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Pluggers, 7/24/19

If I were to make a joke about exurban American old people obsessively watching Matlock, it would be rude, but since Pluggers is a feature by and for exurban American old people, they can say it, and I respect that. Anyway, my guess is that what the dog-man plugger is attempting to convey is less “I use the syndicated rebroadcasts of classic TV shows in the pre-local-news programming block to tell the time, just as my ancestors used the position of the sun and the stars” and more “woman, please hold your tongue and do not interrupt me during my favorite stories, it makes it hard to focus and solve the mystery, we discussed this.”

Mark Trail, 7/24/19

I always knew Mark Trail was in the tank for the Fourth Estate, but who knew that the payoff of this story would be that good local journalism was the real treasure all along — more valuable than gold?

Mary Worth, 7/24/19

Dawn has spent most of this date using factoids from the “Trivia” section of Wikipedia articles she got to from clicking names in the “List of French people” at random as conversational prompts, and somehow it’s still going better than the last one did.

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Six Chix, 7/23/19

Look, folks: I make fun of Six Chix quite a bit here, but the truth is, not everything is for everyone, you know? These strips aren’t really written with me in mind, and that’s OK! They’re for people who are maybe a little older, who maybe have little less “edgy” sensibility than I do. Suburban moms who just want to open the paper and laugh at life’s little foibles, to see a joke then can relate to. Who among us hasn’t run into a few problems with short-term memory as they age, right? Who among us hasn’t had long stretches of the day that they can’t remember, that they can’t account for, but feel a gnawing sense that something horrible happened in those missing hours? Haven’t we all had “one of those days,” where you come to, not sure whether it’s “wine o’clock” or even what day or time of year it is, covered in blood, so much blood, you’d think there’d be a body here with all this blood, but it’s nowhere to be found? Maybe the body’s in the closet. Is there more blood around the closet? It’s so hard to tell. The blood is everywhere.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/23/19

You might think it cruel that Snuffy is laughing at his nephew for trying and failing spectacularly to bake himself a tasty dessert. In fact, he’s laughing that anyone — especially anyone who lives with him — would assume he owns anything as useful and potentially economically productive as a hammer and chisel.

Sam and Silo, 7/23/19

Wow, I have to admit that I haven’t been keeping up with the latest currents in Roman Catholic theology, but I’m pretty surprised they’ve gone from Vatican II to “humanity is an infestation of vermin too powerful for even God to kill” in less than sixty years.

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Mark Trail, 7/22/19

Wow, hmm, Mark Trail sure has some … interesting and nuanced ideas about property rights! Like, it’s bad to hold people at gunpoint in order to get access to gold mines, but it’s totally ok to plunder treasure chests despite the presence of locks that clearly indicate that those chests are private? Anyway, I think it’s particularly cruel of Mark to theatrically break open this lock with a stone and then tell Doc “this is your show.”

Shoe, 7/22/19

There’s definitely an argument to be made that, especially in an age of extremely focused and specific streaming platforms, Saturday Night Live has become bland, middle-of-the-road entertainment. I’m just not sure that message is best delivered by [checks note] the legacy newspaper comic strip Shoe.