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One of the fun things about going over my blog history is seeing just how incredibly long it’s taken some plot points to play out. For instance: Judge Parker Senior’s awful unreadable book that everyone loves for some reason? That’s been a plot point in one way or another since 2008! In the first major plotline involving this cursèd tome, Sam was sent to nail down the ludicrous book advance a Parker deserves; he was in the middle of doing just that out on the golf course when his negotiating rival was gunned down by a sniper. The whole thing ended, as you might expect, with Sam standing by stone-faced while a SWAT team unleashed a hail of automatic weapons fire onto murderous, knife-wielding stripper named “Dixie Julep”.

Mary Worth spent the summer of 2009 trying her best to prevent a forbidden love between neglected wife Delilah and Charterstone resident lech Charlie. Despite Mary’s best efforts to physically separate them, Delilah only turned away from the road to harlotry when she saw the hellscape that was Charlie’s bachelor pad.

But my personal favorite plot of this year was a weird, rambling Mark Trail story where one of the weird but virtuous backwoods families Mark is friends with for some reason decided to call our hero in to take care of a problem with the local water table, somehow. The little girl in this family had a pet raccoon named Sneaky, and Mark shook its hand even though he was told up front that it was a filthy little criminal.

The lady in charge of the company draining the swamp met Sneaky too! Doesn’t he look adorable? Doesn’t he look not at all rabid or like he’s just thinking about biting you all the time?

Sneaky later escaped (to the extent that a wild animal leaving a house and going back into the woods can really be construed as “escaping”) and was eventually captured by a band of sinister backwoods folk who ran an illicit dog vs. raccoon fighting ring. There was log-chaining involved.

Mark intervened with both his fists and some opinions about the legality of the whole scene.

This was, hilariously, local front page news, and the raccoon fightmaster, who was named “Rabbit,” was hired by sinister corporate interests to run Mark out of town. This failed, obviously, though Andy the dog did have to lick Mark free from some kidnappers. In the end, water was restored to the swamp, and Sneaky was free … free to plot against us. He’s still plotting today. They say in the night you can hear his sinister chittering.

Anniversaposts will return on Monday! Stay tuned for a review of year six of this blog, which I dubbed “The Year of the Bastard” for reasons that will become delightfully apparent.

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2006-07 was quite the year in the soaps, guys. Mark Trail encountered a tame bear who couldn’t understand your hostility towards her, which I immortalized in t-shirt form. Later, Mark punched a man’s beard off.

In Gil Thorp, one of Gil’s student athletes accidentally cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. In the spring, a weird lonely old man wandered onto Milford High’s grounds, who helped coach the baseball team and claimed to have played in the Negro Leagues and insisted on being called by a funny nickname.

Turns out he was a fraud, and Gil knew about it but never said anything because he was doing Gil’s job for free so why rock the boat?

Also, in Judge Parker, a substitute butler from a temp agency forced some French punk rockers to strip to their underwear at gunpoint. I swear I didn’t make a single word in that sentence up.

But year three of my blog, without question, belonged to Aldo Kelrast, the man whose name was an anagram for “stalker” because he stalked Mary Worth, stalked her from the first moment he saw her.

Mary gave Aldo the cold shoulder pretty much right away, which didn’t stop him from popping up unexpectedly.

Aldo proved wholly unable to grasp the concept of consent, even when Mary used barbarous foreign tongues to express her disinterest.

Mary eventually had no choice but to arrange an intervention for Aldo, if any group of people brought together in one room to yell at someone counts as an “intervention.” Aldo reacted as most would: by going directly to a liquor store and driving over a cliff to his death. His pudgy, Captain Kangaroo-esque corpse was left in a pile of mangled steel.

This was a huge deal. People went nuts! My blog traffic was off the charts! There was coverage on CNN! There were tribute videos!

Later, Mary and her friends went to his funeral, to make sure he was really dead, and to gloat. It was awkward and fantastic. Cold justice had been meted out, and Mary was victorious. Farewell, Aldo: you didn’t deserve to die, but you shouldn’t have gone around stalking people either.

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The 2005-06 blogging year (I’m going to start calling it the July 11 to July 10 periods under consideration “blogging years”; hopefully this will be the basis for the new calendar, in the Curmudgeonarchy) was another strong one, soap-opera-wise! There was a great Mark Trail series where evil hillbillies kidnapped Andy, which was a thing that they did on the regular, apparently?

Don’t worry, Mark definitely got some good punching in on that one. Meanwhile, Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot revolved around Ted Pearse, a cool and mysterious new basketball prodigy in town who turned out to be homeless, which prompted fans of rival teams to literally dress up as hobos to taunt him.

(Earlier Ted’s friends pretended he had a terrible disease, to make him feel loved? I don’t really understand sports or how men typically relate to each other, guys.)

But 2005-6 was definitely, definitely the the year of Rex and Troy.

Troy was another doctor who tracked down Rex and they had the flirtiest conversation that ever flirted, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

The flirting continued:

They played some golf, or something, and Rex couldn’t stop talking about it the next day:

Then they played more golf and talked about universal health insurance, and were going to start some do-gooder clinic together, but then, uh, Troy turned out to not be a real doctor and fled town to avoid arrest, the end. Rex had to go back to his sham of a marriage/life, but he will always, always remember.

TOMORROW: Who could possibly top the list of the 2006-07 year out of numerous OK I can’t even finish this, it is Aldo, obviously it is Aldo, but tune in anyway to see the runners up. And if you don’t know who Aldo is, prepare for amazement!