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Well, no doubt like many of you, I got swept up in holiday madness last week, and am still playing catch-up in the non-gorging-on-turkey aspects of my life. What with the two Thanksgiving dinners, the Christmas gift exchange with the cousins, the rousing chorus of folk songs from the labor movement, the avant-garde play performed by elementary school children, and the specter of 24 straight hours of uncontrollable vomiting hanging over it all (what, your week wasn’t like that?) I haven’t had time to read the comics so you don’t have to. In both the spirit of the holiday and a desperate attempt to play catch-up, I offer you a week’s worth of comics and corresponding sentence-long things that I’m thankful for.

B.C., 11/23/04

I’m thankful that B.C., having already pissed off both Muslims and Jews, is now going after the Irish, ensuring its departure from the comics pages any day now.

Dilbert, 11/24/04

I’m thankful that public discourse has coarsened to the extent that the phrase “cow’s butt” can now be printed in the comics pages, because I think cow butts are funny.

Beetle Bailey, 11/25/04

I’m thankful that Beetle Bailey has discovered postmodernism, at long last.

Mary Worth, 11/26/04

I’m thankful for Boston, because they rock, man.

Family Circus, 11/27/04

I’m thankful that at least one member of this family is beginning to question the oppressive patriarchal suburban hell in which she lives.

Doodles by Mac and Sack, 11/28/04

I’m thankful that Mac and/or Sack were polite enough to add “please” to their request that I add horns and a bell to the grazing bovine in the bottom middle panel, though I admit that I could have done without the freakish hula-hooping cow above it.

Kudzu, 11/29/04

I’m thankful to Bill O’Reilly, who’s provided days and days of jokes to desperate comic strips everywhere.

B.C., 11/30/04

And now the handicapped. Yep, any day now…

Oh yeah, and one last thing I’m thankful for is this Jonathan Franzen essay about Peanuts from the New Yorker. It’s, like, good and stuff.

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B.C., 10/20/04

OK, so I keep trying to make sense out of the continuing B.C. presidential race and keep failing. Is it just “ha ha, politicians are stupid and/or funny?” Or is it supposed to be a metaphor for ours? Obviously the current candidate who most fits the “linguistically challenged” category is Bush; so is this an attempt to link Kerry with “elitist grammarians,” possibly the most hated group in America today? Does the interrobang represent Kerry’s oft-mention flip-flopping ways? Or … or … what the hell?

Still got all those birds in the background, though. B.C.’s always got the background birds covered.

Not to sound like a despised elitist grammarian myself, but I defy anyone to explain the punctuation in the second panel to me — particularly the ellipsis and the em dash.

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B.C., 9/22/04

So all week I’ve been trying to understand B.C. I know, “Don’t do it!” you’re shouting. But generally this is not a strip that’s hard to figure out: whether it’s making jokes about golf, slamming on the ACLU, or saying that Jesus has come to put a stop to Hanukkah, it pretty much says what it means.

However, this week’s strips on the presidential race in, um, B.C.-land are fairly obscure. Comprehension is clouded from the get-go because the struggle involves three characters who are virtually identical in appearance and behavior. (They’re named “Peter,” “B.C.,” and “Thor,” and I won’t even begin to go into what all is wrong with that combo.) On the one hand, the sequence of events is oddly specific — Peter has successfully put up his sign, while everyone else’s campaign tactics are backfiring in strange ways. It’s more than just simple “Hah! Politics are stupid!” humor, but it doesn’t seem to correspond to anything else either. And, of course, it’s not even remotely funny. Maybe it’s supposed to be a commentary on the current U.S. presidential elections, but if it is, then it’s based on information coming from some parallel universe.