Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 2/23/22

Kind of weird that Dick Tracy, the man who had a portable voice communications device decades before the rest of us had cell phones, apparently has a … pager? In the year of our lord 2022? Seems implausible, to me. Probably more likely that he’s just desperately trying to get away from Sam as Sam tries to ratiocinate his way to the solution that Dick is going to get by doing some light enhanced interrogation on an informant or two next week. “I’d love to really get into your thought process, Sam, but I’m [tries and fails to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse] getting a page from [tries and fails to come up with a normal-sound name] Riger.”

Crankshaft, 2/23/22

Look, I am a huge history dork, OK? Last fall one of the high points of my trip to New York was going to a tiny train museum in the Catskills where I bought this sign and was sincerely disappointed that we had dinner reservations and couldn’t stay for the talk they were giving about … I don’t remember now, but it was definitely train related. But even I would be very upset if I got a mysterious invite that made it seem like I’m about to learn that my great-aunt was going to leave her entire fortune to anyone brave enough to spend the night in a haunted house, but I show up and it turns out it’s just at the local Historical Society. This is going to turn out to be some NIMBY bullshit where Crankshaft And The Gang Stop Evil Developers From Tearing Down An Old But Disused Silent Movie Theater or something and I’m going to wish they had ended up saving journalism instead.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/23/22

Funky Winkerbean has taken a break from its a plot about how the Oscar nominations work that was marred by a number of errors of fact and chronology, and is now doing a riff about how everyone in Hollywood has an eating disorder, which I have to admit is pretty on point.

Mary Worth, 2/23/22

Oh, sorry, it looks like Cal isn’t going to bring his smoldering youthful libido into Toby’s staid life and reawaken her sexual self, which she thought died years ago in Ian’s bed. No, he’s going to want her to be his substitute mom, but like a cool mom, who doesn’t yell at him when he gets high with his bros and does getting-high-adjacent stuff like playing frisbee or watching Netflix but instead tells him he’s “feeding his creativity.” He will still expect her to sleep with him, though.

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 2/12/22

This is in reality an extremely egregious example of working backwards from a punchline to a joke, without putting much effort in trying to figure out how to make the backstory work logically, but damn it, now I’m trying to figure out the backstory behind a guy receiving an epiphany from the Lord above at a church and then switching to another church. I’m imagining the heavens opening and a divine voice informing Mr. Wilson that his current denomination, the General Six-Principle Baptists, were heretics, as were the General Association of Baptists, the General Association of General Baptists, and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, and only the General Conference of the Evangelical Baptist Church carried the true faith.

Mark Trail, 2/12/22

You know, I remember a time when Rusty would be over the moon just to be allowed to go on a trip with Mark and Cherry, and would certainly not plan on killing a cryptid for social media fame without their permission. I guess it’s true that the only way to raise a respectful ward son is to keep him in a “Rusty coop” out back 350 days a year. Parents these days are going soft, and it’s the source of nothing but trouble!

Pluggers, 2/12/22

I think a lot about a story a friend once told me about a Bay Area Vietnamese restaurant that was famous for serving fake but very convincing meat in its dishes. Once my friend was eating there and a guy came in and started berating the owner, who always was out and about serving as host, about how even though they weren’t serving meat they were still promoting meat culture, which is a culture of death. The owner listened to his whole diatribe stone-faced and finally just replied, “Look, we’re Buddhists, we like pork but we can’t eat it.” Anyway, after seeing this panel, I’m going to spend my weekend working on “horseshoe theory, but for pluggers.”

Dick Tracy, 2/12/22

This doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Moran case directly; Dick just knows that the best way to loosen up and get his head “into the zone” as we go into the weekend is to hunt a PR guy for sport.