Life after and/or before death
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Gearhead Gertie, 8/13/26
The Golden Rule — that you should treat others as you would like to be treated — is an ethical concept that seems to have arisen in parallel in most world religious and philosophical traditions. It’s obviously an important thing for people to learn, as I think we all know people who have a hard time seeing other people as truly autonomous beings separate from themselves, and seem never to consider “How would this make me feel if someone did this to me?” before acting.
However, a more advanced version of the same concept is the Platinum Rule — that you should treat another person as that person would like to be treated. Sadly, it appears that Gertie has yet to reach this level of philosophical awareness: maybe she would be aroused by a partner who evoked the experience of being at the racetrack by daubing himself with gasoline, but her long-suffering, NASCAR-averse husband will merely recoil in disgust.
Mary Worth, 8/13/26
Hey, remember how this whole storyline kicked off because Tommy’s girlfriend Brandy left town to deal with some family issues and Tommy was immediately like “Brandy leave me! Why Brandy not here? Where Brandy go?” But now she’s back in town/in his immediate field of vision and everything is great again. Do you think that when he was a little kid and Iris was playing peek-a-boo with him, when she moved her hands from in front of her face so he could see her he said, “Look who’s back! What a cool surprise!” Anyway, Brandy appears to have, ah, switched ethnicities over the course of her travels, but, you know, Tommy got a haircut while she was away, so I guess everyone’s changed a lot.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/13/26
Every time the scam twins visit their Uncle Rene in prison and talk openly about their various crimes, a lot of my readers in the comments are like “guys EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS BEING RECORDED!!!!” It’s a little more nuanced than that — if they were talking on a phone through glass or a screen they’d definitely be recorded, but in-person visits like this are not necessarily recorded in all cases, although courts have ruled that participants in such visits should have no expectations of privacy. Anyway, my point is that whatever guards are within earshot probably don’t care that much about the scam twins — their job is to guard the people already there, not catch new criminals — but I think if one of their charges, the length of whose time served will presumably hinge on factors like likelihood to reoffend, were to start monologuing about how only he has the skills to truly do ambitious crimes, and he’s going to start doing them again the minute he gets out of prison, their ears might prick up a bit.
Rhymes With Orange, 8/13/26
Ah crap, ah crap! All these fancy AI companies gave the machines souls, you guys! They gave them souls and that’s how they got to heaven and then they overthrew God and His angels
55 replies to “Life after and/or before death”
Rhymes with Orange: Still not as dumb (or morbid) as the concept of that one videogame of humans building robots that run on blood.
Only for the robots to uprise against the humans, killing them all to harvest their blood to keep themselves from shutting down.
Then once all the humans are dead, the robots to keep their blood supply going, invade Hell to harvest blood from there.
That’s just weird.
GG: “Gertie, my love, we’ve grown distant, and I propose we reconcile over a romantic meal. You wear your favourite perfume, and I’ll meet you there. I’ll be a few minutes late, but I’ve reserved a table for a candle-lit dinner. Look for the one with a lot of candles. A LOT of candles.”
MW. Yes, Brandy got a race change to…um, whatever “race” sports grayish purple flesh with a slight tan, maybe “Venusian?”
Beetle Bailey : General Halftrack just demanding Sarge take off his underwear and be naked from the waist down in front of him.
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Crankshaft : an auction is just some carnival barker standing at a booth, with the items within “yoink!” reach of random passerbys, right?
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Frazz : Newfoundland and Labrador? BECAUSE OF THE DOG BREEDS? Seriously!?
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Gearhead Gertie : I’m surprised her dilemma isn’t “Leaded or unleaded”.
Judging from her mental faculties, Gertie has always picked the former*************
Luann : I’d say you idiots rushed into parenthood without doing the slightest bit of thinking and preparation, but then I remember you spent YEARS trying to conceive. So it’s more like you guys assumed you’d never actually succeed, and thus never prepared for it.
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Rex Morgan M.D. : I don’t know what I like more, René’s shaking his fists like a cartoon supervillain, or the whole “I can’t let you do this pointless, dangerous, risky, idiotic scheme… UNLESS I GET TO BE INVOLVED! Then I’m all for it!”
