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Hi and Lois, 10/18/16

Lois, if you’re going to raise expectations like that, shouldn’t you make some minimal effort to meet them?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/18/16

Football penalty flags are yellow. The official isn’t ejecting Bull, he’s giving up.

Mary Worth, 10/18/16

Mary suggested Iris should maybe spend a little more time with Tommy. Now she has to settle for a mere week of congratulations, because they squandered the Peace Prize on that Santos dude.

SO UNFAIR.

Heathcliff, 10/18/16

Evolution moves fast chez Heathcliff.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/18/16

I guess it must be far enough down the line for Michelle and Jordan Like the Country to resume flirting. ‘Cause that’s some straight-up banter right there.

Ballard Street, 10/18/16

Too late, by decades.

Mark Trail, 10/18/16

“Cannot … suppress … Nature facts!”

– Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 10/15/16

And it’s an invasive wild boar – the very worst kind! What’s more, he’s either a really ROUGH sort, or a real GROUCH – it’s hard to tell from context. Maybe both!

But hey waitaminute: what are wild boars doing on a volcanic atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? I’m guessing they weren’t carried ashore in bundles of firewood like the ants. Maybe the neo-Aztecs who built the mountaintop temple imported boars for sacrifice until the boars figured out the deal and turned the tables?

Most likely it’s all a plot by Abbey Powell’s sinister “U.S. Department of Agriculture.” Alarmed by the invasion of fire ants, they brought in Formosan termites to control them. This turned out to be a terrible mistake. So they shipped in “beneficial” nematodes, which promptly started eating all the coral. The marine iguanas they imported to kill the nematodes quickly overwhelmed the beaches, so they airlifted in packs of boars and here we are. In a desperate attempt, Abbey has conned Mark Trail to come in and punch the boars into submission. I hope it works, because the next step is nuclear weapons.

Dick Tracy, 10/15/16

When someone is killed for persecuting an ethnic group with exactly two members, the police know where to start their investigation. When both of those members are friends or relatives of Dick Tracy, they have a pretty good idea where to stop it, too.

Phantom, 10/15/16

OK, so the Phantom has one of those Lone Ranger-style “see my unmasked face and die” gimmicks going on, and it apparently includes his wife??? Brrr….

Maybe he only goes all shadowy like this when we’re watching, which frankly hurts my feelings a little bit. Dude, we’re your fans. We stuck with you through Hide the Lion. We toughed it out through The College Kid — that’s gotta count for something. How ’bout a little peek at them baby blues?

Judge Parker, 10/15/16

OK, now that Bob Dylan has his Nobel Prize we’d better get used to the fact that Boomer culture is universal culture everywhere and forever.

At 77, ’60’s icon Spencer Davis (Gimme Some Lovin’) is old enough enough to work at Neddy’s factory, but not desperate enough for her starvation wages. From his retreat on California’s Catalina Island, he writes:

♬

Well, the factory’s collapsing, got a hole in the floor
Canes and walkers clacking on their way to the door
Let me through granny, I don’t want to be entombed
And you better hobble quicker, ’cause this place is doomed.

And I sure hope you make it — we olds can’t take it
You’ve got to: gimme some running (gimme, gimme some running)
Gimme some crushing, (gimme, gimme some crushing)
Gimme some shoving everyday.
Hey hey.

Hi there, faithful reader! I’m sitting in through Sunday the 23rd while Josh takes a break. Please let me know if you experience any access or comment-posting problems at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net. Enjoy!

— Uncle Lumpy

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The Phantom, 10/11/16

You know what you should be calling your dad about, Heloise? The fact that he’s paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition at this fancy pants private high school (risking exposure by selling bits and pieces of his ancient artifact collection on the black market to get the cash needed to do so) and you’re sitting here bored in a giant lecture hall. What’s the student-teacher ratio at this place, anyway? And is the teacher really just gesturing at a six-foot-tall PowerPoint slide that consists entire of three lines of text? Text written in some extremely basic font? What is that, Adrianna? Gross!

Mark Trail, 10/11/16

Hey, remember seven months ago, when Mark urged his shapely female companion to overcome her sense of anxiety and cross a rickety natural bridge? At the time, I claimed that since this was Mark we’re talking about there couldn’t be anything sexual to it, but I’m starting to think that we’ve at last discovered what turns this weirdo on.

Blondie, 10/11/16

I can’t stop looking at the phrase “I didn’t realize you were into shining shoes!” and thinking about how strange and hilarious it is. Honestly, this is exactly the sort of awkward thing that I would blurt out to a child in a desperate attempt to relate to them. I’ve said it before, but Dagwood could save himself a lot of mental energy and frustration just by changing the locks on his doors.