Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 2: The Sea Monster

After my false start in reviewing the Popeye and Son cartoon last week, let’s start with a real start, at the cartoon that doesn’t start — you know, I’m not going to salvage that sentence. Never mind. What I’m getting at is let’s sit down and watch episode two, cartoon one, of Popeye and Son, “The Sea Monster”. Oh, I like sea monsters, so this should be good.

The writing is credited to Cliff Roberts, who also wrote for The All-New Popeye Hour (1978 – 1981), so you can trust he’s got the older characters down. He also wrote for Pink Panther and Sons, so we can trust his ability at writing brand extensions. He also wrote for The Skatebirds, so, y’know. He was a survivor.

My first thought was it’s a shame the new series didn’t have a theme song. There’s some ambient thing going on, but it’s too generic to provide any information about the series or the setting or anything. It just vaguely promises we’re having fun. I was hoping for something that introduced the characters because — to their credit — the creators of Popeye and Son avoided the easy way. That would be to make Popeye Junior, Bluto Junior, Olive Junio, Wimpy Junior, and Sea Hag Junior and send them on their way. Instead we have a Popeye Junior and Tank as Bluto Junior, but that’s it. If there’s any relationship between the other characters and the older generation it’s not explained this episode.

So credit to them for not taking the lazy way in series setup. The drawback is I don’t have any idea who these new characters are. My first reaction was they looked like a near-final draft of the Pup Named Scooby-Doo character designs, and the decision to not have everyone say each other’s names all the time didn’t help my note-taking.

The story in a paragraph: Young Daphne Polly rescues a sea monster from a 500-pound sea-monster-eating clam. The sea monster, whose size obeys no known laws of perspective, follows her with excessive, unwanted devotion. She shoos it off, allowing Bluto and Tank to capture and sell it to some Captain Planet villain. Guilt-ridden Daphne Polly swims out to save the sea monster, but Popeye Junior takes his father’s advice, and spinach, to break the sea monster’s bonds. Fortunately before Polly has to figure how to chase the sea monster of her life, he finds a girl sea monster and they go off together.

On first viewing I thought oh, this whole Popeye and Son project was a mistake. This shows how great the shock of the new can be, even for someone like me who claims to be open-minded. Most of what turned me off was mere unfamiliarity. The second time I watched the cartoon, not distracted by not knowing anyone’s names or getting used to the ‘wrong’ voice for Wimpy (who’s had more voices than any of the main cast) I enjoyed it more.

Left: actual footage of me when someone shows any interest in what I’m talking about.

The story is adequate. It’s no great breakthrough in narrative to have a kid pick up a wild animal as strange companion, or to have it go away at the end. My question: why does the sea monster have to go away? It’s one thing when you have to restore the status quo, but this is episode two of a new series. I suppose there is a strong tradition of the strange novel pet having to go away. Maybe it’s also meant to avoid teaching kids there’s no reason not to keep a squirrel as a pet, if you can get one. Was there ever thought put into having Polly turn out to have a pet sea monster? You’d think that would inspire some stories, or at least allow stories to take new directions. And the animation is fine, in that way Saturday Morning cartons had in that slow rise between Mighty Mann and Yukk and Batman: The Animated Series.

To add a nice thing: Polly gets the giant clam off the sea monster by wit rather than physical strength. This feels in line with, especially, the 1930s cartoons that every Popeye project must bow towards. Good choice, especially for the era. Funny cleverness will cover for a lot of action you can’t show on-screen.

Most interesting to me was the climax, Junior eating his father’s spinach to go off and save the day, while Popeye remains in the background. The hardest thing to get right must be balancing who saves the day. Here we get Popeye telling his son to save the day, and stepping back, letting Junior take the lead. This feels like good parenting to me, especially as Popeye watches, I trust ready to step in if the problem gets beyond Junior’s capabilities. It seems at odds with Popeye’s past, long track record of father and mother to Swee’Pea, but Swee’Pea was much younger than Junior is.

I don’t care much for Junior’s design. He looks to me much more like Young Fred Scooby-Doo than anything else, only wearing a Wesley Crusher shirt. But I do like that part of what the spinach power-up gives him is bulked-out arms and legs to better resemble his father. That’s some thoughtful design.

Less thoughtful: the opening credits use the same sea monster design for something endangering Popeye and Son. They foil it by blowing it up like a balloon, which is pleasantly silly enough. But it did lead me to expect developments this story that didn’t happen. If the scene depicts something from another story we may have an irresolvable continuity error that forces the whole series to be nullified. We’ll see.

Yes, I too wonder what Swee’Pea’s part in this series is going to be. We’ll see that, too, maybe.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Did Saul Wynter leave Charterstone? August – October 2023

Saul Wynter has moved out of his apartment, the better to share his storylines with Eve Lourd (Halloween screen name, Eve Gourd). It seems like he’s got fewer obvious stories to tell, though. He’s got a new pet, a new outlook on life, a new bride. I’d like to think he has more stories left, since he’s got that charm, but if he didn’t it’s not like his life story would feel unfinished.

I hope here to get you up to the end of October 2023 in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. If you’re reading after about January 2024, or any news about the strip breaks, I should have a more current and relevant essay at this link. Thanks for reading.

Mary Worth.

6 August – 28 October 2023.

Saul Wynter’s dog Greta was saved from the dogfighting ring. The people to thank here are Eve Lourd, and her dog Max, who did persistent searches. Also the dogfighting guy who left Greta’s cage unlatched so he could go be a drunken lout or something. Also Greta for running away. Last on the list: Mary Worth, who told Saul Wynter, correctly but without evidence, that his dog was stolen to be a bait dog.

So you understand why the strip then spent about sixteen months of Dr Jeff praising Mary Worth for the dog rescue. Also to Mary Worth saying oh, she’s just an ordinary person with particular skills in turning salmon into beige polygons. But yes, if only everyone could be like her.

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Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 11th of September, 2023. “All I ever needed was the love of dogs like Greta and Max, much better dogs than the Bella I had when I joined the strip. … What, too soon?”

Saul Wynter’s story got a new chapter starting the 21st of August. On a date at the beach he proposes to Eve. She accepts. What the heck, there hasn’t been a wedding in this strip since … earlier this year. All right, but it was a long time since the one before that.

Mary Worth happens to see the two shopping for wedding rings. It’s no surprise she spends most of her days hovering around the wedding ring store. She’s invited to their courthouse wedding, a small affair attended by the minister, the happy couple, Mary Worth, and someone appealing their ticket for having an unkempt lawn. “It’s all native flora, it’s better for the environment,” they say. They have a Mark Trail Sunday page for support and everything.

But Saul and Eve come back home, to toast each other. Saul speaks of how he never imagined marrying again.

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Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 7th of October, 2023. A shared fondness for root beer isn’t much to prove a relationship, no. Ask her if she’s ever listened to The Beatles or if she likes the Scrambler ride at an amusement park.

The 17th of September saw the end of that story and the start of the current one. A large, mustached man named Keith Hillend is moving in to Saul Wynter’s old place, now that he and Eve are going to be sharing storylines. He’s engagingly befuddled by Mary Worth’s insistence on helping and inviting him to events and delivering surprise packages of beige shapes. All she can get out of him is that he’s a retired Marine and cop and that he hasn’t got any family.

