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Mary Worth, 7/22/05

Two Taiwanese-made machine-crafted porcelain swans: $4.

One bottle of Mr. Boston scotch-style liquor beverage product, extra large: $9.

Watching your unwanted guest, wearing her ratty old housedress and carrying a suitcase containing one ill-folded lime-green blouse, stumble drunkenly out of the house in the middle of the night and then falling facedown into a ditch: priceless.

I’m heading out of town for the weekend, everybody: new comics Monday evening.

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Apartment 3-G, 7/21/05

So, when Lu Ann first spotted this dreamy hunk of selfless billionaire through a glass windowpane, this is what I had to say about it:

Instead, though, it looks like we’re going to have to sit through eight and a half boring weeks of a boring boring storyline about Lu Ann’s boring boring boring love life.

Well, here we are, eight and half boring weeks later, and the strip is just sitting here like a pile of something too boring to even bother describing. It’s just been one nonstop boring date after another, and since Scott is so gosh darn nice to everybody and Lu Ann won’t put out, there’s no possibility of anything interesting happening ever. If this storyline were any more boring, just reading it would cause you to go back in time. In fact, as you can see here, even the coloring sweatshop workers are bored … unless we’re expected to believe that Scott decided to wear a flesh-colored polo shirt for hanging around in Lu Ann’s flesh-colored kitchen. Maybe it’s some kind of camouflage so that he can sneak up on her and cop a feel, since that’s clearly the only action he’s going to be getting.

And speaking of boring…

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/05

We’ve already seen that the Morgans, despite their fancy medical educations, are stupider than both a “rescue” dog and a bumpkin who’s so backwoods that he uses meat as a medium of exchange instead of U.S. currency. Now we learn that they’re also dumber than their own day-care age daughter, who’s apparently started talking like a snarky adult at some point during this interminable storyline.

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You know what one of the problems of working for the Man is? You can’t tell the Man, “Oh, I’m sorry, I know I said I’d be available to write a bunch of Webcast scripts on short notice, but I don’t think you understand just how wacky Mary Worth is right now.”

Stupid Man.

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you: Mary Worth’s five stages of grief.

1. Startlement

2. Weepiness

(Wait a minute, he gave them to her … on their wedding night? Ew! I mean … ew! Must … not … visualize … Mary Worth’s … wedding night…)

3. “If I can’t see it, maybe it won’t be true”

4. Rage

(John Voight is Mary Worth!)

5. Blank-eyed numbness

And of course, there’s the corollary: Rita’s five stages of keeping her drunk ass from being thrown out on the street.

1. Drunkeness

2. Drunken slack-jawed incomprehension

3. Drunken self-justification

(Whew! Thank God you’re all right. We were worried there for a minute.)

4. Drunken begging for forgiveness

5. Drunken eagerness to please

Where’s denial in all this, you may ask? Well, over in Mark Trail, we’re learning that denial ain’t just a river in the Lost Forest:

Boy, I can’t see anything going wrong in this scenario. You know, there’s an awful lot of Mark Trail-ian sins I’ll be able to forgive if this storyline ends with El Presidente here gone completely mad, foaming at the mouth and lashing out insanely with inhuman strength at anyone with the misfortune to cross his path. It’ll be just like the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God — though there won’t be any black people, this being Mark Trail and all. Actually, I suppose his lackey’s scheming wife might beat the doomed lunatic to death with an oar or something, saving everybody and clearing the way to that suburban split-level ranch for the evil couple. It would be the perfect crime! Except for all the biting.