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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.

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Beetle Bailey, 3/15/22

Guys, I was about to go on a whole smug riff here about how the idea of a “bucket list” — that is, a list of things to do before you “kick the bucket” (i.e., die) — really hit its cultural peak back when the movie of the same title came out in 2007, which is why it’s telling and sad that Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC is only now getting around to making “bucket list” jokes. However, my total commitment to serving up accurate, information to you, the reader, led me to fact check some things and learn some truly mind-blowing stuff.

First off: Far from being a common phrase that was then borrowed as the title of the movie, as I had very strongly assumed, the phrase was actually originally coined by the screenwriter, Justin Zackham, who says he had kept a list like that for himself that he called “List of Things to do Before I Kick the Bucket,” eventually shortened to “Justin’s Bucket List.” Linguist, Wall Street Journal language columnist, and friend of the blog Ben Zimmer wrote a in 2015 column in which he backs Zackham’s claims; somewhat amusingly, a 2011 Slate article written to debunk the idea has an editorial note at the top added in 2015 admitting that they either misinterpreted or misdated supposedly earlier uses of the phrase. This extremely well-documented Reddit comment in a discussion on the topic in /r/etymology does a great job of demonstrating that the phrase was either invented for the movie or was almost unknown at the time it was released, because there are lots of earlier references to the concept but none actually use the phrase (they usually call it a “life list”).

And it’s not just me, a Gen Xer who was a married adult in his early 30s and had been doing this comics blog for three years when the movie came out, whose mind was blown by this: apparently it has similarly blown the minds of all the teens on TikTok, where discourse on the subject went viral last month. Did I know this? Obviously not, I am an old person who, as noted, was fully adult in the year of our lord 2007, I have not downloaded the TikTok app to my phone and I never will, thank you ver much. As the research journey outlined here has made clear, I only got hepped to this whole scene by — that’s right — the comic strip Beetle Bailey. THE WALKER-BROWNE STRIPS ARE MORE HIP TO WHAT THE KIDS ARE TALKING ABOUT THAN I AM, IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT I HAVE MANY ITEMS UNFINISHED ON MY “BUCKET LIST” BECAUSE I AM CLEARLY DEAD AND ALREADY IN THE GRAVE

Gil Thorp, 3/15/22

Speaking of teens, the “Pranit accidentally becomes a bookie” plot ended super boringly (Pranit got narced on and suspended from the team but otherwise seems to be doing fine and learning the appropriate lessons), so I appreciate the fact that today the strip decided to “have a little fun” and just provide some unsettling closeups of food. You ever wonder what it would look like for a hamburger to be pointed at — form the hamburger’s point of view? Then today’s Gil Thorp is for you, friends.

Pluggers, 3/15/22

A lot of comics did “Pi Day” jokes for 3/14 yesterday, and I ignored them because, as a dork who went to a magnet high school with an engineering focus, I can assure you that I have heard enough of those jokes to last me a lifetime. (Get at me when you’re ready to get on my level and celebrate Mole Day.) I guess today’s Pluggers is supposed to be a saying “I may have forgotten to do a Pi Day joke yesterday but every day is pie day, when you think about it”, but honestly I can’t get over how completely joyless this dog-man’s face is as he looks into the fridge. Pluggers are just simple, down-home real Americans who long ago lost the ability to feel pleasure or anything at all, really, even when they see that there’s a delicious slice of pie for them to eat whenever they want.

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Mary Worth, 3/14/22

I think I speak for those in long-term relationships when I say that in most, you have the ability to call in forgiveness for parallel transgressions. For instance, if, say, your husband got into a fender-bender in a parking lot somewhere and came home ranting and raving, wild-eyed and sweaty in rage, then surely when you’re perseverating about the fact that sometimes you need to maybe show a little leg to inspire a true artist, make him think about the platonic ideas of beauty and how they might relate to your face, not promising him anything, you know, not even really suggesting it, just encouraging his talent — anyway, when you’re in the middle of all that and you slam into a pickup truck at full speed, it’s not like your husband can complain, can he? Remember the parking lot incident? All the yelling you did? We’re even now, right?

Slylock Fox, 3/14/22

A question we’ve often speculated about on this blog: What exactly is the relationship between Slylock Fox and the uniformed canine police? Is Slylock the equivalent of a plainclothes detective, or is he a freelancer who happens to be working hand in glove with law enforcement? The fact that Max has to dial 911 to get the cops down here implies the latter, and the fact that he’s doing it only seconds before Slylock unleashes his big ratiocination reveal goes a long way towards explaining why the same criminals Sly repeatedly foils seem to return to their lives of crime so easily.