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Beetle Bailey, 10/31/05

Family Circus, 10/31/05

Just in time for Halloween, the comics are full of SCARY SKELETONS! AAAAHHH! AAAHHHH! Actually, I’ve never quite got the handle on why skeletons are supposed to be scary. I mean, I get vampires (blood-drinking, transforming victims into damned undead), zombies (brain-eating, rotting flesh produces foul odor), werewolves (razor-sharp claws, poor self-control), Frankenstein’s monster (product of perversion of the natural order in which man plays at being God, very tall), and such. But skeletons, well … they’re just bones, aren’t they? Sure, if they walked the earth on their own power, it would be … unsettling, but without muscle mass, how much harm could they really do? Mostly they make me visualize an anthropology lecture, which isn’t “scary” so much as “boring.” (I’m leaving aside for the moment here the skeletal grim reaper, who’s scary not because he’s a walking skeleton, but because he has a creepy robe and a boss scythe and can take your soul to the underworld.)

Anyhoo, the Family Circus and Beetle Bailey both seem to realize that the kids today, they’re not afraid of an animated bag of bones like they used to be, so they’ve come up with a harder-hitting twist: visible bones = malnutrition. Little Billy, always on the make, is planning on exploiting concern for his pathetic, wasted state to get more goodies from the bleeding-hearts in his neighborhood. Check out the little smile on Mommy: she knows that she can remind Billy of this moment if he ever goes soft and wants to donate the family’s hard-earned booze money to some little brown children starving in some filthy third-world hellhole.

Beetle Bailey, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten it’s Halloween altogether, but it still manages to convey sheer terror on the part of Sarge. Convinced to head off-base as part of the lamest 48-hour leave in the history of the US military (Museum? Museum? Where are the whores, soldier?), our portly sergeant is brought face to face with the prospect of his own mortality in the form of some of the most poorly-executed dinosaur skeletons I’ve even seen. While the idea of being reduced to a hulking set of bones has clearly shaken Sarge to his very core, at least he’ll now have the strength to resist the relentless, anorexia-inducing body image peer pressure that is the Army’s secret shame.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/29-30/05

How heartbreakingly sad is Tommie’s look of pathetic, unbearable happiness in panel three of Saturday’s strip? I can think of two possible reasons for her joy, each more depressing than the next:

• Tommie has convinced herself that, after years of being mousily nice to Margo when everybody else has abandoned her for being such a mean old B, the raven-haired beauty has finally forgotten all about FBI Pete and his ilk and has realized that the only one for her (Margo) is her (Tommie), the one who’s been there for her (Margo) all those years when Lu Ann was off having adventures and dyslexia and getting engaged and whatever the hell else it is she (Lu Ann) does, and now at this moment Tommie is sure that she (Margo) is about to plant a wet one on her (Tommie’s) lips; or:
• Tommie realized that she’s had dialogue in every strip this week.

In her little fantasy balloon Saturday, Tommie makes the elementary error of assuming that the Parthenon is within 150 yards of every location in Greece. By Sunday, our skimpily dressed trio of roommates have already discovered that this is not true, as they’ve decamped to Lesbos. (Yes, Lesbos. Let’s all make the “Lesbian” cracks in our heads and then move on, shall we?) I’m disgruntled by the Professor’s “brought the sunshine with you” comment; since, unlike FBOFW, Apartment 3-G does not take place in real time, this little island getaway could be happening any time of year, so I’m not sure what the point of establishing the weather as abnormally warm is, unless we’re setting up an exciting new plotline where the girls control the Earth’s climate with their minds.

What’s mostly impressed me about this little scene, though, is how it smacks of story-wrapping-up-time. Mary Worth takes weeks and weeks to kill each of its plots, then beat, dismember, and burn their corpses and scatter the parts in strategic locations around town. Apartment 3-G just dumps the bodies of its storylines in the river: no fuss, no muss. Sure, Lu Ann’s just seen what she thought was a relationship that was going to last the rest of her life go down in flames, and the man she once saw as a paragon of selflessness was revealed as a self-centered control freak; but a little walking around Manhattan and quick vacation in the Aegean and she’s apparently good as new! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: life’s pretty easy when you’re dumb and shallow.

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And when I say “mine”, I mean “faithful reader Doug Mayo-Wells'”. Because Doug did what I couldn’t do: figure out a way to fix the annoying bug where graphics would get pushed way down to the bottom of the left-hand nav bar, leaving acres of blank space for those who look at the site in smallish monitors on IE. His fix had the added bonus of preventing Firefox from squishing the graphics to the width of the browser window. The only downside is that the fix involves adding a bit of code to most of the entries on the site; I’ve updated all the posts from October, and will be working my way through the back catalog in the next few days, so if you still see the bug on older pages, don’t panic: help is on the way.

As should be clear by now, Doug strides the earth as a god among mere mortals; you should check out his Web and interactive media consulting and Web hosting services, along with Pathetic Caverns, where he offers his “eclectic reviews and opinions.”

With this fix, I hearby declare the new template to be fixed. There is only one other significant bug that I’ve been informed of, and it’s something of a doozy: for puzzling reasons, some users are only seeing every other comment (and the “missing” comments aren’t numbered, so that, for instance, what is really comment #3 appears to them as comment #2). As near as I can tell, the people seeing this bug are using Internet Explorer on a Mac. Thought I hate to be the sort of person who says this, all I can tell these people is: you need to use a different browser. Microsoft has not updated the Mac version of its browser since 2001, and if you’re using it, you will have increasing numbers of problems as Web standards advance, and you’ll be increasingly vulnerable to security holes as well. If you’re using Mac OS X, switching won’t be a problem for you: you should use either Safari, which comes for free with your computer, or Mozilla Firefox, which you can download for free. If you’re on an older computer that uses OS 9 or earlier, modern browsers are harder to come by. I recommend WaMCom, a variant of the Mozilla browser that is probably the most current free browser available for the older version of Mac OS. Scroll down to the heading “Apple Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x classic” and click on the link that says “wamcom-131-macos9-20030723.sit”.