Mary Worth’s not even out the door when who knocks on the door but family? Sonia Fabar presents herself, claiming to be his daughter. Mary Worth excuses herself so she can go make Tex Avery eyes at the family crisis to come.

Is there a crisis, though? They both like root beer, after all, and Kitty Fabar is someone he knew twenty years ago. She explains a bit of herself: she’s studying to be a social worker and she wants to learn how to stick it to ‘The Man’. Particularly the military and the cops. Hillend is aghast. Without the United States military some of those Latin American nations might go a century or more without a right-wing coup. And without a cop, who are you going to have shake their head sadly and say if they find your bike they’ll return it but it’ll be five business days before we have the form your insurance company wants for your claim? Sonia storms out, wanting nothing to do with a violent, oppressive killer.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 17th of October, 2023. I take a lot of cheap shots at the strip so let me enjoy a moment of sincerity: this is a good, strong moment. Hillend looks and acts like someone who’s just had several identity-shaking hits in short order.

Hillend, for his part, is devastated to learn he has a daughter, and the daughter hates him. He finds Kitty Fabar and meets her for lunch. She reveals she kept him out of Sonia’s life because he would want to marry her. She didn’t want to marry at all, or marry a Marine who was already married to his job. Hillend tries to argue he had the right to know she was carrying his child. Kitty leaves, saying this was a mistake and she’s sorry Sonia contacted him.

And that’s the gentle but legitimate relationship drama as it stands now, the end of October. Will Sonia come to see there are good cops who aren’t actually on any police force anymore? Will Hillend come to see why marginalized people have reasons to distrust the part of the State with guns and a code of silence? We’ll see over the next several months.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

What great things did people not say, but that Mary Worth’s Sunday page said they said? Here’s the recent lineup:

• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop, 6 August 2023.
• “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” — Albert Schweitzer, 13 August 2023.
• “Anyone can be a small light in a dark room.” — Miep Gies, 20 August 2023.
• “To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” — David Viscott, 27 August 2023.
• “My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.” — Winston Churchill, 3 September 2023.
• “If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.” — Princess Diana, 10 September 2023.
• “No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.” — Buddha, 17 September 2023.
• “I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor. Do you know your next-door neighbor?” — Mother Teresa, 24 September 2023.
• “Be curious, not judgemental.” — Walt Whitman, 1 October 2023.
• “Most things in life come as a surprise.” — Lykke Li, 8 October 2023.
• “You can disagree without being disagreeable.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 15 October 2023.
• “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson, 22 October 2023.
• “The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” — George Carlin, 29 October 2023.

Next Week!

John X. Who is he (The Phantom) and what is he up to? Even Lee Falk doesn’t know, so what chance do I have explaining Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity? We’ll see next week.

I Need Help With Three Alligators (Not in That Way)

So I was variously reading about various pets of various United States presidents. It’s a fun field because you can say almost anything about almost any president from before 1950 and people will have to believe you because, what, you know somebody who can tell you Benjamin Harrison didn’t own a pygmy camel named Bimetallism? Even if someone did you can ask, “Vas you dere, Charlie?” and distract them by trying to understand what you’re going on about. But anyway I was reading something from PresidentialPetMuseum.com, who must be reliable because they have a whole dot-com address and a museum in their name and all. And what I need help with is figuring out which is the more astounding fact:

1. Two presidents are known to have kept alligators.
2. Neither of them was Theodore Roosevelt.

Right? If you were going to name any president to have a pet alligator, it’d be Teddy Roosevelt. It’s entirely possible he did and just nobody ever mentioned it to him. But according to Presidential Pet Museum Dot Com, the alligator-bearing presidents were Herbert Hoover — technically his younger son Allan, but, c’mon — and John Quincy Adams. Don’t get the wrong idea, John^QA‘s alligator was a gift — properly, a regift — from the Marquis de Lafayette, who’d been given one on his 1824-25 tour of the United States and I guess figured wasn’t going to get a better chance than this. According to Museum, Adams kept the alligator in the unfinished East Room of the White House and a bathtub nearby. I like this. I could imagine doing that, if I happened to be President and were also given an alligator by one of the many foreign officers who made the Revolution successful. Tadeusz Kościuszko, let’s say. It’s kind of the way I feel an affinity for Calvin Coolidge since I learned he’d ring the Secret Sevice’s alarm and then hide behind the drapes, a prank I bet he was successful in at most twice before everybody started pretending to be all worried. His prank would have stayed funny longer if he had even one alligator to back him up.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? What’s Content-Warn-worthy about Mary Worth THIS time? May – August 2023

My last Charterstone check-in came at the start of a story, which is great. Saves me trying to recap too much plot. And it just finished, too, saving me recap space next time. However, the story to recap here centers on animal abuse and pet endangerment. Obviously nothing too graphic happens. This is Mary Worth, not searing indictments of humanity. But people who do not need “dogs in peril” filling up their recreational reading should probably give this essay a pass. Catch my next recap of Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth around November 2023.

If you are on the fence about whether to read this, I’ll admit there is some wonderful funny stuff the past twelve weeks of the strip. But you should not read stuff if all it does is upset you. You have enough troubles. It’s 2023, for crying out loud. In any case, as the strip itself is transitioning to the next story, you can most likely read the comic again if you want to take it as it happens.

Mary Worth.

15 May – 5 August 2023.

The last couple months of Mary Worth started with a surprising moment. Dr Jeff felt all sad about another couple at the Bum Boat texting their way through dinner. And Mary Worth said if they enjoy spending their time together without talking, fine. Other people not acting like you does not mean they need to be fixed. Before Dr Jeff can ask about the pod people we’re off to the main story, Old Man Saul Wynter and his beloved New Dog Greta. Here I put the cut so you can choose whether to hear any more.

Why You Might Want to Not Read _Mary Worth_ a Couple Weeks

I apologize for the warning on this being a little late. I suppose I hadn’t realized the comic strip was actually going there.

People who are sensitive to pets in danger might want to take a pass on reading Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for a couple weeks. The story under way has seen Saul Wynter’s dog Greta abducted being used as a bait for dogfighting matches. I expect that everything is going to turn out all right, at least for the dogs given names on-screen and shown to us. The strip just isn’t that dark ^[*], you know? But getting to all right seems likely to go through some distressing moments, and you should consider whether you need that in your recreational reading. (I’ll have a similar warning when I get around to the plot recap for the last couple months.)

^[*] Yeah I remember Aldo Keldrast, who stunned us all by dying. But that was a long time ago. And he was set up to be a person you would feel relieved was dead, even if you wouldn’t wish that and would feel bad for feeling that relief. The strip is not going to do a thing to make you feel relieved that someone’s pet dogs die. Anyway, if you’re sensitive to this kind of animal endangerment, think about whether you want this in your comics.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? When did Iris get pets? November 2022 – February 2023

She didn’t. The current story in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth started the 18th of January. A narration box introduced it with “When Iris takes her pets to the veterinarian”. Narration Box was confused. This was Stella bringing her pets to the vet. Probably the previous story being so much about Iris. That both Iris and Stella had bad experiences with Wilbur Weston, and having just made a joke about that recently, muddled things.

