip, most certainly Luann, either stay single, break up badly or wind up with problematic, passive aggressive guys like Phil.
What’s truly chilling is that Ox’s clothes being covered in water is the best-case scenario.
Gil Thorp-“All my life I wanted to be a gangster.”
LUANN: Enjoy the moment now, Ox, because this is the closest you’re ever going to get to a blow-job.
@Old School Allie Cat: Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television. — Albert Camus
@Peanut Gallery: That makes sense. Thanks! Also, get bent, Comics Kingdom.
@Aleta’s Magic Raven: Ah yes, the often relitigated case of The Syndicated Cartoonist vs. The Girl They Think They Deserved In High School. In addition to Greg Evans, Brooke McEldowney and Tom Batiuk also spend huge amounts of time on this matter.
When can we start calling this behavior off-putting? Because it is. I have regrets about missed opportunities in my youth too, but I’ve been employing a technique called “moving on” for about three decades now.
The Phantom – It’s gotta be hard knowing friend from foe when you all wear the same khaki coloured uniform. Maybe Jungle Patrol recognize each other through their “THRACK” sounding kicks, which is different from whatever sounds their foe makes.
Luann – Is Ox a never nude, or just a guy afraid to take his shirt off because he grew up the fat kid?
@Menace the Dennis: Even those three “races” are not really discrete. There is as much genetic diversity within Africa as there is outside it, for instance — a Yoruba from Nigeria is as closely related to a Swede as he is to a San person from Botswana. Attempts to create these kinds of categories always run into absurdities like the fact that under the US Census classification, Iranians are classified as white but Afghans and Pakistanis, living right next door and speaking closely related languages, are classified as Asians. Personally I think that US tendencies to create neat categories derives from the fact that for most of our history the major groups here were Native Americans plus three Eurasian populations whose homelands were quite far from each other — Northern Europeans, West Africans, and East Asians — and not so much the people in between.