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I’ve been remiss in thanking our very own Islamorada Girl (who sent it) and our very own Beasley (who appraised it) for a fab wedding gift I received a few days ago: the Sunday comics section from the Baltimore American on April 26, 1942. My reactions?

• “Wow, every comic got, like, half a page each!”
• “Wow, everybody’s in the army!”
• “Wow, the Phantom sure used to be a lot more racist!”

Fortunately, except for the kids being younger, Blondie hasn’t changed much:

There’s a breast-feeding joke here somewhere, but I’m too classy to really go for it.

I’m taking a quick trip back to see the family in Buffalo this weekend. I’d say that it would interrupt the flow of comics, but that flow got interrupted quite nicely this week without any trips, now, didn’t it? So let’s just say that I’m going to take a pass on Saturday and Sunday’s comics, unless something really wacky happens, like more hand-jiving.

Stuff to entertain and/or distract you while I’m gone:

• Dub Not Dubya’s Gil Thorp-Mallard Fillmore mashup
• A deeply weird reimagining of Rex Morgan, M.D.

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Say, is there anyone out there who’s skilled in setting up WordPress and interpreting arcane SQL error messages and who’s been thinking, “I love that gosh darn Comics Curmudgeon — what can I do to make his life easier?” Well, here’s your chance. I’ve made a couple stabs at installing the SpamKarma plug-in, which everyone just raves and raves about as a killer of loathsome comment spam (I’ve had a bunch the last few days that featured the word “torture” a lot, so that’s another word that will get your comment put into a queue — sorry about that). But every time I activate it, posting a comment causes the blog to barf out a truly impressive SQL error message of some kind. If anyone would like to help me interpret said error message and possibly get SpamKarma working, e-mail me, please.

For those of you for whom the previous paragraph read like “Blah, blah, blah, blah, boring, stupid computer crap,” I apologize. Here, why not enjoy this image from yesterday’s post?

Ha, ha! Jeff has hairy arms!

Update: Upon further reflection I think I need a WordPress guru. WordPress in theory is supposed to hide all interactions with the SQL database from morons like myself. I can look at the error message and get the gist of what’s going on — there are some tables that WordPress and/or SpamKarma expect to find that they’re not finding, or that they’ve found and the permissions are wrong — but I have no idea why they haven’t been created and/or have the wrong permissions, and I’m really pretty sure that I shouldn’t be mucking around in the database directly, but rather fixing WordPress’s interaction with it (if possible). If you do know a WordPress guru, though, be sure to point them my way.

Yeah, apologies for the further dorkery. Look, the freaky Heat-Miser-hair dude from Gil Thorp has furry arms too!

(Thanks for Kevin Spencer for the cuttin’ ‘n’ pastin’.)

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I don’t know if the spammers are getting smarter of if the new version of WordPress is more vulnerable to spamming, but more and more comment spam is getting through my filters. I have thus been forced to take the irritating step of forcing you to enter a security code before you can post a comment. Not sure if this will cut down on spam or not; I’ll keep it in place if it does. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: OK, that didn’t really help matters, and I think I’ve found something else that does, so I turned it off. Go about your business.