Dick Tracy has always been a straight shooter, but his dialogue in the last panel knocked me out of my chair.
One of the best parts of comics is when a character says something you agree with but would never actually say out loud.
I don’t dignify my preference for staying home by calling it a phobia, except that, if I do go, I want an aisle seat.
As for the rest, whether it is claustrophobia or agoraphobia or the more high-toned enocholophobia, it basically comes down to wishing people luck but not wanting to go.
Though I think it’s largely a preference for not dealing with it all.
Which boils down nicely to “I wish him luck, but I don’t really want to see it.”
On a semi-related note, I came across this ticket stub the other day, which gave me a date for what I suspect was the first of three times I went to see Les Mis in Montreal, since it’s near my birthday and my mother dragged me kicking and screaming into a sold-out theater.
After which I went and saw it two more times, once with the one of my boys who wasn’t in Japan and once with a girlfriend, but then I realized the show only really had about three songs and they just swapped out the lyrics and suddenly I couldn’t watch it anymore.
There’s probably a clinical name for that, like lernerandloewemania, but I prefer to simply chalk it up to having a pissy attitude.
The cure for which is to stop feeling guilty about it.
Which by a roundabout way of looking at things brings us to Betty, an underappreciated strip that shows up here a lot, last Sunday’s strip being a good example of why.
There are several strips in which the lead character is presented as a sort of salt-of-the-earth wise person but I have no patience for that sort of Will Rogers bullshit where a person pretends to be a peasant in order to speak plain ol’ countrified truth.
Betty doesn’t cover up her insights, and I laffed at this one because I have also looked into other people’s shopping carts and wondered what in the hell they were thinking.
Which is related to a Dominos Pizza ad promoting an app that will buzz you when your pizza arrives.
In the commercial, the daughter races out of cheerleading practice, the boy abandons his video game and the wife hastily wraps up a college lecture so they can all hurry home in time for Dominos.
Leaving me to wonder what kind of depressing slop they eat on other days that makes cardboard and tomato paste so exciting?
Not that all fast food is bad, and Moderately Confused drops this one right after I had the good fortune of hitting Subway when one of the new people was working as a “Sandwich Artist,” which is to say, she laid on the lettuce, onions, tomatoes and such generously enough that I about had a side salad, too.
She’ll learn not to do that, I’m sure.
The difference between a sub and a burger being that the sub is configured so that extra stuff falls out the side and you still have a sandwich in your hands, while, when you get one of those burgers that only a python could get in his mouth, it all falls out the back leaving you biting down on an empty, condiment-soaked bun.
We’ll be back right after this message:
Tank McNamara is soliciting nominees for Sports Jerk of the Year, the build-up to which is as much fun as the reveal at the end.
And you thought the Democratic field for 2020 was crowded.
Now, where were we?
Oh yes: A permanent plot development over at Retail, where Val and Cooper quietly tied the knot and are off to Hawaii with the money they saved.
This is becoming something of a thing among the younger crowd, which is fine with me because I don’t much like weddings, though second weddings can be pleasant because they’re so much more like a real party than an overextended Barbie movie.
I talked about a second marriage once, but it was more of a running joke, since our agreement was that we’d have a mutual friend perform the ceremony once he went from being the first openly gay member of the city council to being the first openly gay mayor.
The outcome being that he eventually was elected mayor, which was good for society, but we’d already broken up, which was good for us.
Pooch Cafe offers some odd synchronicity today, because just two days ago, one my boys asked me to remind him of how my version of the Three Little Pigs ended, there being a preponderance today of versions which end with some kind of rapprochement between wolf and pigs.
Mine ended with the sonofabitch burned to a crisp, because it’s not a “fairy tale” but a “fable” in which karma is the point and, without karma, there is no point.
Which brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day, and a very good day it was
(Macanudo)
Both of these strips were, I’m sure, drawn, inked and submitted before Gillette revealed the depth of insecurity among our manliest men.
To return to our opening, maybe we’d do better to stop talking about misogyny and recast the conversation in terms of gynophobia, because I’ve been stunned, as we grow older and stop lying to each other, to find how many guys were simply scared to death to even talk to girls.
And still are.
Yes, there are women in the same boat, trapped into being what they think they ought to be instead of who they are. Of course there’s such a thing as “toxic femininity.”
But you know what? #NotAllGirls
(That’s — I say — that’s a joke, son.)
It’s also a reason for you to cowboy up and get over your sad-ass self.
Meanwhile, check out these losers:
(I’ll bet girls aren’t the only thing passing them by.)
What you can do is to peel back the paper/foil the burger comes in and use it to hold the back of the burger in place while you work on the front. The key is to avoid thinking of this as a burger diaper.
But if I go to Applebees or Chilis, I want to ask the waiter, “Excuse me, could you bring me a diaper for my burger?”
Go ahead, but if you order it that way there’ll be an upcharge.