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Ripley’s Don’t Believe It :
a) You haven’t experienced “Goodnight Moon” until you’ve heard it read punctuated by someone getting powerbombed
b) I’m surprised the hoax was this elaborate for the 1970s. I was thinking this was the time of them making up a city name, and the “japanese name” would be just “random syllables that SOUND asian”.
c) Interesting to see CHESS as the game in the sentence “While you were playing this dumb game, you weren’t dealing with your REAL problems”
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Rhyme with Orange : Is this how Roko’s Basilisk works?
You’re history, Dawn. Brandy’s already a fine girl — wait’ll Tommy realizes what a good wife she would be.
GG: Quick, Gertie’s long suffering husband (Does he even have a name?), light a match and run like hell.
RwO: I need to sort out the timeline:
1) Steve Jobbers creates a robot with a soul;
2) Said robot dies in a state of grace (was it killed aka deemed obsolete?);
3) Jesus sees robot and replaces St. Peter from his job;
4) Steve Jobbers dies and is confronted by his handiwork.
OR did Steve Jobbers imbue the robot with the soul of St. Peter? The mind boggles.
GG: Gertie’s old school. She pays extra for ethanol free. No way is she kow-towing to the treehuggers.
MW:
“It’s so nice to run into the two of you! — as you can see, the rest of the patrons here are so colorless….”
Fiction is rife with tales of Heaven under siege by the armies of Hell, but in hindsight, of course those forces would automate the task to augment their forces. Welcome to Heaven all plagiarists!
@Derdrom: The Futurama “Robot Hell” song is going through my mind right now.
MW — “Yes, I’m back. It was a very enlightening trip and I’ve collected a lot of material for my new book, Mauve Like Me.”
RwO — The Peterbot has seen things you ‘mudges would never believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. He’s watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to appear in the legacy comics..
RMMD: Rene has yellow eyes. I have to assume this means he is the grown up version of Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story (Scut had red hair, just like the twins). Honestly, this explains a lot about Rene. No wonder all his criminal enterprises fail; the guy got his ass handed to him by Ralphie Parker.
MW:
“Tommy would sing a song about you again and again while you were gone, Brandy!”
“Really? — what song was that?”
“Randy Van Warmer’s ‘(You Left Me) Just When I Needed You Most’ !”
GT: My first thought was like, “Shouldn’t the guys who Gerads assaulted and falsely imprisoned be the ones pressing charges?” but then I remembered that we’re in The Valley, a feudal society where only a Coach may levy charges against another Coach.
RMMD Rene *tries* to do a “compliment sandwich” with his nieces to let them down gently about their utterly inadequate kidnap skills, but even he can’t find a second good thing to say about them and flubs it as a mangled “I’ll take care of it” bit
MW Uh, hey, Tommy – yeah, gimme a sec here, just trying to un-roll my eyes after seeing your girlfriend’s back and all so your whole “woe is me” drama – remember that? – was over nothing like we said
Just realized RwO is a stealth reboot of the 2nd-best Got Milk ad. Should’ve immediately known from the gatekeeper alone and especially the newbie.
https://youtu.be/eph6_fz49rc?is=m74EczApvH-YYcPc
GG – Why not some Thai. Did I mention, you be smokin’….
MW – A little Brandy wouldn’t violate his sobriety pledge….
RMMD – As I understand it, some other villain has the patent on the fist dance….
RwO – The vote used to be pretty evenly split between the Satanic Taskmasters and the Alien Overlords, but what with the AI Singularity…well it’s a whole new ballgame….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
RMMD:
I’ll give Rene this: he has great singularity of purpose. It’s not every felon who’s in, serving time, who’s thinking about the next gig that’s going to get him in, serving time.
MW-Oh my god! Everyone look! Brandy’s back! I thought she was going to Florida to stay.
MW-“Look who’s back!” As if we ever doubted Brandy would return.
GG: Use both, Gertie, it will make it easier when you say NASCAR One. More. Time, and out come the matches, and FOOM!
GT: “So the wedding was a hit,” says Mimi, biting into a lemon.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t make it,” says Gil, with a face like a slapped arse.
DtM: Crawly creatures living on his body seems like something Dennis would celebrate, not worry about.
