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After all the other 'Ed doing things nobody visiting NYC would' entries, I have to acknowledge today's strip for verisimilitude: Only a tourist would go to Washington Square Park to buy pot.

—ValdVin
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Infinite leisure isn’t as fun if there isn’t a job I’m blissfully ignoring

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Gil Thorp, 8/13/14

It’s mid-August and the summer Gil Thorp storyline finally comes into focus! It’s about how True Standish doesn’t want to go to some football factory in gross south Florida; he wants to go to one of the public Ivies, which looks like a college from an old movie! One of my cousins and her husband both went to Miami of Ohio, and they loved it; from my visits, I can confirm that it does have a classic look, largely as a result of rigorously enforced building codes that require that all buildings aesthetically match the original early 19th century structures. This uniformity has does have some weird results, particularly in huge new buildings that couldn’t actually be built from brick and mortar construction despite the appearance of their facades. At Cornell, where I went to college, buildings are supposed to look very contemporary to when they’re built, which results in an interesting aesthetic mishmosh that gives you something of an architectural historical tour as you walk around campus, even though some of the individual buildings from questionable periods end up kind of hideous (lookin’ at you, Uris Hall). Nevertheless, Miami of Ohio’s regime of strict architectural nostalgia-kitsch has managed to impress a star prospect for their 75th-ranked football program, so who am I to judge?

Judge Parker, 8/13/14

NOOOO … THE LEGAL PRACTICE THAT SAM SPENT HIS LIFE BUILDING … with the legal secretary … and the lawyer he hired, like, I’m not even going to bother looking up when but it was definitely in the last five years of real life so like three months ago strip-time … disintegrating … all he has to console him is his extremely active job of running legal interference for Judge Parker Senior and also his millions and millions of dollars … MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN SAM

Momma, 8/13/14

Haha, highlighting the tinges of pseudo(?)-sexual jealousy in Momma and Francis’s relationship really adds to the laff factor in this strip, doesn’t it! This is a joke that’s appeared in the strip before, and I’m glad to see that, if Momma really is transitioning into some kind of greatest hits mode, the definition of “greatest hits” is “most perverse and unpleasant.”

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The King and His Horses is their debut album

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Heathcliff, 8/12/14

Here’s an amazing fact that maybe you’re smarter than me and it’s not news to you but maybe it will blow your mind as much as it did mine — I think maybe Ryan North’s Twitter feed is where I heard it but I’m not 100% sure. But, anyway: have you ever noticed that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme does it mention that Humpty Dumpty is an enormous man-egg? It’s true! It’s not clear from the rhyme’s history whether he was always meant to be an egg — perhaps it was originally a riddle with his eggish nature as the answer as to why he couldn’t be reassembled. Wikipedia says that “the rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.” Humpty-as-egg is such a well-known bit of pop culture, in fact, that Heathcliff and his friends have named their new eggcore band “Dumpty,” which nicely fits into the narrow space between whimsically surreal and thuddingly stupid where Heathcliff has found its sweet spot.

Better Half, 8/12/14

Stanley and Harriet yearn for the days when healthy electronic pizza will be a thing. Until then, they’ll just keep on eating enormous blobs of chocolate-chip cookie dough, I guess.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/12/14

Les has finally figured out that probably nobody wants to see a movie of Lisa’s Story and definitely nobody wants to see a comic version of the story of how Lisa’s Story got made into a movie, so he’s now kicked us into a mildly more interesting fantasy sequence instead.

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This is how Cortez got started, right?

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Slylock Fox, 8/11/14

One of the many questions I have about the post-animapocalypse world of Slylock Fox involves biodiversity: have the newly sapient animals remained restricted to their original ranges, or, like the early members of genus Homo, are they using their smarts to conquer new environments? Today we learn that Australia, at least, is still largely the domain of its unique native fauna, who have in their brief period of ascendency already established an iron-clad hierarchy: the marsupials wear fancy clothes and sell expensive baubles to each other, while the monotremes live on the margins of society and are forced to steal to survive. Unfortunately, the marsupials aren’t equipped to maintain the oppressive social structure they’ve created and have been forced to call in placental mammals from outside to help. If human history is any guide, this is a terrible, terrible mistake.

Judge Parker, 8/11/14

Haha, looks like we’ve reached the real talk phase of Gloria’s exit interview! Anyway, everybody in Judge Parker is doing no work and getting paid for it and now people are getting grumpy about it for some reason.

Dennis the Menace, 8/11/14

I think this is the most I’ve ever seen Mr. Wilson enjoying himself! He’s just going to town on some snacks and then he’s going to pass out on the couch covered in crumbs. Dennis is being a total scold about it, which I deem to be unusually unpleasantly menacing.