This should catch you up to mid-February 2023 in the comic strip. If you’re reading this after about May 2023 I should have a more useful plot recap here. And now on to the big wedding news.

Mary Worth.

20 November 2022 – 19 February 2023.

Zak and Iris, bonded over how they both prefer Zak to not fall off a cliff to his death, are marrying! I believe it’s the first actual factual marriage happening in Mary Worth since I started recapping the plots. What could disrupt this happy event?

How about a face from Zak’s past? We see Zak on the phone talking to someone he’s missed. Someone he says “I can’t wait to see you, dear” to. It’s Nan, his former babysitter. She’s in town, taking a vacation from her home in Hawai’i to visit Santa Rosa for some reason. Nan looks uncannily like Iris, a thing Zak never notices because they wear different earrings. Iris notices, though. Also how Zak and Nan have all sorts of bits they have to run through. Things like Nan surrounding her face with fingers or the two saying things like “yummy yummy yummy in my tummy tummy tummy” and all.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 7th of December, 2022. Must say that all of Zak and Nan’s inside jokes and gestures, like whatever the heck they’re doing here, seem like stuff you might do with your babysitter when you’re six and she’s in high school. I guess it speaks well that they’re not embarrassed to do this stuff as grown-ups out in public, but I also see where it’s even more exclusionary than usual inside jokes are.

Iris was already insecure about how she and Zak had a nontraditional relationship: he’s never seen or heard of Casablanca while she takes thyroid medication. What if Zak’s interest is only in the spiting image of his first crush? Wouldn’t that be weird? Like, too weird for people to deal with? Zak insists no, insisting that he loves different things about them. And besides she’s happily married and he wants to happily marry. And they only look generally alike. And besides, “people fall in love all the time based on their past experiences”, a declaration true yet also not on point. Anyway Zak insists it’s not weird until he has to leave the room.

Mary Worth doesn’t comfort Iris more, but she offers a chilling comparison. You know who else was jealous of another person? Wilbur Weston. Iris is willing to do anything not the way Wilbur does things, but she’d still like to know someone else thinks it’s weird Nan looks so much like her. Mary Worth won’t even give her that and insists it’s jealousy that’s the real problem. So Iris surrenders, agreeing to marry a man she loves even though she looks a lot like his old babysitter.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 23rd of December, 2022. So on the one hand, Iris seems to be wrong in being jealous, if we take all of Zak’s protests at face value and don’t think about his calling his former nanny ‘Dear’. On the other hand, nobody is giving Iris the dignity of taking seriously her feelings; if she feels this is dangerously weird it would be nice if any person said anything other than “what’s your malfunction here?”

The happy day comes the 2nd of January, with a church ceremony before the eyes of God and Wilbur Weston, who’s invited because ?? ???? ??????? ???? ???? ? ???? ??. I guess to make sure he doesn’t stumble into doing something really embarrassing. All he does is comment to Mary Worth how, hey, most marriages end in divorce so he’ll be ready in case Iris breaks up with Zak after all. It’s the sort of comment you make when you know you’re charming and can be facetious and don’t notice everyone slapping their foreheads around you, like, all the time. Still, we did see Wilbur’s thought balloon sincerely wishing her happiness, so, I still don’t know why he was invited.

Everyone agrees it was lovely, though, and they’re very happy to see people married. Dr Jeff has learned well enough not to even suggest that Mary Worth marry him. So that’s all happy to see.

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The current story, as mentioned, began the 18th of January. Stella and not Iris took her dog and cat to the vet, Ed. She’d gone out with him once before. That date got turned into a colossal karaoke battle between Stella and Wilbur Weston. Stella and Mary Worth remember it as the most awkward and embarrassing event they had ever been present for or could imagine witnessing. Wilbur Weston remembers it as “Tuesday”. The vet is up for another date, though. Stella and Ed bond over how they both would prefer companion animals not die, and how life is stressful. It seems a promising start to a relationship. And then Wilbur appears.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 16th of February, 2023. Early lead for the title of Funniest Single Mary Worth Panel of 2023 here. I’m sure Moy and Brigman are doing that for the fan delight and possible meme-ification but, you know? I’m still delighted.

He says running into Stella at the pet store is coincidence. His goldfish needed food. Innocent? Maybe, but as anyone who keeps goldfish will tell you, if you run out of goldfish food you’re feeding them too much. But then she starts seeing him leering into the window, looking like she threw away a jar with easily two dozen mayonnaise molecules still left. But is he actually there or is she hallucinating? This Sunday we see Wilbur’s face intruding on her dreams, which is a heck of a thing to have to dream about.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

• “The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.” — Nikon Kazantzakis, 20 November 2022.
• “Friendship is another word for love” — Unknown, 27 November 2022.
• “Everything in adulthood can be traced back to childhood.” — Penny Junor, 4 December 2022.
• “I look back to a happy childhood.” — Helen Spence, 11 December 2022.
• “You can be the moon and still be jealous of the stars.” — Gary Allan, 18 December 2022.
• “The love we give away is the only love we keep.” — Elbert Hubbard, 25 December 2022.
• “Cheers to a new year and another chance to get it right.” — Oprah Winfrey, 1 January 2023.
• “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” — Mignon McLaughlin, 8 January 2023.
• “If I get married, I want to be very married.” — Audrey Hepburn, 15 January 2023.
• “I believe, in life, you always get a second chance.” — Fabio Lanzoni, 22 January 2023.
• “It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” — Hans Selye, 29 January 2023.
• “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” — Bob Marley, 5 February 2023.
• “Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.” — Tom Wolfe, 12 February 2023.
• “Nightmares are releases.” — Sylvia Browne, 19 February 2023.

Next Week!

I didn’t have a good spot to mention it in the main text but I’m delighted to see that the Santa Royale pet shop is now carrying eevees. They’re demanding pets but very rewarding if you put in the effort. But what about other strange animals with uncannily human-like features? The Ghost Who Walks was looking at some of them. I’ll recap the last couple months of Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s Sunday-continuity The Phantom next week, all going well.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? How is Wilbur Weston so incompetent? August – October 2021

The current story in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth has focused on Wilbur Weston, a giant mayonnaise sandwich of a man. As usual for his stories, it’s about how he’s screwing up his own relationships by acting dumb. Wilbur Weston’s day job is advice columnist. Doesn’t this strain credibility?

I rule that it does not. First, it is hard for any of us to change the ways we screw up our relationships. We wouldn’t screw them up if it were easy for us to spot what we were doing wrong, or to do something else. Second, an advice columnist gets a problem in a clean, discrete lump that sets out (one hopes) all the relevant information. Spotting the relevant information while in the midst of the mess is hard. Yes, I would expect him to be better than average at diagnosing his problems and prescribing a cure, once he was aware he was the problem. And I don’t expect him to be any better than any of us in following the cure.

So this essay should catch you up to late October 2021 in Mary Worth plots. If you’re reading this in 2022, or if any news comes out about the comic, you should find my most up-to-date pieces at this link.

And if you’re interested in reading other things, let me offer Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z, a glossary of various mathematics terms. The most recent essay was about the hyperbola.

Mary Worth.

1 August – 23 October 2021.

After my previous plot recap we saw a couple weeks of Drew Cory wondering why Ashlee’s left town and told him she doesn’t need his money after all. With Mary Worth agreeing they don’t understand Ashlee, the story came to an end, the 15th of August.