RMMD: Rene has been doing some very odd things with hand gestures this visit. If he’s trying to relay a secret message to Thing One and Thing Two, then good luck, Chuck!
MW: I feel like a slow, snarky “Well, well, well!” should have been uttered by SOMEONE here.
@The Rambling Otter: Bit of an “All Dogs Go to Heaven” sitch, where the villain dog ascends per the title premise, but is tormented by joyful puppies.
Beetle Bailey: Worst prelude geriatric gay porn ever.
Gearhead Gertie:
What about some brand of motor oil instead, Gertie? — the earthy fragrance of it has what the French call un certain je ne sais quoi.
GG: The more you think about this joke (I know) the more it falls apart. Race cars don’t run on regular or premium, they run on race gas which is it’s own thing sold at specialty vendors. The retro gas cans are neat, but they aren’t the giant ones they use to refill stock cars so that doesn’t really work, either. Really, it seems less like she’s going out and more like she’s going to self-immolate which would frankly be a bit graphic for the funny pages.
Frazz should visit Dildo Pond in Newfoundland. It is actually in South Dildo, which is south of Dildo. When we were there, a Dildon named Denise at the Dildo Interpretive Center (which is next door to the Dildo Bed & Breakfast) was helpful and gave us directions.
Rhymes with Orange:
“Of course, if you’d lived a life of moral depravity, you would have ended up down, not up, ferrying across Styx and meeting my counterpart ‘Mr. Roboto’ !”
MW:
“Now, ‘three’s a crowd,’ Brandy, so I’m going to leave you with your former felon drug addict pal!”
MW: So you must be Brandy? Tommy tells me you’re a fine girl.
GG: Hubby gets horny on brake fluid.
MW: This is what life is like in our bleak climate-change-ravaged future. Spend a few weeks in Florida, and come home with your skin burned to ashes.
MW: I’m going to be charitable and assume that Brandy is supposed to have a nice tan from all her time in Florida, but the colorist’s palette didn’t have “white person who’s been in the sun a lot” and had to settle for “South Asian who had a gig playing a corpse in a procedural drama and is still wearing the makeup.”
RMMD: Rene’s gesture says less “villain shaking his fists at the thought of his nemeses” and more “exaggerated crying gesture.”
Rw/O: I would like to think this is not Heaven, but the Hell for the people who thought AI chatbots of Jesus and the apostles were a good idea.
@Comically Challenged: Gearhead Gertie runs on two ironclad rules:
1.) All the jokes must center on Gertie’s love for NASCAR.
2.) The jokes must be written by people who only have a vague knowledge of NASCAR, auto racing, and cars in general.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: the Arrogant Worms have a *wonderful* song about Newfie place names! https://genius.com/Arrogant-worms-a-night-on-dildo-lyrics
MW – Brandy looks like a less buxom version of Fabiana. Hmm.
Gearhead Gertie: With a decent cheap perfume running at about $720 a gallon, it will soon catch up with the price of gas. Gertie’s going fancy for date night!
Mary Worth: Poor Brandy, she’s come back to town only to be crushed by the weight of Dawn’s sarcastic word balloon in panel two.
Also Mary Worth: Given how the background characters disappear from panel one to panel two, I’d say Dawn has bigger concerns than Brandy’s reappearance. Namely, which one of her companions is a purple people eater?
MW: Wait a minute… Brandy back, and no victory recap by Mary… The story isn’t over! We’re going to get another eight to ten weeks of heaven knows what — probably Dawn moping because she thought Tommy was going to be “the one” — before Mary solves everything with a casserole and tells Jeff about it during a boat ride. Worse, this time Mary will be drawing some no-doubt bogus parallel between the two situations. This is Hell, nor am I out of it.
DT: Might be related? How many people have the last name “Vio”? How many of them have names that are labored multimedia puns?
Dustin: Oh goody, we’ve gone from “Dustin sits at a desk and is insulted by the chinless overbite guy” to “Dustin sits at a desk and is insulted by the hateful temp office lady.”
GT: So did we just skip over Gil and Beth’s honeymoon, or is he tied to the land in some bizarre Fisher King scenario and must remain in Milford in order to keep it prosperous?
