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The moment I’ve been dreading is here. In today’s Baltimore Sun was an announcement that the comics section will soon be getting an “extreme makeover.” Accompanying the article was a ballot in which readers were asked to choose their ten favorite current comics. This is clearly an attempt to force a Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma on loyal comics readers before the powers that be down on Calvert Street decide to impose Marvin or Baby Blues or some such on us, or, even worse, cut the comics section in half.

Now, in my expert opinion, it’s the soap opera strips — my precious, precious soap opera strips — that are in biggest danger of elimination, because, despite my best efforts to impress the depth of their horrible hilarity onto the uncomprehending minds of the populace at large, most of those minds remain uncomprehending. So, this is the moment where we find out if IRTCSYDHT has the power to unleash an army of rabid followers out onto the world. Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Go to the Sun’s comics ballot page (I’ll put a link at the end of this post).
2. Vote for Apartment 3-G, Mark Trail, Mary Worth, The Phantom, Prince Valiant, and Rex Morgan, M.D. (along with four others of your choice; I suggest you include the Lockhorns).
3. If you happen to live in the Baltimore area and have a copy of today’s Sun, cut out the actual physical paper ballot from the paper and send it through the actual physical mail (not forgetting the actual physical stamp).

That link for the voting is http://www.baltimoresun.com/comicssurvey. I have no qualms about this electronic ballot stuffing. After the presidential election, I now know that such desperate measures are necessary to preserve all that’s good about our way of life. Of course, if blog rants actually affected voting patterns, then the presidential election might have turned out differently.

Update: While I was in the middle of writing this post, ever-faithful reader Sue Trowbridge indicated in a comment on a previous post that she had already followed these steps unprompted by me, winning her the first-ever IRTCSYDHT Golden Tommy award. If there’s anyone out there with the skills, equipment, and free time to craft a trophy shaped like everyone’s favorite Mary Worth-based meth dealer, we could give this entirely notional award some physical substance. Also, I should say hello to the many, many of you who have arrived here from Jimtreacher.com.

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OK, first I was too stressed about the election to write funny things about the comics. Then I was too depressed about the results to write funny things about the comics.

I’m somewhat over it now, so there will be a rash of new comics coming tonight. If you want to know how I feel about the election, click here. Feel free to heatedly agree or disagree with me, but I ask that you keep all political diatribe comments attached to this post. Any others will be removed by me at my arbitrary whim.

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When I moved from my Blogger site to this one, I was rather pleased about the new commenting system. There have been some grumbling from commenters, however, who say that the pop-up comment window is too small, and that they’d like to be able to preview comments before they go live. These are well-reasoned requests, to which I say: bite me. Ha, ha! No, seriously, part of what annoyed me about Blogger was that leaving a comment required you to leave whatever index page you were reading and go to a page that contained just the post you were commenting on — the pop-up window seemed like a good solution to me to make it easier to navigate the site. I’m sure there’s a way to make the pop-up window a bit bigger, and when I have time in the next couple of weeks, I’ll track that down. In the meantime, though, if you are really feeling constricted by the tiny pop-up window, all you have to do is click on the headline of the post instead of the “Comments” link. Doing so will take you to a full-sized page that contains the post and a comment form at the end. Or, if you use a browser like Safari, Firefox, or Mozilla that allows tabbed browsing, you can, as helpful reader Mark Jackson points out, right-click on the comment link at the end of the post and open the comment window in a new tab.

As for previewing posts, that’s not really possible with the software I use to run the blog. However, I could set things up so that you could register and log in as an IRTCSYDHT member. If you log in and leave a comment, you could later go back and edit that comment — logging in would essentially be a mechanism that the blog would use to make sure that you were actually the person who entered the comment originally. Do any of you have any actual interest in this? I’ll set things up if enough people clamor to become registered members of the site; then I’ll probably have to think of some damn fool membership benefits or something like that. Anyway, e-mail me or post a comment if you think this might be fun.

Meanwhile, faithful reader Sue Trowbridge had no problem posting the following comment: “A few weeks ago, didn’t you post that someone had found their way to your site by searching on ‘blondie bumstead nude’? I notice that Sunday’s strip, which actually DID feature a nude Blondie (well, almost…), went unremarked upon by you. So I thought I should say something about it. Because you could definitely see part of her breast. I don’t think I would have noticed that kind of thing in the past, but I think reading people’s comics-related Google queries has sullied me.”

There are in fact many someones who found their way to my site looking for nudie pictures of Blondie Bumstead, and I did of course notice her semi-nude status on Sunday. I passed over it in order to express my outrage at incontinence humor, but Sue is right in that I need to serve my readership. So, for all you perverts out there, here’s what you’re looking for: Blondie, as nude as she’s going to get.

I hope you’re happy. By the way, congratulations, Sue: you’re the first person to publicly admit to being “sullied” by my site.

Speaking of sullied, here’s some strange and alarming search terms for you: “dilbert wedding planning strip,” “baby moses taking bath cartoon,” “oh mary why don’t you have some sense,” “trainwreck drug lingo,” and (no kidding) “how to make crystal meth.” Well, see, first you get a brown paper bag…