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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/25

Ha ha, can you imagine? The Smif and Barlow families would be lined up opposite each other, and Steve Harvey would shout out, “Things you carry home in a burlap sack!” And Barlow would buzz in first and smugly shout “Chickens!” but while he’s distracted, Snuffy jumps over the podium and charges at him with a rusty blade he had hidden in his overalls, eager to slit Barlow’s throat and finally declare victory in their long-running clan war, right there on national television. The little bastard doesn’t understand that TV shows aren’t broadcast live, but the footage will leak out anyway. It’s too sensational not to.

Bizarro, 1/10/25

Hey, did you know that the millions of toner cartridges and batteries we’ve produced over the past few decades all have souls? Or maybe they are the souls of the electronic equipment we stick them inside, I’m not 100% that I follow the cosmology here, but the point is we’re going to be encountering this stuff when we die and move on to the next world, and I think it’s going to have some questions for us that I for one am not sure I’ll be able to answer.

Dennis the Menace, 1/10/25

You know what’s real menacing behavior, Gina? Carrying around a 5 x 7 wedding picture of your parents outside in the middle of winter while you tell people about this. What if you drop it in the snow?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/9/25

I regret to inform you that we are almost to the end of week one of “Kelly is in college, now” and it appears we never did make our way out of the phone talking part of the storyline. But I do think today’s strip has an nice message about how much better Summer and Kelly get along now that she’s out of her rebellious phase. Back then, Kelly was very dismissive about her mother’s “dumb boyfriends,” but now she’s like “Mom, I’m not at home anymore, so shouldn’t you be using the opportunity to, I dunno, have more sex? Just a suggestion. Welp, gotta go!”

Curtis, 1/9/25

Today’s Curtis is a repeat — you can tell because Curtis isn’t wearing the streamlined new hat he got as a gift in 2018 — and I’m pretty sure it may date to before I even started doing this blog. That’s because I can’t find any evidence I talked about it when it first ran, and maybe I’ve become a different person over the years, but I find it hard to believe that at any point in my long life of reading the comics so you don’t have to I would’ve neglected to note that Greg thought of his ample posterior as being in a monogamous sexual relationship with his chair, and his butt and the chair have sex, and are in love, and we’re left to speculate on the mechanics of both types of interaction. I feel like I would’ve talked about it! It’s a lot.

Pluggers, 1/9/25

“Oh Lord, I started out the day with good intentions, but then I got out of bed and, as usual, that’s when it all went wrong! So much blood! So much killing! If You didn’t want me to maul and maul and maul, why did You make me a bear with such powerful claws?”

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Dustin, 1/8/25

I think I speak for insufferable pedants everywhere when I say that I immediately clocked this as not being an actual line from Confucius — it’s way too touchy-feely — and felt great satisfaction when exactly 5 seconds of research proved me right. It’s widely attributed to the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, as part of the longer quote “He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything,” but nobody seems to have a specific citation for it, so that’s probably not true either. I leave the details to the elite team of Brainyquote investigators in the comments, but I do think that if there were even a thin thread connecting this to Confucius, you’d find that attribution everywhere online, because the older and more exotic the source of an anodyne statement like this, the more people love it.

Anyway, it made me wonder: What would Dustin’s dad think of Confucius? I feel like his opinion would be mixed: obviously he’d be into the filial piety and respect for hierarchy, but Confucius rejected the strict codes of Legalism and emphasized that an enlightened ruler leads by means of moral example, which a lawyer would be dubious about. I also considered trying to figure out what Dustin’s dad would think about Thomas Carlyle, but it turns out that his Wikipedia article is really long, and why would I waste my precious time on it when I could be making jokes about Dawn Weston walking into a door in Mary Worth?

Mary Worth, 1/8/25

In other news, Dawn Weston, having eschewed corrective lenses for the dumbest reason imaginable, walked into a door in Mary Worth, which incredibly means that she didn’t even get out of her own apartment building before we were treated to The Mr. Magoo-ening Of Dawn Weston. Honestly, looking at those doors I half expected them to open automatically, and maybe she did as well, who can say. Anyway, I look forward to Dirk tactically abandoning his “Nerdgirl” taunt and moving on to “Bruisegirl Nosebleedchick.”

Hi and Lois, 1/8/25

Ditto, she’s been around since 1954, she’s never had any teeth, and at this point she’s pretty sure she’s never going to have any teeth. Stop taunting her! Mush is all she will ever know, across however many decades she has left to suffer in this ageless hell!