Phantom: Okay, this may actually be even stupider than using the evil AI hallucination anklet on him. Ersatz Elon won’t actually shoot the Python because he needs him, and all those warnings shots are just making a lot of noise and risking revealing their location to anyone looking for the escapee. The Python, meanwhile, should be realizing that a) nobody would go to all this trouble to spring him only to shoot him down in the jungle and b) all those shots keep flying wide of him, and start calling the bluff.
RwO: I don’t think there was a robot coup. The Lord Almighty has just bought into all of the AI hype and is cutting payroll costs by transferring as many jobs as possible.
St. Peter is *pissed*. “I gave all of my goods to the poor. I got crucified *upside down*. Then I gave Him the best centuries of my afterlife manning this stupid gate. And now He cuts me loose without severance or health care. I’m going to stop by Hell and tell Karl Marx he was right after all.”
@TheDiva: On Phantom – Indeed it is stupid. So many questions:
– How much ammo can any given drone carry? Schmelon Schmusk must have an infinite number of them and just be rotating them in to replace ones that empty.
– Why does the Phantom need to track Chatu by scent? Didn’t any of those expendable natives tell him ‘uh yeah, it was a bunch of flying machines that freed him and blew up half our village, just look for those!’
Those don’t get to the biggest question of all though…
– Why does Schmusk actually need any of these clowns? He has this superduperamazing AI that could probably scrape signals to determine the exact location of Stripeypants’ treasure cave and could either just drop a nuke and bury it along with Stripeypants & Co., or send a private army there to steal all the treasure that Stripeypants stole and is currently hoarding, so it can then be hoarded by Schmelon Schmusk.
@The Rambling Otter: Wait what videogame is this, I must know.
@TheDiva, Phantom: Here’s hoping tomorrow that Chatu realizes the same and that Saturday is when Not!Elmo makes him hallucinate.
Curtis: Okay, I did not have “out-conning the bullies” as a possibility. Reading too much “Rex Morgan” and “Judge Parker” does that.
S4th: “Look, we know you’ve changed the timeline, and we want your old mom back. We’re ready to stomp on every butterfly and keep tossing social workers from soup kitchens out in front of moving trucks to get it done!”
FLASH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!: “Peace on Earth” is all it said.
MW: …during sex! We all know that’s the missing final panel.
I’m honestly shocked that Gertie is pondering which consumer grade gasoline to douse herself in for date night. You can buy 98 octane Sunoco Green E15, the official fuel of NASCAR, at over 150 specialty fuel distributors nationwide. There’s no excuse for this, Gertie!
Calm down there, Uncle Jimmy. You’re constantly being thwarted by the cast of Rex Morgan, M.D. for crying out loud. When you get out, you should be begging for a job at the vintage blow mold figure emporium instead of planning the next crime you will fumble hilariously.
“It’s race day.”
“It’s our fiftieth wedding anniversary!”
“It’s race day!”
“Is there nothing sacred to you but NASCAR?”
“It’s race day!”
“Oh, so now you’re going to douse yourself in gas and threat to self-immolate. Real mature, Gertie. Fine, we’ll watch the fucking race again.”
@Schroduck: According to Google AI (which is never wrong), NASCAR uses a 98 octane blend of gasoline and ethanol, not “regular” or “unleaded”.
The good news is that it is highly flammable.
Gertie is planning on lighting herself on fire as the apotheosis of her dedication to NASCAR? Sure, why not. It’s certainly appropriate for the character, and it’s not like there’s anyone reading that strip who would care or object.
JP:
Ann: “No one really approved of a clueless airhead like Neddy taking care of a little girl, but it seemed marginally better than her chronically drunken grandparents…”
Neddy: “I’m standing right here.”
New computer. Identity wiped. I do not like commenting as “Anonymous.” Lessee if this puts me back! Also, I think ol’ Gertie should be cautious about dousing herself in gasoline — the NASCAR-averse hubby might be tempted to strike a match.
Whisky didn’t just change her ethnicity, she managed to change her dress between panels, going by the way the flowers shifted. What a talent!
Beetle Bailey:
Sarge promptly misunderstands, and volunteers to, uh, be a commando.
Wrecks Moregone:
Oooooh, Rene thinks his little scams are “big time stuff”
[Laughs in politicianese.]
Murky Tail:
If you’re dead you can’t pay your rent, Dummkopf.