Tales of Josh’s oldness
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Hi and Lois, 9/10/26
Now, look, I more or less enjoyed Forrest Gump as a college-aged moviegoer in 1994, but I wouldn’t say that it had much of a lasting cultural footprint, you know? Certainly not to the extent little kids would be going around quoting it. Just for comparison, an eight-year-old in 2026 quoting Forrest Gump would be like me as an eight-year-old in 1982 quoting … actually, I looked this up, and the Forrest Gump equivalent from 1960 (hit winner of multiple Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director) is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, one of the greatest movies ever made. I also saw The Apartment for the first time in 1994, but if I had seen it as a child, I’m pretty sure I would’ve loved it then too. A lot of it would’ve gone over my head but the dialogue is pretty accessible, I think. “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise!” I would’ve said, if I had found myself in a situation like Ditto has in today’s strip. It would’ve still been appropriate, and my mother would’ve been charmed by my precocious taste in film instead of vaguely annoyed like Lois is here.
The Lockhorns, 9/10/26
Very longtime and very faithful readers of this blog know that today is my wedding anniversary, and, on the I think justified assumption that Leroy is a last-minute gift shopper, it appears to be the Lockhorns’ anniversary as well. This is even more disturbing than the fact that they’re millennials. This one’s personal.
38 replies to “Tales of Josh’s oldness”
The most disturbing part of The Lockhorns is how much they have to fuck up the proportions of their entire world, just so that Leroy and Loretta can interact with it.
Lockhorns: The man on the escalator is coming to tell the woman at the counter that once Leroy leaves shut it down. The deserted mall is closing for good.
Hi and Lois: Why does Lois even have that cookie jar? She forbid the kids from eating the cookies. Look how disappointed she is that her younger son successfully penetrated her defenses to eat some.
So the purchase and unpackaging, to say nothing of possibly baking, of the cookies in the Flagston house is kept secret from Ditto? What other elaborate ruses are perpetuated? Can the sugar be salt? Liquid soaps interchangeable with lotions?? The Scott is now Charmin??? Oh, Flagstons, you purveyors of delightful madness!
LH: [3 min earlier] Clerk: “No. Look. You see the sign ‘Adult Non-milestone Birthday Gift Suggestions’? Just past that.”
The saddest character in comics is the woman whose bodily proportions are more out of whack than Leroy Lockhorn’s.
H&L: Ditto needs his eyes checked if a cookie in his hand is as mysterious as the hidden flavour at the center of a chocolate bonbon!
Hi and Lois:
“Life is like Thirsty’s beer cooler — if you stick your hand in it to grab some brand of brewski, you never know what you’re going to get.”
Lockhorns: Love Dracula in the background, grabbing a few things at the mall. His creepy gliding across the floor shtick isn’t as scary once you realize he was just on an escalator the whole time.
H&L: Lois holds out hope that Ditto needs glasses and is not so stupid as to not simply look in the jar.
My Great Aunt Joan was an Anniversary Gift Suggestion-Giver. Worked her way up from the bottom, started as a Direction-Giver, then a Recipe Suggestion-Giver. Anniversary Gift Suggestions was the top of the mountain. Then, one day? Boom. Downsized, when it was revealed that nobody in the history of the Universe ever actually had that job. I’d feel bad for old Joan, if she weren’t completely made-up.
Happy anniversary, Josh! I only hope that you, like Leroy Lockhorn, have access to a huge department store that employs a full-time worker just to provide gift suggestions — which actually does seem more suited to the era in which The Apartment was made. Also, I hope you aren’t disturbed by the fact that you’ll tower over her, since the counter seems designed for customers who are four feet tall.
Once again we get one of the most popular and time honored comics tropes, the cookie jar that no kid is allowed to eat any of the cookies from. Down here in Southeast Texas we use cookie jars to store things we don’t want the cockroaches to get at.
Really today’s Lockhorns is a tragedy. If that woman stood up, her waist would be at Leroy’s nose. Her head is longer than his legs. She was destined to be with him, for the comic incongruence of her stretchiness and his squatness. Yet it can never be!
I guess now I must be the one to point out that Forrest Gump came out *thirty-two* years ago, not twenty-two. Young Josh would be quoting from All About Eve.
LH: Leroy’s *HIC* tips Loretta off that this year’s anniversary gift is the same as so many previous gifts: an empty bottle marked “XX”. It serves as a reminder that he is a hopeless drunk and not wealthy enough for triple X liquour
Lockhorns: If they phased out Leroy and Loretta to make more space for this performance artist doing bits in dead malls, I wouldn’t mind at all!
