Monday is for old people
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Pluggers, 9/7/26
This year, my 80-year-old stepmother fractured her hip badly enough to need a replacement, and although “hip replacement” sounds very dire, the hip is a large but simple joint and the whole procedure was remarkably easy: it’s an outpatient procedure and she was up and walking again in just a few days. A few years ago, a friend of mine in her 40s fell and hit the ground just right to cause a similar fracture, but her situation wasn’t so simple: the doctors told her that normally with that kind of injury they’d do a hip replacement, but the people who normally have that kind of injury are old, and they don’t think an artificial hip would last through the full lifetime of someone in their 40s, so my friend had to endure months of painful, immobilizing recovery instead.
Anyway, the idea that decisions about certain medical procedures have to take into account the projected lifespan of the patient is one I think about a lot. Like, yeah, it’s great that the sort of people who are most likely to need a quick and easy hip replacement are the same sort of people who don’t have to worry about whether that artificial hip will last more than a couple decades. And obviously it’s great to be told that you don’t have to go through the annoying process of doing a colonoscopy anymore! But I don’t know if I’d be quite so excited to learn that “Enh, you haven’t developed colon cancer yet, and if you start to do so at this point it almost certainly won’t be the thing that kills you.”
Marvin, 9/7/26
I really enjoy how upset everyone looks in this comic. Obviously the joke is that Marvin’s grandpa is like “Wife no cook food? Where food come from if wife no cook it?” (with the implication that in this context he is as helpless as a small pet dog), and that’s a classic sitcom-style bit. But Marvin’s grandma isn’t happy about this either! She thought writing the apartment newsletter would be a fun lark and a way for her to connect with her community, but instead it’s eating up time she’d rather spend caring for her family!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/7/26
“They kept saying stuff like, ‘What’s that lump on your head,’ and ‘Is it supposed to be hair? Because it doesn’t look like hair’ and ‘We’re moving out because the lump on your head has bad vibes.’ Good riddance, I say, and that’s coming from both me and my head-lump.”
22 replies to “Monday is for old people”
DtM – No Ruff, Mr. Wilson was telling Dennis, not you, to eat shit and die.
Rex Morgan:
Grandpa really wants to get Behind the Green Door. Hard to blame him.
Marvin:
Three thousand years from now, archaeologists will discover old Marvin strips. They will puzzle over what they could possibly mean and why anyone would ever read them, and then puzzle even more when they learn that the strips were actually translated into Spanish.
Pluggers:
Pluggers spontaneously shout “Woo hoo!” while being singularly unaware that this is a repetitive line from the band Blur’s “Song 2.” Then again, everything is a Blur to them.
RMMD: Rex finally enters the picture after the head of lettuce in lumphead’s takeaway bag gives him Cyclospora.
Crankshaft-“You’re doing more cleaning than for the health inspector.”
Slylock Fox-Wrong back door, Slylock.
MW-“They were wacked out on Mary’s muffins.”
RMMD: I thought doing twins would be a dream come true but now I got this lump on my head. Good riddance they’re gone, I say.
Pluggers: That’s nice. So when do you die? That’s the only thing I want to know, Plugger. When do you die? I’m sick of you fat, lazy, ignorant, decrepit meat sacks rubbing your inexplicable health in my face, when your life choices are way worse than mine across the board. And then you refuse to die, or even suffer any real consequences. Are you actually cockroaches? It would explain a lot.
I’m reminded of the fact that Milton Berle was diagnosed with colon cancer at, like, 93. They didn’t bother to operate because he wouldn’t be around long enough for it to kill him and even if he was, so what? It’s just Milton Berle.
RMMD: Wait, the plot has moved forward after only a few days of characters rehashing the same idea? Is that legal?
MW: You expect me to believe that Nelly, whose sole character trait is “hating everything,” is the sort of person who greets her neighbors? And you expect me to believe she waited a whole day before trying to ruin lives?
Mary Worth:
“And you’ll never guess what I saw them doing!”
“What is that, Nelly?”
