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Say, is there anyone out there who’s skilled in setting up WordPress and interpreting arcane SQL error messages and who’s been thinking, “I love that gosh darn Comics Curmudgeon — what can I do to make his life easier?” Well, here’s your chance. I’ve made a couple stabs at installing the SpamKarma plug-in, which everyone just raves and raves about as a killer of loathsome comment spam (I’ve had a bunch the last few days that featured the word “torture” a lot, so that’s another word that will get your comment put into a queue — sorry about that). But every time I activate it, posting a comment causes the blog to barf out a truly impressive SQL error message of some kind. If anyone would like to help me interpret said error message and possibly get SpamKarma working, e-mail me, please.

For those of you for whom the previous paragraph read like “Blah, blah, blah, blah, boring, stupid computer crap,” I apologize. Here, why not enjoy this image from yesterday’s post?

Ha, ha! Jeff has hairy arms!

Update: Upon further reflection I think I need a WordPress guru. WordPress in theory is supposed to hide all interactions with the SQL database from morons like myself. I can look at the error message and get the gist of what’s going on — there are some tables that WordPress and/or SpamKarma expect to find that they’re not finding, or that they’ve found and the permissions are wrong — but I have no idea why they haven’t been created and/or have the wrong permissions, and I’m really pretty sure that I shouldn’t be mucking around in the database directly, but rather fixing WordPress’s interaction with it (if possible). If you do know a WordPress guru, though, be sure to point them my way.

Yeah, apologies for the further dorkery. Look, the freaky Heat-Miser-hair dude from Gil Thorp has furry arms too!

(Thanks for Kevin Spencer for the cuttin’ ‘n’ pastin’.)

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Dilbert, 10/3/05

This punchline is undeniably funny. However, it just emphasizes a sad and all-too-obvious fact, which is that Scott Adams cannot be bothered to do the kind of detailed drawing work that would really drive home the hirsuteness of the pointy-haired boss’s knuckles. For that kind of loving craftsmanship, we need to turn to Charterstone’s plush leather beanbags:

Even in this low-quality graphic, you can see the layer of lustrous, manly fur that coats Jeff’s forearms. Even his bizarre, gut-and-pelvis extruding posture can’t distract from the fact that Dr. Cory is a charter member of the league of hairy-armed Mary Worth characters. Mary’s libido must be trapped under an ice cap the size of Greenland if she can keep turning away this virile, hairy he-hunk.

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Mary Worth, 9/30-10/2/05

This is how Mary Worth’s alcohol-driven storyline ends: not with a booze-fueled, police-intervention-requiring bang, but with a sober (or, perhaps, dry drunk), platitude-drenched whimper. As Rita and Vic motor off in his Mood Car (like his suit, it shifts from melancholy blue during the goodbyes to hopeful brown as they head towards Rita’s new small-town hideaway), I can’t help but wish that we had seen a little more cussing and public humiliation of Mary and Jeff, and a lot less forgiveness and overcoming of adversity.

Nevertheless, things do seem to have wrapped up awfully neatly. Rita even now has a substitute Fay to smother with affection and make freaky puppets with; this will save her from liquoring up Vic and forcing him to sire some mutated incest-child on her in order to fill the emptiness that Fay’s death has left in her codependent soul. We’re probably not meant to contemplate the many, many loose ends (Will Rita relapse? Won’t the suffocating atmosphere of small-town life leave her with nothing to do but drown her sorrows in the bottle? Does the interlude at the Women’s Shelter prove that Mary hates and fears poor people above all others? Is Dr. Jeff finally going to get laid?) so instead I’ll just pose this question to you all, on the subject of “inappropriate” quotation marks: why do aphorisms one (“Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you!”) and three “To live in hearts we leave behind is not die!”) get quotes around them, but not number two (“Only time will tell!”)? Perhaps Mary’s mind is so cliche-o-riffic that she can’t even tell the difference between platitudes and her actual thought process anymore.

I would be remiss without showcasing this comment on Friday’s strip from Dennis Jimenez: “I like the soul shake there in panel two. The sistas at the women’s shelter must have taught ’em that. Right on!”