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The current storyline, which has been pleasantly wrinkled, started the 16th of August. Wilbur and Estelle, whose last name I don’t seem to have recorded, are having more dates where they get together and sing. Estelle’s one-eyed cat Libby likes to sing along, somehow raising Wilbur’s ire. Wilbur locks the cat in the bedroom, where neither she nor Estelle want her to be.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 18th of August, 2021. For a week or two the story looked like it was all going to be watching Libby plan and outwit Wilbur and that was fun. Unanswered question: how exactly did Wilbur, Libby, and Estelle move between the first and second panels? (No, this really doesn’t matter, because the panels convey moments clearly and well. But if you start to think how these people could be in this order, either Wilbur ran between Estelle and the piano or Estelle twirled around in her seat.)

Wilbur’s position is simple: he doesn’t want the cat interrupting his singing. Estelle’s position is simple: Libby’s a cat, she likes being with her. Libby’s position is simple: she can make Wilbur’s life miserable. So she does, including peeing on his end of the sofa. Estelle forgives this; Wilbur does not, and demands the cat apologize. Estelle declares that she and Wilbur need to take a break.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 12th of September, 2021. So on the one hand, Saul Wynter is certainly a happier person than he was when we first met him. And that’s got to be making all aspects of his life better. On the other hand, he’s become someone who thinks there’s a laugh to be had somewhere in the statement “I signed up for an online class that starts soon! I need time to figure it out!”

While pondering how anyone could choose a pet over him, Wilbur runs into Saul Wynter. He knows Wynter as that grumpy old recluse. But Wynter’s changed, becoming a warm, outgoing, sunny person, which he credits to his new dog Greta. This seems a bit weird since Wynter had a dog, Bella, when he was all misanthropic and unliked. But I rule this acceptable too: Greta, a rescue dog, was shy and needful in ways that we can suppose Bella was not. And the experience of helping Greta seems to have given Wynter an emotional security that Bella didn’t.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 5th of October, 2021. Oh man, I hope someone’s told Wilbur about the food thing dogs need.

Wilbur has the brilliant idea to draw the wrong lesson from this. He goes to the Animal Shelter and adopts the first dog he sees, a French bulldog he dubs Pierre. At the dog park Pierre meets Sophie, a French bulldog kept by Carol. And Carol meets Wilbur, an experience both find pleasant enough. Carol explains some of the little things an expert dog-owner knows, like that dogs should have toys.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 20th of Octber, 2021. The thing Wilbur’s keeping private is that a couple years ago he fell for a salsa dancer who was pulling a romance scam on him. It would have been an interesting direction if he’d shared that, and with a trustworthy (I assume) Carol learned to dance again. But it’s also quite reasonable for him not to want to touch that activity again.

Estelle catches a glimpse of them going to the pet store, and leaps to the conclusion Wilbur has a new girlfriend already. So does Wilbur, who mentions how he and his ex loved having singalongs. She doesn’t like singing. She likes salsa dancing. He doesn’t like dancing. He likes travel. She doesn’t. He likes talking about everything his ex liked and did. When he accidentally calls her Stella, she calls the date off. This may seem abrupt but we’ve seen two or three panels of him every day. She’s seeing the full thing.

Wilbur calls to apologize, the way he was always apologizing to his ex for embarrassing spectacles. She points out he’s nowhere near over his ex, and that’s where things stand as of late October.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

• “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.” — Gloria Stuart, 1 August 2021.
• “I will trust you — I will extend my hand to you — despite the risk of betrayal. Because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me.” — Jordan B Peterson, 8 August 2021.
• “He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping. He loved her.” — W Somerset Maugham, 15 August 2021.
• “Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.” — Miguel de Cervantes, 22 August 2021.
• “I never met an animal I didn’t like, and I can’t say the same about people.” — Doris Day, 29 August 2021.
• “Love is unconditional, relationships are not.” — Grant Gudmundson, 5 September 2021.
• “Attitude determines the altitude of life.” — Edwin Louis Cole, 12 September 2021.
• “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” — Helmut Schmidt, 19 September 2021.
• “Morning will come. It has no choice.” — Marty Rubin, 26 September 2021.
• “Back in my day, people met in the real world, not on their telephones.” — Julianne MacLean, 3 October 2021.
• “Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.” — Erica Jong, 10 October 2021.
• “I am not what you see. I am what time and effort and interaction slowly unveil.” — Maugham, 17 October 2021.
• “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” — Groucho Marx, 24 October 2021.

Next Week!

It’s the ghost of the Ghost Who Walks, who doesn’t walk! The conclusion of The Visitor to Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity, if things go as I plan.

In Which My Love Is Disappointed in Me

Our pet rabbit has hay fever, which I agree seems inefficient for a rabbit. But she gets these sneezing fits sometimes, with this week one of those times. Fortunately the treatment is a bit of children’s cough syrup. And even more fortunately she loves children’s cough syrup, even more than she loves collard greens, life itself, or intimidating my love’s parents’ dogs. To set your expectations about that last one, though, you should know one of those dogs is intimidated by a potato chips bowl that’s somewhat large. The point is it’s quite easy to give our pet rabbit cough syrup. It’s maybe easier than not giving her cough syrup. She’s that enthusiastic about it.

This photograph was not taken last night, as you could have deduced because it wasn’t nearly cold enough yesterday to be wearing long sleeves.

Last night right after finishing her medicine, she sneezed three quick times. My love quipped about why the rabbit would do that right after having her medicine. I had guesses. “Maybe she wants more syrup? Maybe she’s a hypochondriac?” And then I realized, and gasped, and said, “Oh, no!”, my tone worrying my love.

I diagnosed, “Our rabbit has Bunchausen syndrome”.

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And on a separate, more serious rabbit-related note. It’s about Porsupah Rhee, a friend. And rabbit photographer; there’s an excellent chance you’ve seen one of her pictures likely captioned “Everybody was bun-fu fighting”. She’s having a bad stretch right now, and has a GoFundMe to cover immediate needs. If you are able to help, that’s wonderful of you. Thank you.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why is some woman screaming at Drew Cory? February – May 2021

That woman is Ashlee Jones. She did not take well Drew Cory’s having to cancel their photoshoot when he got called in to his actual work.

There’s a bunch of content warnings I need to give for this plot recap of Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. The first is that the main story, the one that began at the end of December and wrapped up in mid-April, concerns a survivor of spousal abuse. It also takes a detour into pet endangerment. The pet is physically unharmed and quickly recovers from his ordeal in this case. But the pet is also shown to have been physically harmed in the past. If that isn’t enough, the current storyline features a character that looks ready to become a stalker. Certainly emotionally dangerous, anyway. If any of that is stuff you don’t want to deal with in your recreational reading, you are right, and we’ll catch up next time. My next Mary Worth plot recap should be linked here, sometime after mid-August 2021. So should any news I have about the strip. Thanks for reading.

Mary Worth.

