Post Content

Sam and Silo, 1/28/25

You know what would be awkward? If you were a corrupt city official taking kickbacks from a local sporting goods supplier, and one of the things they produced was “rebounders” for soccer practice, sometimes referred to as “kickbacks,” and you pitched them an idea for a small version. That’s pretty much the only circumstance where you’d ever say “Where’s that little kickback we discussed? No, I am not talking about football” to someone on the phone, which would also require you to be using “football” in the non-American sense even though you’re an American. It’s a vanishingly rare scenario, which is why it’s kind of amazing to see it captured in today’s Sam and Silo.

Blondie, 1/28/25

As I long ago noted on here, as a child I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively, and I knew what the context of a sigh was because the characters were always sighing, but I didn’t realize what physical noise was being described so I would just say “sigh” aloud at times when one might sigh, and no adult corrected me for years, presumably because they found it very funny. In my defense sometimes Peanuts would just drop the word in word balloons, so I’m not sure what I was supposed to think. Anyway, in today’s Blondie, I guess Mr. Dithers is supposed to be smacking his lips as he enjoys a delicious donut, but I’d prefer to think he’s saying “Smack!” with the implication being that this delicious donut is taking him to the same state of euphoria that a junkie experiences after injecting heroin into their veins.

Hi and Lois, 1/28/25

A thing I feel very certain saying about Hi Flagston is that he has exactly one friend, and it’s Thirsty Thurston, which means that either (a) they’re on a two-man bowling team and Hi showed up tonight and Thirsty, probably drunk and belligerent, demanded to be captain of the team, and Hi sheepishly backed down, or (b) he’s on a team with a few acquaintances or maybe just people that the bowling league arbitrarily assigned together, and the rest of them decided Hi was a drip and a loser and pulled off some sort of coup, much to his humiliation. I think either of these scenarios would’ve frankly been a more interesting comic strip than this little “oh no, Lois briefly thought the family’s finances were in crisis” switcheroo.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 1/12/25

This Mary Worth storyline is sadly all too realistic in its depiction of emotional abuse and manipulation. But it’s extremely unrealistic in its depiction of someone who isn’t wearing her usual corrective lenses. I’m sorry, if Dawn’s vision is so bad that she’s just squirting ketchup all over the table in a vague attempt to season her fries, I refuse to believe she has any ability to see anything other than vague colors or shapes, or has any idea where she is or who she’s even talking to. I was also going to say that the transition that got us to “Duckgirl” isn’t realistic either, but I guess I need to keep in mind that Dirk is extremely stupid, so I’ll allow it for now.

Daddy Daze, 1/12/25

I swear that I am usually capable of processing a deliberate incongruity in the fictional world of a comic strip as a “joke,” but my least favorite instance of this is when an animal or some other entity that shouldn’t be able to read or write at all can, but is bad at it (probably the canonical version is the Far Side “CAT FUD” panel). That’s why I kind of approve of this strip, in which the Daddy Daze baby, who we are meant to understand is capable of advanced cognition that he communicates in a series of “ba”s, appears to have produced a professional-quality pamphlet, and hasn’t just handed over a piece of paper with squiggles all over it. Of course, you all know my theory that the baby is just a baby and the Daddy Daze daddy is insane, but nothing we see here precludes the possibility that the daddy produced the pamphlet himself in some kind of fugue state.

Hi and Lois, 1/12/25

Do you ever feel envious of Trixie, who lives outside the world of adult responsibilities and even childhood fears and enjoys a simple existence with her best friend, the light of the Sun itself? Well, it turns out that actually she perceives all sources of light and heat as separate conscious and jealous entities, and is constantly caught in their complex web of social relations as they jockey for status. Sounds real stressful, honestly, so maybe we should rethink our attitudes about her life.

Shoe, 1/12/25

I was about to make fun of Shoe for saying you can’t make money on the Internet, but then I remembered that he’s a newspaper editor, so he probably knows from pretty hard experience about not making money on the Internet.

Post Content

Dustin, 1/8/25

I think I speak for insufferable pedants everywhere when I say that I immediately clocked this as not being an actual line from Confucius — it’s way too touchy-feely — and felt great satisfaction when exactly 5 seconds of research proved me right. It’s widely attributed to the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, as part of the longer quote “He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything,” but nobody seems to have a specific citation for it, so that’s probably not true either. I leave the details to the elite team of Brainyquote investigators in the comments, but I do think that if there were even a thin thread connecting this to Confucius, you’d find that attribution everywhere online, because the older and more exotic the source of an anodyne statement like this, the more people love it.

Anyway, it made me wonder: What would Dustin’s dad think of Confucius? I feel like his opinion would be mixed: obviously he’d be into the filial piety and respect for hierarchy, but Confucius rejected the strict codes of Legalism and emphasized that an enlightened ruler leads by means of moral example, which a lawyer would be dubious about. I also considered trying to figure out what Dustin’s dad would think about Thomas Carlyle, but it turns out that his Wikipedia article is really long, and why would I waste my precious time on it when I could be making jokes about Dawn Weston walking into a door in Mary Worth?

Mary Worth, 1/8/25

In other news, Dawn Weston, having eschewed corrective lenses for the dumbest reason imaginable, walked into a door in Mary Worth, which incredibly means that she didn’t even get out of her own apartment building before we were treated to The Mr. Magoo-ening Of Dawn Weston. Honestly, looking at those doors I half expected them to open automatically, and maybe she did as well, who can say. Anyway, I look forward to Dirk tactically abandoning his “Nerdgirl” taunt and moving on to “Bruisegirl Nosebleedchick.”

Hi and Lois, 1/8/25

Ditto, she’s been around since 1954, she’s never had any teeth, and at this point she’s pretty sure she’s never going to have any teeth. Stop taunting her! Mush is all she will ever know, across however many decades she has left to suffer in this ageless hell!