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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.

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Beetle Bailey, 12/12/23

One of the whole points of Beetle Bailey is that the title character is lazy. Or, I guess if we’re being more charitable, despite the fact that he’s enlisted in the notoriously hierarchical U.S. Army, we could say he simply refuses to do things that he doesn’t feel like doing, even if he’s ordered to do so — that he’s “somebody who’s caught in the system that they have to resist in order to exist,” in one of Mort Walker’s more poetic descriptions of his most famous creation. This is all well and good and honestly entertaining when Beetle is refusing to peel potatoes or mop the floor or whatever make-work tasks Camp Swampy has on offer; but today’s strip, which features an terribly injured man trapped in a burning car, his dog howling out in desperate hope that someone can help his master before he dies in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable, makes Beetle’s bit of doing a real half-assed job at everything, including providing or calling for assistance in an emergency, somewhat less comical.

Mary Worth, 12/12/23

Who’s the worst possible person to try to introduce to the idea of a polycule, and what’s the worst possible way to do it? I’m tentatively going to go with “Keith” and “like this.”