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Blog Year Nine was capped off with throwback to the wacky Gil Thorp summer plots of yore, in a story that began when two fast food ruffians met with vigilante justice in the form of a terrified WHO-O-A! and a mighty, meaty WUD:

Our Hawaiian-shirted hero was a senile former pro wrestler who Gil agreed to wrestle for charity or something, despite the fact that he didn’t even know who Gil was and this would be a good way for him to get terribly injured, probably. Sadly, nobody got terribly injured and actually the old guy probably wasn’t all that senile and it was some kind of double-game long-con wrestling angle.

In Rex Morgan, M.D., yet another wacky elderly patient gave the Morgans free stuff — in this case, a free vacation to San Diego! All they had to do was check up on her rental property, which turned out to be full of sexy ladies who turned out to be strippers with hearts of gold, helping out one of their own who was suffering form breast cancer. Obviously, some of the ladies took a liking to Rex and one maybe flashed him a little, to which he reacted in typical theatrically dickish fashion.

But Blog Year Nine undeniably belonged to an epic seven-month saga in Mary Worth. It began with a cry of psychic pain in the Weston household.

Seems that Dawn got dumped by a dude named Dave, and things got worse when she ran into her ex and his new girlfriend and they invited her to a three-way. Dawn spent a lot of time on the couch watching Game of Thrones and repeating what became the summer of 2012’s catchphrase.

Wilbur decided that a trip to Italy would get Dawn’s mind off her ex. Unfortunately, everywhere she went, she kept having reminders of Dave’s sexy abs and/or genitals thrust in her face.

Determined to cheer up his daughter, Wilbur took her on a cruise ship, which immediately ran aground in a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. As the ship slowly capsized, Wilbur and Dawn saw human desperation at its worst.

Fortunately, the Westons were rescued via helicopter. Wilbur returned to Santa Royale with a new column idea based on his entirely undeserved good fortune.

Dawn, meanwhile, emerged from the experience with a determination to make a difference in the world, and Mary convinced her to volunteer at the hospital, where she befriended a one-armed fellow named Jim. Jim immediately became fixated on Dawn because she looked uncannily like his sister, who died in the boating accident that claimed his arm, which meant that Dawn was now forbidden to approach any body of water, and also required to have sex with him. Dawn rejected him because he was a possessive, delusional creep, but Jim laid in with the guilt.

Anyway, in her very good psychology class Dawn learned that possessive, delusional creeps just need the love friendship of a good woman and that fixes them, and it totally worked and now Jim can hang out near the water without fear and doesn’t want to murder Dawn at all, even a little. He just wants to be friends! And Dawn enjoys her friendship with him. They say that, if you listen closely, you can hear them continuing to enjoy their friendship, even today.

Tomorrow! Our trip through Soap Opera Past finally reaches the present day. What plots from the past year merit recording in the Book of Eternity?

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We must begin our review of Blog Year Eight with a discussion of that time one of Rex’s charming drunk old patients died and left Rex all his money. There was a mysterious screenplay-novel hybrid involved, as well as a sexy alcoholic daughter, and it climaxed, naturally, with an ugly scene at a funeral. Honestly, can’t we have one funeral in this town that doesn’t end in drunken violence?

Apparently not! Don’t worry, everything worked out fine, by which I mean that Rex cashed a check.

Judge Parker featured a long, weird storyline in which Sam Driver spent thirty seconds negotiating with Hollywood big-shot Avery Blackstone to get an insanely generous movie deal for Judge Parker Senior’s terrible, unreadable book. This was followed by weeks and weeks of an ill-fated fishing trip, during which they stumbled on a massive marijuana grow operation, whose proprietor eventually captured Avery. This sequence was most notable for intense narrative whiplash: At one point Avery was about to be dismembered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac:

But mere moments later Avery and said maniac were sipping fine scotch and discussing art.

In the end, everything worked out fine, by which I mean that Sam cashed a check.

Apartment 3-G featured the return of beloved ancillary characters Scott Gaines (erstwhile billionaire janitor/Lu Ann fiancé) and his high-powered wife Nina, whose wedding Margo planned. They had decided to have a baby despite Nina’s ambivalence, and Tommie, who had accidentally become a midwife, was in charge! There were some dumb misunderstandings that arose because Margo maybe kissed Scott a little, but eventually they made up and gave birth on their own terms, which is to say in their own apartment, with an inexperienced midwife overseeing a difficult birth. Why didn’t they just call the paramedics to take Nina to the hospital, you might ask, but that would be a pretty stupid question.

But for sheer insanity, it was hard to top Gil Thorp basketball season plot. It all started with this sexy scene:

Yes, Milford had a new tattoo parlor, run by Ransom Hale, who in addition to being very handsome was extremely good at business.

Sounds like a winning marketing strat, Ransom! Milford’s dopey basketball players couldn’t get the Mudlarks’ logo tattooed on themselves fast enough, despite the fact that Coach Kaz has a tattoo and Coach Kaz is in all ways aesthetically embarrassing. Milford Ink also provided nose-piercing services and hot Kiwi accents and bootleg DVDs, which gave Ransom another opportunity to be extremely good at business.

No, wait, that one actually worked:

Anyway, eventually Gil got miffed at all the tattoos adorning his players, did some half-assed psychoanalysis, then used the excuse that one of the underage Mudlarks forged his dad’s signature to get permission to get a tattoo to bust up this little operation. He discovered that Ransom Hale the New Zealander was really Rupert Hall from Dayton, Ohio, but the most shocking revelation was yet to come: those bootleg DVDs? They weren’t bootleg at all. Behold just how amazingly good at business Rupert Hall is:

Man, is that a 100% guaranteed massively lucrative money-making scheme or what? Anyway, Gil successfully shamed this wholly legal small business into shutting down, and its downtown storefront remains empty and a burden on the city’s tax base to this day, the end. Tomorrow, in Blog Year Nine: senility in the squared circle, stripper hotel, and, of course, life’s brutality.

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The 2005-06 blogging year (I’m going to start calling it the July 11 to July 10 periods under consideration “blogging years”; hopefully this will be the basis for the new calendar, in the Curmudgeonarchy) was another strong one, soap-opera-wise! There was a great Mark Trail series where evil hillbillies kidnapped Andy, which was a thing that they did on the regular, apparently?

Don’t worry, Mark definitely got some good punching in on that one. Meanwhile, Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot revolved around Ted Pearse, a cool and mysterious new basketball prodigy in town who turned out to be homeless, which prompted fans of rival teams to literally dress up as hobos to taunt him.

(Earlier Ted’s friends pretended he had a terrible disease, to make him feel loved? I don’t really understand sports or how men typically relate to each other, guys.)

But 2005-6 was definitely, definitely the the year of Rex and Troy.

Troy was another doctor who tracked down Rex and they had the flirtiest conversation that ever flirted, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

The flirting continued:

They played some golf, or something, and Rex couldn’t stop talking about it the next day:

Then they played more golf and talked about universal health insurance, and were going to start some do-gooder clinic together, but then, uh, Troy turned out to not be a real doctor and fled town to avoid arrest, the end. Rex had to go back to his sham of a marriage/life, but he will always, always remember.

TOMORROW: Who could possibly top the list of the 2006-07 year out of numerous OK I can’t even finish this, it is Aldo, obviously it is Aldo, but tune in anyway to see the runners up. And if you don’t know who Aldo is, prepare for amazement!