7 February – 8 May 2021.

Last time I checked in the story was about Saul Wynter and new Charterstone resident Eve Lourd. Lourd froze up, crying, at a men’s clothing store in the mall. After avoiding Wynter a while she explained. The suit reminded her of her late husband, who was emotionally and physically abusive. And from here I’m putting things behind a cut.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 12th of February, 2021. One of the little threads of Saul Wynter’s story has been his transition from gleefully cranky old guy into a pleasant person to be around. I can’t say it quite feels like the Personality Transplant Fairy of soap opera lore visited. It’s heartening to think that even really well-worn grooves in one’s personality might be given up, and happier ones found, given a fair chance.

Over a dinner at home Wynter asks if Lourd has talked to a professional. Yes, she has started talking to a therapist. This would seem to resolve the story, but doesn’t. It continues another two months. One small slice of this is discussion of Wynter’s own problems. His parents pressured him to marry someone he didn’t love, and he grew bitter and cranky over that for decades. But then he got a great dog and he feels he’s all better.

If you feel that “great dog” is a redundancy, good news: Karen Moy and June Brigman agree. Much of the two months covered here is Wynter and Lourd agreeing how dogs are great, and then getting worried when one goes missing.

The one who goes missing is Max, Eve Lourd’s Labrador retriever. They have a very tight bond. When her husband once tried to shoot her(!), Max got in the way, taking the bullet instead(!!). It’s a heck of a moment to take.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 28th of February, 2021. I grant someone might say the illustration of Greta in the last panel there looks silly, but have you ever looked at a dachshund, or any other short dog, running? I mean really looked? Thank you.

A couple nights later a heavy storm rolls in. Max, scared, races out into the storm. Lourd goes to Wynter for help. He doesn’t need cajoling to start a search. He has the idea that Greta, his dachshund, might even be able to track Max down. I’m skeptical that a dog who wasn’t trained for that would be able to. But Wynter also might be telling Lourd this as reassurance, even if the actual work will be their looking around. Wynter does have a thought balloon where he wonders if Greta isn’t following the scent, though.

They find Max, though, at what I think is a bench along their usual walking path. They celebrate with lunch and with treats and praise for their dogs. And talk about how great dogs are. They even speculate whether their dogs could make good therapy dogs. I again wonder if they’re underestimating how hard it is to be a therapy dog. But few people doubt that their own pets are extraordinary members of that animal kind. I say this as caretaker for the most adorably snuggly and flop-prone rabbit in existence.

After this we get the ritual week of thanking Mary Worth for … uh … something. I guess she advised Wynter to let Lourd open up as she felt comfortable. we also get some time with Lourd talking with her therapist about moving on from a toxic or abusive relationship. It seems to be working, though. On a return visit to the mall Lourd isn’t thrown by the men’s clothing store.

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And finally, the 11th of April, with Wynter and Lourd sharing frozen yogurt, that story ends. The new, current story began the 12th of April.

It centers on Dr Drew Cory, son of Mary Worth’s eternal paramour Dr Jeff Cory. Drew Cory’s become an Instagram nature-photo person in his spare time. Ashlee Jones, waitress at a diner, recognizes him over lunch. She loves his wildlife and forest scene photos. She’s a photographer too, specializing in selfies as she hopes to be a model. And she has a great idea: why doesn’t he take pictures of her?

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 9th of May, 2021. I for one am glad this problem’s resolved quickly! I see no warning signs here! Apart from that Plato quote which I bet was created by BrainyQuote.

He’s skeptical but willing. Unfortunately, he has to break their photo-session date when he’s called in to the hospital, and leaves a voice mail with the bad news. She shows up at the hospital anyway, crying and cursing him out for standing her up. He talks her into calmness, for now … and that’s where the story stands.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

The auto care place up the street continues to simply thank the local economic development council for help staying open through the disaster. So let’s get on to the things that famous people mostly didn’t say.

• “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” — C S Lewis, 7 February 2021.
• “Instead of forcing yourself to feel positive, allow yourself to be present in the now.” — Daniel Mangena, 14 February 2021.
• “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.” — Roger Caras, 21 February 2021.
• “We live in a rainbow of chaos.” — Paul Cezanne, 28 February 2021.
• “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — Henry David Thoreau, 7 March 2021.
• “Everything I know I learned from dogs.” — Nora Roberts, 14 March 2021.
• “This life is worth living … since it is what we make it.” — William James, 21 March 2021.
• “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” — James Beard, 28 March 2021.
• “Forgiveness is just another name for freedom.” — Byron Kate, 4 April 2021.
• “Be present — it is the only moment that matters.” — Dan Millman, 11 April 2021.
• “I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” — Arthur Rubenstein, 18 April 2021.
• “The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.” — W Somerset Maugham, 25 April 2021.
• “Attraction is beyond our will or ideas sometimes.” — Juliette Binoche, 2 May 2021.
• “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” — Plato, 9 May 2021.

Next Week!

It’s a Ghost Who Walks out of Skull Cave and through the Deep Woods. And it’s messing with The Phantom for a change! It’s Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity, if all goes to plan. See you then.

60s Popeye: Love Birds, a cartoon

It’s a Paramount Cartoon Studios-produced short today. The story’s by Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer, with the director as usual Seymour Kneitel. Here’s the 1961 short Love Birds.

So, here we delight in the 584th straight “Popeye has to chase a thing” cartoon produced by Paramount this line. I exaggerate. But it is another one of the formula where Popeye gets in trouble chasing an innocent who’s not, particularly in danger from the perils around them. It’s done with the competence I’d expect. There’s a few nice little throwaway pieces, such as Popeye’s eyes picking up a western when he falls on a TV antenna.

The most curious joke is in the pet store. The proprietor’s a monkey wearing a blue suit. Popeye is as confused as I am. It seems like this should set up the revelation that the real owner is right behind the monkey and we just didn’t notice. But, no, a talking monkey is selling love birds and that’s just something in the Popeye universe. It feels like a transgression. But it’s not as though there haven’t been talking animals in the Popeye cartoons before. Even ones that speak more than a throwaway line as a joke. I don’t know why this bothers me in a way that the Whiffle Hen or the Hungry Goat don’t.

Writing prompt: the monkey is voiced by Frank Nelson (the “yyyyyyyes?” guy from The Jack Benny Show and who they’re imitating with that on The Simpsons). Go!

The whole pet store business is part of getting Olive Oyl’s lonely love bird, Juliet, a partner. It takes two and a half minutes for them to meet, and start fighting right away; Popeye’s chase doesn’t even start until nearly three minutes into the five-and-a-half-minute cartoon. The pacing is all very steady, very reliable. A bit dull.

And, then, bleah. There’s the love birds squabbling, Juliet hectoring Romeo until he runs away, the first time. The second time, he takes a tiny bit of spinach and fights back. This works because cornball humor is all about how wives are awful but you can yell them into place. There are things I miss about this era of cartoons. This attitude, though, is not among them.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Is Mark Trail ever coming back? June – August 2020

There is no word, yet, on who King Features Syndicate is hiring to take over Mark Trail. Nor whether they are actually going to hire anyone. If I get any news about Mark Trail I will share it in a post at this link.

[Edited 25 September 2020: Good news!  Jules Rivera is taking over the comic as of the middle of October.]

Also on my mathematics blog I’m looking at mathematical terms from A through Z. This week: K. I’m not covering all the mathematical terms that start with K, not in one essay.

Mark Trail.

