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Hey, everybody! Just thought I’d briefly toot my own horn and point out that today is my ninth blogiversary. That’s right, I’ve been making fun of the daily comics more or less daily for nine years now. Which is … impressive? Horrifying? An internet eternity? Whatever. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading my blog since the beginning, or who only just now started. I really appreciate your patronage and support! If you’re interested, here’s my first week of blogging, which is in some ways cringeworthy for me to look at now and in some ways pretty much what I’m still doing. Will I still be doing this nine years from now? Who even knows! I would’ve pegged this blog’s lifespan at about six months back in 2004, so I’m done making predictions.

By the way, just to prove I’m still “hip” and “with it” now that this blog thing is on its way to Internet dinosaur status, I have a Twitter and a Facebook and a Tumblr and a Google+, and you might want to click those links if those are things you like!

Anyway, I begin my tenth year of blogging the only way I know how: by whining misanthropically about Gasoline Alley.

Gasoline Alley, 7/11/13

Shockingly, the Wikipedia entry for Gasoline Alley does not include a complete list of all the characters in the strip’s sprawling cast. For that, you have to go to this lovingly maintained site that, like mine, was created in 2004, though it maintains some classic 1997 Web design aesthetics. Anyway, I was really hoping that Slim’s befuddlement in panel two meant that he had never seen this lady before in his life, and she was using his low emotional state and pliable mind to worm her way into his life and rob him blind. But no, it appears that Slim does in fact have a daughter named Gretchen, which means that his complete failure to recognize her puts him in the running for the worst dad of all time.

Mark Trail, 7/11/13

So not only is Mark not wearing a disguise, but he went undercover at this illegal poaching camp by registering under his own name! Lucky for him there’s no way for anyone to quickly determine if, say, someone were a prominent crusading journalist who wrote for a high-profile magazine focusing on outdoor living. Since all of our knowledge is limited by our own memory, Mark’s secret is safe, forever.

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Gil Thorp, 7/10/13

Man, I can not take my eyes off Gil’s jorts in panel one! And I don’t mean that in a good way. Gil, you’re trying to sweet-talk a possibly senile, definitely violent old pro wrestler out of jail, maybe you should dress with a little bit of dignity.

Hi and Lois, 7/10/13

Man, who says print journalism is in trouble? The Generic Suburb Intelligencer-Tribune probably has about half the pages, a third of the staffers, and a quarter of the ad revenue it had when I started this blog in 2004, but that doesn’t mean it can’t find room to wedge in some wire service copy offering “news” about a scientific model of stellar evolution that’s been accepted for pretty much decades.

Spider-Man, 7/10/13

A little poking around on travel sites has flights from San Francisco to Central America lasting anywhere from 9 to 13 hours, and if Spider-Man were to be actively humiliated by a small child for the entire duration of this trip, I for one would not complain at all.

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Crankshaft, 7/9/13

One of Crankshaft’s go-to humor-producing techniques is “olds say the darndest things,” which I’m assuming is what this is supposed to be. Or maybe it’s “Grandma Rose is heartless and cruel and always will be,” another classic Crankshaft comedy gold mine. Whichever it is, though, today I approve of it, because it produced “Your father puts ketchup on so many inappropriate things,” which is surely the greatest sentence that will appear in the comics all week, and perhaps all month. It’s positively poetic. In fact, I urge all of you poetically inclined folk to make it the first line in a poem of your own design in the comments. I expect Pulitzer Prize-winning greatness.

Spider-Man, 7/9/13

Holy crap, you guys, today’s Spider-Man pulls back the curtain on a White House scandal worse than the IRS + Benghazi + NSA spying times one billion! First we learned that the President answers each and every phone call from befuddled TSA agents nationwide, which surely isn’t an efficient use of his time. And he uses this bureaucratic power that he’s arrogated to himself to allow whatever liberal masked hoodlums he holds in high esteem to board our nation’s otherwise well-secured aircraft. But most damning is the fact that hanging in the Oval Office is a ghastly, miscolored parody of our national flag. That flag is red, white, and black — the same colors of the banner of Nazi Germany. WHEN WILL YOU WAKE UP, SHEEPLE?????

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/13

Well, I guess I was wrong about us never seeing any of the fancy clothes that Lu Ann is being forced to try on by the creepy governor’s creepy svengali! Here she is wearing a fancy new gown. That’s what a fancy new gown looks like in real life, right? With a lacy collar? And a belt? And it’s all the color of Pepto-Bismol, including the collar and the belt? And it covers every inch of flesh below the collarbone and (I assume) above the wrists? This is high fashion?

Gasoline Alley, 7/9/13

Oh, goody, idiot man-child Slim, having been abandoned by his wife and obviously being unable to fend for himself in any way, is descending into catatonic depression. He’s already had one brush with insanity that he bounced back from, but we can only hope that his current downward spiral is permanent.