H&L Keep trying, Ditto, maybe you’ll find a neck in there.
Happy anniversary to you and Loretta!
“Nice speech, Lois. But I wouldn’t worry about those cookies. You can always put that award where those cookies ought to be.”
“Your dad really fucked you up, didnt he?”
Now, I’ve heard of the director and all the actors, of course, but I somehow managed to never hear about The Apartment, and looking it up, I find it hard to believe that “Depressed Jack Lemmon opens an Airbnb” was enough to sweep the Oscars…
But… you do, though. I get that sometimes cookies come in variety packs, but usually it’s all chocolate chip, or all snickerdoodle or whatever, to say nothing of baking a batch of cookies. Does Lois routinely bake, like, one cookie at a time? “Okay, that’s one butterscotch. Next I’ll do a single shortbread.” I mean, I get it, sometimes you’re standing in the kitchen with your shoulder in your ear and you’ve got to say something to your mother, but Jesus, Ditto, did it have to be this?
“Lois, he’s at it again!”
H&L: At least Lois retired the Job Jar, that former bane of Hi’s existence. Is everyone in this family working on a jar-based merit system?
MW: Mary starts a retaliatory rumor about Nelly and Wilbur. Nelly moves away in the middle of the night.
RMMD: This arc has totally hit a wall. Should we have FORSEEN that?
DtM: Dennis is in the OTC meds aisle, and the alarms should be going off. I mean literal alarms, like the Red Alert on Star Trek.
GT: The most important part of practice; menacing faces.
Happy Anniversary, Josh! May your gift be encouraging.
Hi and Lois-Ditto must have seen Doug Walker’s revirw of “Forrest Gump”.
MW-“I saw what I saw and I recorded what I saw.”
H&L: I turned eight in 1985, so my Best Picture reference would have been Amadeus. Frankly Ghostbusters easily trumps it in terms of pop culture impact and quoteability, but I could still make it work. “Mediocre chocolate chips of the world, I absolve you!’
L’horns: If Leroy is indeed a Millennial he is an unusually retroactive in his manners, going to the Montgomery Ward in the mall to ask the woman at the “Anniversary Gift Suggestions” desk a question rather than looking it up online like the rest of his cohort.
Archie-“Last Tango in Riverdale”
C’shaft: And that was how Tony Montoni had his fatal heart attack.
Dustin: I think we found the all-purpose punchline for any Dustin strip.
MW: I mean, come on, what is Nelly supposed to think? No sane person would willingly spend more time in Ian’s (or Mary’s) company unless there was something untoward going on…
The Lockhorns:
Happy anniversary, Josh! Now, there was a time, long ago, when the comics pages occasionally acknowledged Josh personally—a caricature in the Jumble, say, or a background detail referencing one of the blog’s running jokes in Archie, or most prominently, a genuinely mean-spirited attack by Crock in which he was summarily executed by the dictatorial Frenchman. Those days are sadly long gone, but no one will blame you for choosing to believe that the Lockhorns, a strip you’ve always professed to admire, decided to bestow upon you the highest honor it could think of, having you share an anniversary with its titular hate-gnomes.
MW: If Alma wants to be sure about this situation, she should ask the Window Eels. They see everything.
@Liam:
Archie is afraid to tell Mr Lodge that he needs the butter for lubrification because part of his anatomy is too big, and got jammed in an orifice, and now he can’t get it out without utterly breaking what it’s stuck in, and since it’s precious to Hiram he’d rather pull it out smoothly.
Happy anniversary and don’t eat too many cookies?
Oh, that wacky Leroy! What will he get into next?
@Joe Blevins: Sorry about that generic comment, but my actual comment wouldn’t show up so I posted that one as a test.
“The apartment, the greatest movie ever made”
I literally never heard of this film… I don’t know what this means.
Also, Die Hard is the greatest movie ever made.
Assuming the reality I woke up in, Die Hard still exists.
@TheDiva:
Weren’t those both 1984? 1985 would leave you with (checks notes)…Out Of Africa. Oh, God. I’m so….just, sorry.
H&L: He ate all those cookies? Ooh, somebody stop him! [long silence] You know, like, “Ooh, somebody stop me!” From The Mask? Another hit movie from 1994? [more silence] Look, I did a lot of research for this joke, so I’m not going to not type it out.