1 June – 22 August 2020

A story about Andy, Mark Trail’s dog, had just started last time I checked in. Andy, unsupervised, playing near a construction site. He’s accidentally locked into a truck trailer and driven off. Rusty and Cherry worry that Andy’s out and won’t come back, but Mark Trail is confident everything is fine.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 6th of June, 2020. That raccoon is auditioning for the Disney+ remake of The Hound That Thought He Was A Raccoon. (It’s a cute movie except when you realize what they had to be doing to the raccoon “actors” and an animated version would be great to have.)

At a motel the truck driver opens the van and finds that weird noise was a dog in the back. Andy leaps out and runs into the woods. Mark Trail reassures Rusty and Cherry that sure, Andy’s been gone a long while, but “he always comes home”. And Mark Trail tells of how pets can find their way home over great distances. Like, how dogs can focus on scent. Rusty puts Andy’s bed out on the porch in case that extra bit of familiar scent might help. There is some neat storytelling to how it’s done. We see Andy bounding through the forest, passing turtles and raccoons and waterfalls and everything else. We hear Mark Trail explaining the clues that a dog might use to find home from a great distance away. And, sure enough, Andy finds his way home.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 17th of June, 2020. So there’s several other cabins right beside Mark Trail’s, too? I guess Mark Trail’s neighborhood is gentrifying. There’s all sorts of nature-explainerers and poacher-punchers around now. There would be even more of them except new residents keep growing hipster beards and having to punch themselves.

And, yeah, as Mark Trail predicts, Andy finds his way home safe and sound. Which is all good for the Trails. “Don’t worry, dogs usually come home” is awful advice for anyone whose dog or cat has gone missing. The only useful thing was Rusty planning to put up Lost Dog posters. There’s not even a mention of getting your pets’ ears microchipped, so Animal Control will have a chance at contacting you. Or that you could watch your dog when’s playing at the construction site so he doesn’t get locked in a truck trailer or something.

But Andy is safe back home. And on the 22nd of June what proved to be James Allen’s last story started. It’s incomplete. If a new team is hired, I assume they will have the choice to complete this story or let it drop. They will also have the choice whether to see “Dirty” Dyer’s revenge against Mark Trail carried out.

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The last story’s premise: Hollywood liked Mark Trail’s story about white-nose syndrome in bats. Not just for bats. Along the way Mark Trail discovered human traffickers. (This was the story from just before I started doing plot recaps. Mark Trail eventually caught the traffickers while he was in Mexico with Dr Carter, though.) And found an astounding cave system of wondrous beauty, most of which survived Mark Trail’s visit. So producer Marnie Spencer wants to make a film adaptation of this award-winning Mark Trail article. And she wants her boyfriend, bad-boy action hero Jeremy Cartwright, to play the lead. And the lead is Mark Trail. Also, yeah, they’re interested in the bats. Not the Yeti search. Could be they’re waiting to see how the civil suit from Harvey Camel’s family plays out.

Mark Trail’s open to making a movie, though. This provided money from it goes into fighting human trafficking. And he’s glad to have Jeremy Cartwright over to meet him. Learn what he’s like. Read his Starbuck Jones comic books while drinking hot chocolate and eating cookies. Rusty is impressed. Mark Trail is less so, noting how Jeremy Cartwright is just an actor and hinting about his reputed bad behavior.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 14th of July, 2020. And there we are, the last poachers of Mark Trail, at least before it goes into reruns for an unknown time! I don’t know why the poacher in the middle is Bill Bixby as Mark Trail’s evil twin, Mike Trail. Sorry. Anyway, just imagine living in a world where wanton, pointless cruelty to animals was punished. You know?

And then we get the return of a traditional Mark Trail guest star: poachers! Someone named Digby and someone who isn’t are hunting bighorn sheep. It looked like Jeremy Cartwright was being set up for the full Mark Trail experience.

Spencer is delighted to meet everyone and see everyone in the Lost Forest. Cartwright is smug and vaguely condescending toward the small town. We don’t see exactly what happens but Mark Trail describes him as not being “a very gracious guest”. He complained about the food, which Cherry shrugs off. And he’s not big on the outdoors. Of course, during James Allen’s tenure, the outdoors has done a whole lot of trying to kill Mark Trail. While fishing with Rusty Cartwright complains how he needs a drink, and wonders if they’re heading back to the hotel soon.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 25th of July, 2020. The last new daily Mark Trail for the foreseeable future. I am a little surprised King Features didn’t have the last panel rewritten, or if need be redrawn, so that Rusty said something about “let me tell you about a time that — ” so that we could pretend the reruns are a framed device within the story.

And that, the 25th of the July, is the end. James Allen leaves Mark Trail (dailies) and we go into Jack Elrod-era reruns. James Allen-produced Sunday strips continued for a few more weeks, because Sunday strips have a longer lead time than dailies. And this week we got back to Jack Elrod-written Sundays with a bit about squirrels.

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With the 27th of July we enter Jack Elrod reruns. I don’t know when this story first appeared. It is, in odd symmetry with the last complete James Allen story, an Andy story, and a lost-pet story. In this case, it’s a cat “not wanted by its owners” that’s deliberately abandoned. Far enough away that the owner is sure it won’t find her way back. The cat, unfamiliar with wild life, approaches some animals, who all run away. Except for Andy. So the lost cat makes a friend.

The Trails are happy to take in the cat, dubbed Tabby. Tabby is happy to explore the farm. Also I guess Mark Trail has a farm? Maybe that’s the buildings so close to the log cabin? I do not know. Tabby’s chased off by a rooster, prompting Andy to rush in and protect her. Cherry Trail scolds Andy for harassing the rooster. So for all of you whose favorite Animaniacs segment was Buttons and Mindy, good news: you do not exist. Nobody’s favorite Animaniacs segment was Buttons and Mindy. Buttons and Mindy just made us all feel tense and bad.

Jack Elrod’s Mark Trail rerun for the 19th of August, 2020. I do, sincerely, appreciate and like how much James Allen worked to make the Mark Trail storytelling less stodgy. Plots that are less linear, for example. Mark Trail sometimes having thoughts Mark Trail does not express aloud. The narration box’s role reducing to the minimum possible. (I like a narration box that’s also a character, myself. But I know that’s one of many old-fashioned things that I like.) But I also do like just how resolutely square Jack Elrod could be, and scenes like this are a part of it. Also it’s adorable seeing that skunk do the about-to-spray handstand from over here on the safe side of the page. Also a prime moment: the day before, as Tabby approaches the skunk, and according to the narration, “Andy, keeping an eye on the cat, can’t believe what he sees”.

Wild dogs raid a neighbor’s farm, and Mark Trail mentions how they need to keep a close watch. Not close enough to keep Andy and Tabby from wandering unsupervised, though. Andy tries to rescue Tabby from a skunk, realizing too late that this is not a rush-in-and-rescue situation. Even washed off he still stinks, though, so Andy goes off deeper into the woods to avoid bothering anyone. Tabby insists on following. The wild dogs, meanwhile, move into the area and surround Tabby. Looks serious.

Sunday Animals Watch!

