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2006-07 was quite the year in the soaps, guys. Mark Trail encountered a tame bear who couldn’t understand your hostility towards her, which I immortalized in t-shirt form. Later, Mark punched a man’s beard off.

In Gil Thorp, one of Gil’s student athletes accidentally cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. In the spring, a weird lonely old man wandered onto Milford High’s grounds, who helped coach the baseball team and claimed to have played in the Negro Leagues and insisted on being called by a funny nickname.

Turns out he was a fraud, and Gil knew about it but never said anything because he was doing Gil’s job for free so why rock the boat?

Also, in Judge Parker, a substitute butler from a temp agency forced some French punk rockers to strip to their underwear at gunpoint. I swear I didn’t make a single word in that sentence up.

But year three of my blog, without question, belonged to Aldo Kelrast, the man whose name was an anagram for “stalker” because he stalked Mary Worth, stalked her from the first moment he saw her.

Mary gave Aldo the cold shoulder pretty much right away, which didn’t stop him from popping up unexpectedly.

Aldo proved wholly unable to grasp the concept of consent, even when Mary used barbarous foreign tongues to express her disinterest.

Mary eventually had no choice but to arrange an intervention for Aldo, if any group of people brought together in one room to yell at someone counts as an “intervention.” Aldo reacted as most would: by going directly to a liquor store and driving over a cliff to his death. His pudgy, Captain Kangaroo-esque corpse was left in a pile of mangled steel.

This was a huge deal. People went nuts! My blog traffic was off the charts! There was coverage on CNN! There were tribute videos!

Later, Mary and her friends went to his funeral, to make sure he was really dead, and to gloat. It was awkward and fantastic. Cold justice had been meted out, and Mary was victorious. Farewell, Aldo: you didn’t deserve to die, but you shouldn’t have gone around stalking people either.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/2/14

Oh, man, check out how terrified Les looks by the idea that even in the fictional world being weaved by Cable Movie Entertainment, Lisa might live! It’s almost as if her death was the foundation on which he built his entire artistic career and sense of self. It’s almost as if he has to kill her again every day in his mind in order to stay Les. It’s almost as if the thought of Lisa alive, standing before him, and seeing what he’s done with his life for the past decade fills him with a the darkest sort of dread.

Take comfort in our evil screenwriter’s cynicism, Les! He’s declared this ending a “happy moment of some kind of swear word (bullshit maybe? let’s say bullshit)” because he knows just as well as you that nobody lives, nobody ever lives, everybody dies.

Shoe, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because if this show were still on the air its writer-protagonist might use a contemporary publishing platform, can you even imagine how bizarre that would be

Pluggers, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because older people prefer the pop music of their own youth to contemporary pop music they are so unique and different it is extremely note- and praiseworthy

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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!