“The same thing as that Worth virago does with that physician ‘boyfriend’ of hers with a skunk stripe in his hair — not a damned thing!”
A Plugger when his doctor decides, “You know what, you really should die of colon cancer.”
MW – Alma appears to be suffering from heavy exposure to colloidal silver and is unlikely to live long enough to spread this gossip.
Pluggers: I guess Pluggers was never meant to be seen at this resolution – it’s meant to be seen roughly the size of a postage stamp, printed in the cheapest inks on the greyest paper America’s struggling newspapers can afford – but those wonky pupils don’t look excited, they look manic with fear and rage. This is a man who is either suffering a breakdown, or is being depicted at the very moment he experiences his last colonoscopy.
Crankshaft : …this is building up to a week of “WE GOTTA HIDE PEPPER FROM OLD MAN MONTONI, HE COULD NEVER TAKE THAT KIND OF ANACHRONISM”, with the twist ending being “In my youth, I was always chasing some dumb, hot new gimmick to breathe new life in the restaurant. I was one of the first people to buy a DEFENDER arcade machine, BEFORE the local arcade! Of course I would think Pepper is a great addition to my restaurant!”
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Luann : …this strip continually forgets that Tiffany ALSO works at a restaurant part-time along with being a college student. That, or it thinks either half of that, if not both, is a sinecure compared to Luann’s stuff, which itself is treated as a sinecure by the strip!
(…I’ll actually be sad if we never see any of her “Comic Books are Serious Stuff” class…)**************
Marvin : I like how the art has only the dog expressing/emoting at all. The two humans are just blankly staring ahead, like they’re hypnotised robots going through the motions.
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Pluggers : Okay, everyone has commented “that means the Plugger is going to die”, so I’ll try the “does the Plugger who’s cheering so wildly realise that means he’s going to die pretty soon? If yes, is THAT why he’s cheering so wildly!?”
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Slylock Fox : I prefer the variation of this riddle where the solution is “the crooks left two empty wine bottles. There’s no way their accomplice could be sober enough to answer the detective’s questions if, as he claims, he was the one who just drank them himself”.
Pluggers: I really like how DogMan is shown from the waist up, as if he got into the exam room and immediately dropped his trousers before the doctor said “You know what, put that thing away, we’re done with that…”
Marvin: The joke here is that they don’t live in an apartment. Grandpa is pretty sure he knows that, but not sure enough to say something.
RMMD: “…I know that because they wouldn’t shut up about it while they were doing it. Just kept talking out loud as if they were narrating their own lives in the world’s most pointless documentary. God I am looking forward to the silence…”
@Lauralot: Not only that, but this neighbor appears to be the first POC we’ve seen at Charterstone ever since the Latino groundskeeper vanished (draw your own conclusions about *that* one). I was half expecting Nelly to be all ‘I’ll tell you all about it while you clean my apartment!’
Pluggers: A Plugger ages out of his anal retentive stage.
Pluggers: I hate to spoil everybody’s fun, but actually there is a point at which you’ve had your last colonoscopy (while you’re still alive). I’ve been there and I was glad that was over—no, I didn’t holler anything.
So enjoy your colonoscopes for the next 20 or 30 years, I hear they’re really fun. Don’t forget the delicious drink the night before and blow your intestines out real good.
@Pozzo: Quoth Wikipedia:
In April 2001, Berle announced that a malignant tumor had been found in his colon, but he had declined surgery.[93] Berle’s wife said the tumor was growing so slowly that it would take 10 to 12 years to affect him in any significant or life-threatening way. One year after the announcement, on March 27, 2002, Berle died in Los Angeles from colon cancer.
Dang that’s grim.
@Unca Bob: Yeah, I was like “I can relate to that plugger.” Did not enjoy the colonoscopy prep one tiny bit.
Marvin: Time Grandma would rather spend caring for her family? That family?
The juxtaposition of today’s Family Circus and Pluggers is too melancholy even for Josh to make light of
I’m gonna listen to Phil Ochs’ Changes on my iPhone now.