• Thorn Bugs, 31 May 2020. They know some things about not being eaten by predators. Do you?
• Fossa, 7 June 2020. They’re nice and weird creatures and if I’m not wrong their name’s better pronounced “foosh”, which is pleasant to say. They’re doomed in the wild.
• Blue Whales, 14 June 2020. There’s evidence they’re making a comeback. Nothing like how prairies dogs are making a comeback, of course, but still, a comeback.
• Rhinoceros and Oxpecker, 21 June 2020. Great team. Some of our earliest sound films are recordings of this pair’s vaudeville act.
• Lava Crickets, 28 June 2020. They’re doing all right in the volcano eruptions, if you wondered.
• Maned Wolfves, 5 July 2020. Legs.
• The Fly Geyser, Washoe County, Nevada. 12 July 2020. So as industrial accidents go this one is pretty cool. I hope it’s not screwing up the water table too badly.
• Asian Giant Hornet, 19 July 2020. That is, the “murder hornet”; it kills as many as 50 people a year, which is about one-third of yesterday’s reported Covid-19 deaths in Florida alone. So let’s not get worked up about hornets.
• Banksia, 26 July 2020. It’s a plant that relies on bush fires to grow and reproduce so at least it’s having a good year.
• Iterative Evolution, 2 August 2020. So the Aldabra white-throated rail went extinct when their atoll sank. When the atoll emerged from the sea again, the animal re-evolved from its parent species, and isn’t this amazing?
• Invasive Species, 9 August 2020. Kudzu, of course, and Tegu lizards, a “squamate scourge” intruding into Georgia.
• Blanket Octopus, 16 August 2020. Last James Allen Sunday strip. So the male of this species “detaches a specialized arm and gives it to the female during mating”, which is a heck of a thing for Mark Trail to go out on.
• Squirrels, 23 August 2020. First Jack Elrod Sunday rerun. Check out the flopsweat from that one on the bird feeder line, though. That’s just great. And I say this even though I have a squirrel feeder, to feed the raccoons.

Next Week!

How is Madi doing, living with her (uncle?) Saul while her dad’s busy getting arrested for his hilariously failed coup in Venezuela? We check in with Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth next Tuesday, unless things get in the way.

Popeye’s Pet Store: wait, does he sell Magilla Gorilla here? Plus other riddles of the ages

I find a couple of things as I look through the 1960s King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons. There’s forgettable cartoons. There’s cartoons that aren’t good, but are at least bizarre. There’s cartoons that I like because they get weird in fun ways. And then there’s simple baffling cartoons. Popeye’s Pet Store, another Jack Kinney piece, is one of those.

New cartoon, new profession for Popeye. He’s not actually sailing, for some reason. But he’s not just puttering around the Boring Suburbs, which is usually a good sign. He’s running a pet store. I thought it looked like the one Magilla Gorilla lived in. No; it’s nothing like that. I’m just the fool for thinking every 60s cartoon city pet shop looks the same.

I call this a baffling cartoon. I think that when I was a kid I wouldn’t even notice. But, like: yes, it’s funny that Popeye should dust a goldfish. We don’t see him put the goldfish back in the water, though. It’s logical to suppose he puts it back, but, he started out doing something illogical. How do we know he hasn’t kept that up? We never see an aquarium, after all.

It makes sense, for the cartoon, that Popeye’s regular friends want pets. And it’s fine that Popeye shouldn’t have just what they want. That Olive Oyl should insist a chihuahua is the poodle she wants is funny. If you don’t agree, would you at least grant that’s the shape of a correctly formed joke? That a better cartoon would make it work? But then we get to Wimpy wanting a “hamburger hound”, whatever that is. And Popeye giving him an anteater? That’s just what Wimpy was thinking of? That Swee’Pea wants a cat, and Popeye, the pet store owner, hasn’t got any? But uses a bird in place? That’s baffling.

More than anything this reads like the setup for a Monty Python sketch. Several, really. Popeye giving a parrot(?) as a pussycat makes me think of the “Pet Conversons” sketch. Popeye not having any of the various animals people want makes me think of the Cheese Shop. Those are better sketches, yes, but it’s striking that good premises were just sitting there ready for at least a decade before more talented hands picked them up.

Finally we get Brutus in. He’s introduced growling that “I hate satisfied customers,” which is a nice weird line. He goes about to un-satisfy everyone and picks up a net. I guess he’s the city dogcatcher, although the cartoon isn’t explicit about that. I guess we’re supposed to read the net as shorthand for that. It’d help if he had, like, a badge or something. Even a line saying “as the city dogcatcher I can un-satisfy them”. The cartoon can’t be trying to save screen time. After the dogcatcher’s truck pulls up next to a spinach truck, Popeye — Popeye — says “Spinach, that’s what I need!” And then “Good ol’ spinach,” in case we don’t understand what can of leafy green stuff Popeye has just eaten while Popeye’s fanfare plays.

More baffling stuff. Brutus the dogcatcher-I-guess grabs everyone’s new pets. They’re upset. OK. Why are they upset with Popeye? Why call him a cheat? Why does the angry-mob noise not sound like any of King Features’ three voice actors are in it? (I’m curious if anyone knows what cartoon or sound effect library the sound at about 14:18 is from.)

I do like Popeye’s pose in his hound dog costume. It’s carrying his personality. Make of the chihuahua’s pose and flirty eyes what you like.

Popeye has an Augie Doggie’s Daddy costume. All right. I don’t know what fursuit I would assume Popeye to have, so, Doggy Daddy will do. Why does Brutus grab him? Brutus was out to un-satisfy customers; who’s the customer here? It’s not that Brutus acting as regular dogcatcher; he gloats at 15:26 that “I’ll un-satisfy them”. And then in the dogcatcher’s van, Popeye reaches out to a spinach truck luckily nearby. I guess he’s one of those fursuiters who won’t remove his head while on stage no matter what? Also, Popeye can smell canned spinach? … Well, I’ll give him that. We’re talking Popeye.

Popeye fights Brutus while in costume. This has the odd thread that Brutus doesn’t actually know who he’s fighting. There’s also a quick funny moment at about 16:28, where Popeye runs across the screen, Brutus chomping down on his rear end. That’s a nice silly little extra bit. Anyway, a quick bit of fighting and everybody’s happy again, apart from Brutus who doesn’t count. All right.

This is definitely a cartoon to watch while you’re doing something else. The better I pay attention the more I notice things that don’t quite make sense. The storyline’s simple enough: Popeye gets his friends pets, Brutus steals the pets, Popeye gets the pets back. Why does it end up being harder to follow the more I watch?

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Is That Student Really Infatuated With Professor Ian? October 2018 – January 2019

If you’re looking for the latest plot recaps for Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, you may want to check this link. If you’re reading this before about April 2019 I probably don’t have a more up-to-date post. But this essay just gets you up to speed for mid-January 2019.

Also, each week I look at mathematically-themed comic strips, in another blog, with a very similar name.

Mary Worth.

28 October 2018 – 19 January 2019

I was furious with Mary Worth last time I recapped its plot. This is just like any reasonable person who has strong emotions about Mary Worth. Saul Wynter, local curmudgeon, was grieving the loss of his beloved dog after 17 years of companionship. Mary Worth decided he’d had enough of that. She dragged him to the Animal Shelter and shoved a dog into his arms with orders to be happy now OR ELSE.

