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Archive: Mary Worth

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Excited for deep cover agent Mary Worth to finally meet her handler

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Mary Worth, 3/13/22

I haven’t discussed Mary Worth all week because it has entirely consisted of Cal ham-handedly flirting at Toby and asking her out to lunch and Toby serenely pretending she doesn’t notice, or perhaps actually not noticing, while this lady looks on menacingly. Today is noteworthy mostly because Helen unleashes a deadly wave of cringe by announcing “I’ll say it again for the people in the people in the back”; I assume her point is that this is a young person phrase, and that when it’s used by old people like Helen, it’s extremely embarrassing, just like it’s embarrassing when an old person like Toby flirts with a college student like Cal. Anyway, today’s Sunday Mary Worth Epigraph™ is from former CIA head Michael Hayden, so I certainly hope somebody’s going to get waterboarded by the end of this storyline.

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/22

Mostly I’m posting this for the final panel in the middle row, in which Mr. Wilson looks appropriately jazzed to tell Dennis exactly how his favorite charismatic megafauna went extinct. With that clenched fist you can tell he’s really getting worked up about how many of Dennis’s beloved monsters died in a frenzy of flames, and then the rest starved to death over the ensuing months as dust blocked out the sun and the food chain collapsed. I’m excited for Mr. Wilson to overhear the lad wondering what happened to his other grandparents that we never see some day!

Crock, 3/13/22

Say what you will about the negative effects of climate change, but it at least it will wipe out all the characters in Crock in a huge, cleansing flood! (We realize that this is cold comfort to the 44 million or so people of Algeria and mean no disrespect to them.)

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Mostly frisbee content

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Shoe, 3/5/22

Look, I’m not saying the creators of Shoe are trying to get us to think about the weird anatomical mechanics of their bird-man character’s asses — I am of course on the record as saying that they’ve actually forgotten that they’re birds entirely. But you have to admit that this strip features the absolutely perfect angle to remind you that, yes, the Perfesser has a huge plume of tail feathers, and that’s why he doesn’t wear pants, and then immediately hits you with his wacky story of sitting a gooey puddle of chocolate. I don’t care for it.

Mary Worth, 3/5/22

Oh my gosh, it looks like we’ve found our plot’s villain, everybody! It’s this woman who’s watching Toby and Cal’s ham-handed flirting with cold, detached disapproval. Not sure which possibility is funnier: that she’s Santa Royale Community College’s designated #metoo officer and she’s going to cancel the living daylights out of Toby, or she’s a literature prof who’s met Ian at conferences and always had an eye on him, and now that his hussy younger wife is flinging herself at some teenager she sees a chance to make her move.

Gil Thorp, 3/5/22

“…to inject me with the EXPERIMENTAL SUPER SERUM”

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I know it’s paradoxical, but you will never initiate sex by using the word “initiate”

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Mary Worth, 3/4/22

Here’s a weird thing that happens sometimes in Our Dumb Dystopia: people will make storefronts on Amazon even though they don’t have anything to sell. Instead, they set bots up to find other stores that actually have things to sell, create listings for the same items the other stores sell, mark up the price by a dollar or two, and then use SEO trickery to try to make their store a higher ranking search result than the real one. When someone tries to buy an item from their store, they just order from the real store, who does all the work, and they pocket the difference, having done nothing. This can sometimes produce truly bizarre results, like when the bots that do this for two fake stores lock onto each other, each assuming the other is real, and each keeps raising its price to be just a little higher than the other, until someone notices that soap or toothbrushes are selling for more than a million dollars. I’m bringing this up because today’s Mary Worth shows what would happen in a similar situation, except instead of two Amazon storefronts, we have two robots who have been programmed to attempt to convince a real life human to have sex with them. “But not for initiating a ‘fling’ with you!” and “go sit in the corner, Cal!” give off very strong “we showed this AI 10,000 hours of people flirting and this is what it came up with” vibes, except it was more like 20 hours, tops.

Sam and Silo, 3/4/22

The internal worlds of newspaper comic strips are extremely resistant to change, which makes them great little time capsules of social mores that were quite different not that long ago and have changed in ways most of us don’t think much about. Just as Blondie still takes place in a world where suburbanites let their dogs roam freely at night, Sam and Silo in whatever year this rerun is from failed to move up into the world where most people’s housecats would be fixed as a matter of course. Because this cat? This cat fucks, everybody. He fucks a lot.

Gasoline Alley, 3/4/22

GASOLINE ALLEY ADMITS IT: LITERALLY ANYTHING ON TV OR IN THE MOVIES IS MORE EXCITING AND FUN THAN GASOLINE ALLEY