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Gasoline Alley, 12/22/23

OK, I may have to revise my previous statement of approval for Gasoline Alley’s wild, no-rules approach to the mall Santa game. Folks, the men (and occasional women) who put on the red suit and the fake beard are just doing their jobs, part of which involves the emotional labor of making everyone feel welcome and seen; do not take their openness towards you as an invitation to live out your longstanding sexual fantasy of making it with a thousand-year-old elf/nature spirit.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/22/23

If you need more proof that Parson Tuttle is a theologically unlearned fraud, consider the fact that anyone who decided that a lone cow was a perfectly acceptable substitute for a nativity scene probably hasn’t read Exodus 32.

Dennis the Menace, 12/22/23

You know I’m on a big kick lately about how the Lockhorns are millennials, but the truth is that today millennials are between 27 and 42, so probably most adult legacy comics characters, especially those with younger kids, are millennials. Anyway, Alice mostly ignoring her son’s Christmas-related whining by idly scrolling on her phone is a particularly millennial way to turn the menacing tables on him, in my opinion.

Mary Worth, 12/22/23

Sorry to obsess about Brad’s hat, but I’m clearly not the only one! Would he be less insufferable if he dropped the hat and let his hair free like God intended? Maybe! He could at least try it!

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Mary Worth, 12/17/23

Many years ago, something or some collection of things I said on this site convinced some readers that I was a vegetarian, which anyone who knows me in real life would find very, very funny, given that my diet is mostly predicated on the fact that vegetables are, in my scientific opinion, “yucky.” That said, my wife’s a vegetarian and I generally find cooking with meat kind of a pain anyway, so I do often make use of various meat substitutes, and honestly they’re fine? Like the Morningstar Farms fake fried chicken patties and nuggets aren’t “chicken” per se but are serviceably salty protein delivery mechanisms; and fake beef technology has really improved over the years, with stuff like Beyond and Impossible ground “beef” being … well, distinguishable from the real thing, probably, but also greasy (in a good way) and pretty tasty. They certainly wouldn’t result in even the most hardened carnivore reacting in the kind of disgust Keith is displaying here, unless you’ve talked yourself into hating it in advance.

That said, nothing in those types of burgers could be described as “Soylent,” which is actually the brand name of a vile nutritive slurry invented by a tech guy who hated food and almost certainly had some kind of eating disorder, and which was supposed to substitute for eating altogether. I don’t want to say that this is the first indication that Mary Worth may not have a good handle on what left-wing radicals are actually like, but I will say that Soylent, while technically vegan, had more appeal to people in libertarian tech spaces who wanted to spend all day coding for their startup without pausing to cook or even chew, rather than people who actually strongly identify as vegan. Anyway, Soylent’s heyday seems to have passed, and one of the things it was most famous for was wreaking havoc on your digestive system, so if that really is a Soylent burger, Keith has that to look forward to, I guess.

Marvin, 12/17/23

Obviously the worst part of Marvin is all the piss and shit jokes. But the jokes about the romantic lives of babies? Let’s be real: they’re not great either.

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Crock, 12/16/23

The infancy story in the Gospel of Matthew is the one that mentions the Magi, and while it specifies three different gifts they brought to the baby Jesus (gold, frankincense, and myrrh), it doesn’t actually say how many people brought that stuff, and while there are three kings included in most nativity scenes, there’s nothing canonical about that number. So, who’s the smart guy now, eh, Seymour?

Family Circus, 12/16/23

Jeffy, what are you wearing? Did you come to be dumb and belligerent at this mall Santa right after doing a standup set at Caroline’s in 1988?

Hi and Lois, 12/16/23

I gotta say that I really appreciate the facial expressions and body language on Dot and Ditto here. They’re devastated! Christmas is ruined!

Mary Worth, 12/16/23

Sonia and Brad love nothing more than fighting the system, a system that includes cattle ranching and taking your hat off indoors. Keith, on other hand, loves the system, and would never violate any aspect of it, especially America’s precious trademark laws, which keep our beloved franchised fast-food restaurants safe from repetitional harm.