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Blondie, 9/25/05

In my first non-metapost as a married man, I don’t really feel a need to point out the insufferable lameness that is the Blondie wacky anniversary adventure, or the problems with this strip’s surf instructor’s technique (which, according to Mrs. Curmudgeon, who’s been known to “hang ten” now and again herself, are many and egregious), or even discuss Blondie’s lovingly detailed breasts. No, today I want to draw your attention to Dagwood in the first panel on the second line, and specifically to his torso. At first glance it appears that he’s wearing what one would expect for a surfing lesson, which is to say no shirt at all. But the absence of nipples, combined with the baffling rippling concentric circles around his neck, lead me to believe that he is in fact wearing a flesh-colored turtleneck. Let’s hope that he hasn’t actually fashioned a shirt of real human skin in some kind of twisted, ritualistic attempt to gain spiritual power, conquer the big “momma” wave, and awe everyone with his surfing prowess. Because not only would that be wrong (yes, I take the tough, unpopular stands against making garments out of human flesh), but it clearly hasn’t worked, which is always embarrassing outcome to an unspeakable act of totemistic horror.

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So we went and got married. It was real nice, real nice, I tell ya. Then we went to Greece for two weeks. That was real nice, too.

A couple enterprising Cardinals who knew us before this blog gave our nuptials a worldwide audience attended the blessed event and have posted pics on this forum thread, if you’re interested. Pix start on the fourth post, so scroll down.

After returning from our honeymoon, we arrived home to a huge pile of mail and a mysterious box from some glass-blowing outfit. We opened it with some trepidation, only to find inside, courtesy of yellowjkt, two painstakingly hand-crafted blown-glass symbols of marriage: two swans, birds that, if you haven’t heard, mate for life.

Hopefully these won’t be rudely shattered by some ungrateful drunken houseguest years after my tragic demise. You can’t really see it in this pic, but the glass making up the little beaks and wings is golden colored. They are simultaneously two of the most hideous and wonderful things I have ever seen.

Tomorrow, I think, there will be real, actual, new comics commentary and content. Also, I will get around to reading the comments on the ULTRA POST — congrats on hitting quadruple digits, by the way. And soon, a redesign of the redesign, with legibility in mind. But while I’m still on my gettin’-hitched high, I wanted to share one more thing with you. See, we asked our guests to e-mail us wedding-, love-, and us-themed haiku for our wedding; a friend of Amber’s wrote them onto little flags that were hung around the wedding site. She also set up a little station where people could write more haiku during the reception. Some of them were sweet, some were silly, all were wonderful. But the one I wanted to reprint here was from our friend Sam Wiley, who loves Mary Worth as much as I do:

They’re not like Tommy
Who sold that guy some bad stuff
Their love is good stuff

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OK, with less than 48 hours of single life left, I am posting my last pre-wedding-and-honeymoon post. A few bits of housecleaning:

*Just over a year ago, when I went to France for two weeks, I held a “Summarize the soaps” contest. I encouraged readers to e-mail me an amusing summary of what had happened in one of the soap opera strips while I was gone. I got some pretty good responses, and at the time my traffic was about a tenth of what it is now, so I’m expecting some very good responses this time around, dig? Feel free to summarize the soap of your choice, or even a non-soap if it’s feeling soapy. Winners get nothing tangible, but will have their entries reprinted by me in the blog and singled out for adulation.

*One of last year’s winners was one of this blog’s most venerable Cardinals. You know him as Smitty Smedlap, but he has a fine blog of his own called Subdivided We Stand. I’m singling him out because he’s just started a new feature called I Read Leviticus So You Don’t Have To that will hopefully keep you entertained in my absence. It’s just like my blog except, you know, with the book of Leviticus instead of the comics.

Oh, yeah, and now for the new concept: the ULTRA POST! Basically, it goes like this: this post is going to be the top one on the blog for two weeks. How many comments can you accumulate during this time? Only time — specifically, the next two weeks — will tell. But the comments section will get ULTRA BIG. However, I must say that just posting gibberish or “First Post!” or what not constitutes cheating. The ULTRA POST will only be brought to its ULTRA STATUS by the kind of witty commentary that I’ve come to expect from y’all. Now get crackin’!