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Mary Worth, 10/8/06

So as I was contemplating this strip on my computer screen with Mrs. C. looking over my shoulder, I said, “Boy, Mary sure is looking…” and she said, “LAVENDER?”

She’s right, of course, but the word I was looking for is smug. In fact, this whole quartet of murderers is looking awfully self-satisfied as they get dressed up for one last look at the mangled body of the man they condemned to an early grave. Mary looks in particularly good spirits in the last panel for someone who’s contemplating her degree of responsibility for a poor schmuck’s untimely demise. In fact, the only way that facial expression would make sense to me would be if you replaced “prevented” with “expedited.” “Could we have driven him to suicide even more quickly somehow and saved me some annoyance? What if we had dressed Toby up as the ghost of his dead wife and demanded his soul in exchange for hers? Oh, that would have been delicious! Too bad we’ll never get the chance now…”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/8/06

There’s been much buzz in the comments of this site about how and when Heather’s Brigadoon In-Law Adventure and Tommy Lee’s True Tales Of White Trash are going to link up, plot-wise. But now that we know that Milton’s family isn’t a bunch of kilt-wearing, Sassenach-hating Scots snobs but just poor, I propose an elegant solution to the problem: what if these lowlifes are Milton’s family, and Nikki (whose gender I still haven’t been able to figure out) is Milton’s son? You can’t hear accents in dialog balloons, after all. It would be a lot less Ivanhoe and a lot more Trainspotting, but would be entertaining nonetheless.

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Pluggers, 10/7/06

“Hi Cousin Mabel! How are things in California? What? 4:30 in the morning? No, I think you’re wrong, my watch says 7:30. ‘Time zone’? Oh, I forget that you crazy Californians always have to do things differently! Ha ha! Yeah, I know we go through this every time I call, but I just don’t understand why you silly liberals don’t get on real American time.”

Seriously, though, I can derive no other message from this strip other than “Pluggers will call you at a totally inappropriate time just to save a few cents a minute on long distance,” or, to put it more succinctly, “Pluggers are assholes.” I note that contributor Lauren Williams is herself an inhabitant of Santa Barbara, California, which is one of the lower plugger-density cities in America, so I have to assume that she’s not admiring the plugger’s thrifty ways but rather attempting to publicly humiliate her plugger relatives who call her in the dead of night. Sorry, Lauren, but you should know by now that pluggers don’t feel any shame.

Judge Parker, 10/7/06

Yeah, Raju’s going to have a pretty awesome time at that party, all right.

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A note arrived from an inquisitive member of the Fourth Estate:

I’m a writer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looking for fans of the Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and/or the Boondocks who live in the Milwaukee area. Can you please post something on your blog asking if there are any Milwaukee bloggers who fit this need? Ask them to contact me at this e-mail address: lprice@journalsentinel.com.

Heed the call, Milwaukeeans! (Milwaukeeites? What the hell do you people like to be called?)