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Judge Parker, 7/16/24

Sorry to sound like, you know, a worrywart, but I think that if I had glimpsed what looked very much like my dead father wrapped in chains under water, I might … not spend my time relaying that information to my friend as if it were a mildly interesting dream I had? I dunno, I might call home at that point. “Abbey!” I’d say, if I were her. “What’s Sam up to? Seen him lately? I don’t suppose he’s working on any cases where he might get murdered and his corpse dropped into the Long Island Sound? You’d probably know something about that, if that were going on, right?” That’s what I’d do. I don’t want to tell Sophie how to live her life. But it just seems like maybe it’d head off some misunderstandings.

Mary Worth, 7/16/24

I very much love the symbolism of the second panel here. “Dear, I know engaging with your mother is emotionally painful,” Mary is saying, “but I urge you to grasp onto that thorny relationship with your bare hands, no matter how much it leads you to suffer! Me? I’m wearing gloves. I have no stake in any of this and it won’t affect me at all.”

The Phantom, 7/16/24

Hey, remember the rocket that fake Elon Musk launched a few weeks ago? Well, it crashed in Bangalla, and this cute robot rover guy was in it, and now he’s wandering around the Bangallan jungle. Don’t have much to say about it but I thought you’d like to see him. I just think he’s neat!

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Crock, 7/15/24

Ah, just another day in the French Maghreb, with a difficult march ahead for our Legionnaires, though at least they have a promise from their commanders that they’ll be cared for this time … but wait, what’s this? A white flag of surrender flying above the fort? Ominous! Presumably the stragglers will not be left by the wayside because there simply will be no stragglers: most of the men will summarily executed en masse by the insurgents of the liberation army, while Crock and the other the officers, having made a deal to save their own skin, slip through enemy lines back to heavily fortified Oran or Algiers. Don’t worry, my vulture friends, your cravings will be satisfied indeed!

Hi and Lois, 7/15/24

Ha ha, that was kind of a downer, sorry! Anyway, chores, amiright? You gotta do ’em? I do like that Lois is holding a laundry basket here; she’s not a nag, she’s just someone willing to shoulder her share of domestic labor, and she wants to make sure everybody else does, too.

Alice, 7/15/24

Look, I’m a big fan of 20th century novelist Kurt Vonnegut, but he was not a doctor and also he’s dead, so I would simply not seek medical advice from him. Of course, I also wouldn’t trust him to prescribe medication to my parrot, so I supposed it’s been well established that Alice and I are on different wavelengths in this regard.

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Mary Worth, 7/14/24

Dawn has said a couple times that she and her mother don’t agree on politics but hasn’t offered any specifics, and this reminds me that at one point I tried to come up with a list of the political ideologies of the whole Mary Worth cast and immediately decided that neither Wilbur nor Dawn had ever voted in their lives. I’m imagining that her mother is a fairly middle-of-the road suburban type, maybe a former Romney Republican who became an MSNBC lib during the Trump era; she mostly just wants Dawn to at least register to vote, and thinks her daughter refuses to do so because she’s one of those protesting anti-electoralist leftists like her friends’ kids who go to Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, when in fact Dawn just finds everything about the American system of governance “confusing” and thinks about it as little as possible.

Anyway, I know Wilbur’s emotionally fragile right now, but I regret to tell him that “Let’s do something fun this week!” doesn’t sound like a plan at all! It actually sounds like what you’d say if you don’t want to hang out with someone but also don’t want to explicitly say that, and you hope that not nailing down any specifics will allow you to get out of a social obligation unnoticed.

Judge Parker, 7/14/24

So it turns out Sophie had a little problem with a rip current and was rescued not by Lucas, the increasingly whiny drip who has a crush on her, but by his hunkier, significantly chiller older brother Glen, and I thought that was setting up a tired love triangle type story? Except no, what it’s actually setting up an exciting underwater zombie type story and I am immediately 100% on board for it. Sorry hunks! It’s zombie time now.