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Here’s a bunch of links that I’ve been saving up to put in a metapost; there’s enough of it that I didn’t want it to get lost in the weekly Sunday COTW/ad love post (which will be coming soon enough). Anyway, for your interest and delictation:

• Barfield Loses His Lunch. Garfield seems pretty easy to spoof, but this is one of the better parodies out there. Made up (mostly) of existing Garfield panels that have been rearrangend and subtly altered. Click the arrow at the top of the screen to begin. Warning for the faint of heart and easily disgusted: Not for the faint of heart or easily disgusted, as this hilarous bit demonstrates. (Thanks to many faithful readers for pointing this out to me.)
• Scroll down on this page for an amusing Slylock Fox spoof.
• Speaking of our favorite vulpine detective, faitful reader Dean Booth has developed a ethically questionable Web application that allows you to cheat at Slylock Fox‘s Six Differences puzzle. It only works on Internet Explorer, and I’m too lazy to switch to my Windows laptop to try it out, but I assume it will allow you to amaze your friends with your six-difference-spotting prowess. It costs you nothing but your dignity.
• Finally, faithful reader yellojkt continues with his March Madness Comics Competition tradition. This year, he’s running the National Coolest Comics Character Contest, which you get to vote in! Already up are the Most Realistic Comics Teenager and Most Precocious Kid categories; coming soon are competitions for sexy ‘toons, evil anthropomorphic animals, and, of course, ambiguously gay duos.

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Doodles by Mac & Sack, 3/18/07

Ah, there’s lots of good artistic hate to be had in today’s Doodles. Our koala hero is usually the victim in this feature, getting haplessly devoured by various beasts, but today in my opinion our simian artiste has every right to be outraged by his marsupial rival’s blatant act of visual plagiarism. This is what comes of kids’ constant exposure to Slylock Fox’s Six Differences puzzles: they think, oh, we just need to change six things about a picture and it’s totally different! Well, it isn’t, and I think we’re about to see some monkey poo flung righteously to make that point.

Fun bits from the bottom: A painter assaults his own work in some kind of absinth rage; the charmingly named “Toby da Vinci” stares dully out at us, proudly showing off his headless creation; and a classic anti-Semitic football joke is reworked for general consumption.

Apartment 3-G, 3/18/07

OK, for a while I was willing to believe that Gina was just unnaturally self-absorbed and clueless, but it’s pretty obvious now that she’s decided to just torment Tommie relentlessly for some reason. Does any normal English speaker ever just switch pronoun referents in mid-thought? No, unless they’re trying to screw with your head. The only question is: why would anyone want to persecute poor Tommie Thompson? Isn’t her life pitiful enough as it is?

I note that, like most underemployed actors, Gina is slumming in the caffeine-delivery service industry. I’m guessing she manages to insult her customers on a routine basis. Fortunately, she’s probably too dumb to notice how bad her tips are.

Mary Worth, 3/18/07

“Curses upon you, Von”?

“Curses upon you, Von”?

Wow. Just … wow. I’m not even sure how to follow that up. Vera Shields looks like she has a lot of internalized anger. We all know of, course, that anyone who comes into Charterstone experiencing normal human emotions must be dealt with, and harshly. So, the question is: is Vera going to be the kind of Mary Worth peripheral character that Mary needs to help … or the kind that Mary needs to kill?

With its decaying plaster, crooked pictures, and bed that was blatantly scavenged from a dumpster behind a hospital, Vera’s apartment looks way too downscale for an up-and-coming ad exec. It’s barely a step up from the downtown women’s shelter! My theory: “Von” is actually Houston Texans defensive back Von Hutchins, who blew a tackle that allowed the winning touchdown in a game that Vera had 50 large riding on; thus, this filthy tenement room is all she can afford after she makes her monthly usurious payment to her bookie.

Dennis the Menace, 3/18/07

Today, Dennis proves himself less menacing than Margaret. And Margaret’s grandmother.

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/17/07

Oh yeah, Gerald an’ April are gonna be at home all by themselves. And they’re going to “practicing.” And I think you and I both know what they’ll be practicing. That’s right: they’ll be practicing talking like actual fifteen-year-olds, rather than robots programmed by a sixty-year-old to say things like “make some green,” “the kiddies,” and, of course, “practice.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/17/07

For those of you who don’t know, a “magnum” is a one-and-a-half liter bottle of wine or champagne, which is twice the usual size. Thus, General Halftrack is merely proposing to drink himself into a stupor so as to at least briefly obliterate from his mind the hellish reality of the marriage he hates, and is not openly contemplating some kind of murder-suicide scenario. It’s still plenty grim, though perhaps not as off-putting as his flesh-colored mustache in panel two.

Curtis, 3/17/07

Clearly there’s some kind of off-panel donkey defecation going on in the first panel of today’s Curtis, but I have to admit that I’m disturbingly fixated on Curtis’ unfinished sentence. Why do you think they call it what? What? Is there some proverb or turn of phrase or bit of folk wisdom that involves donkey poop?

Judge Parker, 3/17/07

Wow, look at the expressions of utter panic on the faces Neddy and Abbey as they grapple with the concept of having missed their stop. If rich Americans, who are clearly the best and smartest people in the world, can’t handle the complexity of public transit, how in the world do the poor foreigners who ride it consistently make it home alive? Here’s a hint, kids: the train goes both ways along its whole route. You could just get off and get back on going back the other direction until you return to your stop, and not have to wander through whatever horrifying slumscape you’ve inevitably ended up in.

If you can’t tell, I’m growing more and more contemptuous of these two with each passing moment that they manage to further botch the relatively simple task of taking the train; thus, I am now openly rooting for the sinister punk rockers, and firmly believe that our pair of innocents abroad will deserve what they get. Fortunately, the evil punks probably don’t have anything sexually deviant planned for their victims, since, despite all evidence, they apparently believe that Neddy and Abbey are men. Yes, “Ils regardent la carte,” as Mohawk Punk puts it, means “They’re looking at the map,” but the “they” is masculine; the feminine would be “elles”. I don’t mean to imply that I’m some big expert Frenchie-talker — I was in charge of parlezing the vous when we were in a remarkably punk-rocker-free Paris a few years ago, and Mrs. C. will be happy to tell you how badly that went — but the ils/elles distinction is something you literally learn in the first week of French class.

Slylock Fox, 3/17/07

The most disturbing thing about this Slylock Fox? It’s not the fact that the cow has, in a burst of unnatural strength, managed to leap across a road; nor is it the cow’s unprovoked attack on the terrified rabbit, despite the fact that two species are not traditionally antagonistic towards each other. No, it’s the heavy-lidded, unfocused expression on the cow’s face, combined with the lolling tongue. That cow is high as a kite, and I don’t just mean literally.