Wynter complies, though. He sees something in Greta, a dachshund who shows signs of past trauma. Greta sees something in him. He takes her home. Greta’s shy at first. But Wynter’s patient, and supporting, and repeats Worthian platitudes about living life sad afraid and grumpy. She recommends not doing that. And Greta sees he’s already bought a food dish with her name on it.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 11th of November, 2018. I do know that look of hesitant distrust in Greta’s eyes, there. My love’s parents have a dog who has been afraid of, among other things, how the bowl holding some table scraps was just too large.

So they get along, and pretty well. In a couple days Wynter’s going out again, introducing Greta to everyone, and smiling contagiously. It’s a sweet moment. It’s a touch odd: when the story started and he had the dog he’d loved for seventeen years, he was also a grouch. But I suppose everyone does sometimes fall into habits, even grumpy ones without realizing they’re doing it. Well, here’s hoping we can all get to a better place, but may it be through smaller traumas.

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The 19th of November started a corollary story. And a great one. Wynter’s story infuriated me with its clumsy-to-offensive handling of pet death. This follow-up, though, was almost uncut, gleeful hilarity.

Mary gets a call from Animal Shelter. They need a foster home for one of their cats. Libby is a one-eyed cat with an appealing scruffy look. I’m surprised she wasn’t adopted already. Mary agrees to foster Libby. This leads to a great string of scenes where Libby goes about cat business, and Mary is put out in delightful ways. We don’t often see Mary Worth coming up against someone she can’t meddle into compliance with her view of life’s order. Pets are great. But you can’t have pets if you aren’t emotionally ready, at all times, to have any day transformed into “emergency vet visit because the animal was sitting in the living room surrounded by a three-foot-wide annulus of poop”.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 27th of November, 2018. Second panel: “Hello, ladieeeeeeeez.”

We get a twist when Doctor Jeff visits for dinner. It turns out he’s explosively allergic to cats. He has to flee the apartment in minutes. It puts Mary in a quandary. She adopted Jeff years ago; it’s not fair to turn the old pet out in favor of the new. Good news, though. It turns out they had another Old Woman character in stock. Estelle likes the one-eyed Libby, and is very optimistic about being able to take care of a cat for the first time in her life. Libby goes off with Estelle. Both return to the primordial xylem of supporting cast members, and Mary reflects on trading the cat for Jeff after all.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 13th of December, 2018. That is definitely Mary looking very nearly in Jeff’s direction with very nearly a feeling as he kisses her temporomandibular joint!

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The 17th of December started a new, and the current, story. It’s about the marriage of Toby and Professor Ian. And starts, promisingly, with Toby telling Mary about how great it is that she and Ian have a nice boring marriage. With the benefit of separate day lives. Mary suggests, you know, they could try a cruise ship or something to spice things up. Toby chuckles about how not even God could sink this ‘ship.

So, Ian teaches Shakespeare over at Local College. Jannie, a student, comes up after class to talk about how inspirational he is. How he has a great theater voice. How impressive his knowledge is. How she wants to bask in the glow of his brilliance. Toby snorts at how some students will do anything to butter up their instructors. Ian doesn’t see any reason he might not just be “nut-rageously amazementballs”, as he desperately imagines the kids say.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 28th of December, 2018. So, I haven’t taught anything in a couple years. I don’t remember even the students who were enthusiastic about my mathematics instruction being remotely this appreciative of learning any prosthaphaeretic rule. (Prosthaphaeretic rules are ways to do calculations by way of trigonometric functions. This made sense, back in the days we didn’t have calculators but did have tables of since and cosines and stuff.)

Ian is so convinced that Jannie is not buttering him up that he doesn’t even ask why their semester runs across Christmas and New Year’s. (I know this sounds like me not giving them the dramatic license to show events that happen out of synch with the reader’s time. But the strip does pause to explicitly say it’s New Year’s Eve, right in the middle of the plot. Yes, I know there are colleges on trimester systems that have classes running across New Year’s. I’m sticking to my joke.) Why, he asserts, she really and truly likes him. This inspires jealousy in Toby, and fears that she might lose her husband to this undergraduate. She sends up the Mary Signal.

Mary gives Toby some good advice: tell him she’s concerned about this relationship. Toby dismisses this, because she doesn’t want to seem “clingy”. Well, what kind of relationship survives honest talk about the important stuff? Mary asks how she knows that Jannie actually has feelings for Ian. He might be misunderstanding things. Toby can imagine only one reason someone might say her husband “[stands] out as an educated man among Neanderthals”. All Toby will commit to doing is twisting in uncertain agony.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 16th of January, 2019. Anyone who’s taught knows the wisdom of starting your class looking like you’re a creampuff and then getting harder and harder until finally, just before the student evaluations come up, you’re failing 95 percent of the class.

Which all tees up some funny ironies. First, Ian isn’t wavering in his commitment to Toby. As best we can tell, he’s never considered that this should ever be more than listening to how awesome he is. He’s certainly never considered campus policy about appropriate instructor-student relationships, anyway. Second point, Jannie is just buttering him up. We learn this week that she’s figuring a hefty load of flattery will help her ace the rest of the course. And to complete a fun bit of frustrated-or-false crushes, this week we met Michael. Michael is one of her fellow young people. He seems interested in her and her exotic style of vaping though a six-inch countersunk-head nail. She’s too busy chuckling over how she’s out-thought Professor Ian to care about mere classmates.

And that’s where things stand this weekend.

Dubiously Sourced Quotes of Mary Worth Sunday Panels!

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 19th of August, 2002. The auto care place has not updated their sign since last time I recapped Mary Worth. Please enjoy these not-at-all despairing messages instead.

• “The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.” — George Eliot, 28 October 2018.
• “Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.” — Orhan Pamuk, 4 November 2018.
• “Change is the end result of all true learning.” — Leo Buscaglia, 11 November 2018.
• “In the midst of winter, I found there was in me an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, 18 November 2018.
• “Time spent with cats is never wasted.” — Sigmund Freud, 25 November 2018.
• “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” — Wayne Dyer, 2 December 2018.
• “What greater gift than the love of a cat.” — Charles Dickens, 9 December 2018.
• “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” — Cesare Pavese, 16 December 2018.
• “Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it, but don’t swallow it.” — Hank Ketcham, 23 December 2018.
• “I will praise any man that will praise me.” — William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 30 December 2018.
• “To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.” — Simone de Beauvoir, 6 January 2019.
• “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorry, it only saps today of its joy.” — Leo Buscaglia (again!), 13 January 2019.
• “I was a disinterested student.” — David Fincher, 20 January 2019.

Next Week!

So … uh … the Rat? Did he Must Die yet? Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity, gets summarized in a week, barring surprises.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why Is Everyone Rightly Mad At Mary Worth? August – October 2018

I have a content warning before going into Karen Moy and June Bridgman’s Mary Worth today. It features pet death, and handles it with spectacular incompetence. If you don’t want to read that, I don’t blame you. You might skip the whole thing. Around about January 2019 I should have another plot recap. I trust this storyline will be done before that point.

In non-warn-worthy content, I have comic strips based on mathematical topics discussed over here. I also have a fun series describing mathematical terms, which you might enjoy. Last week included mathematical jokes. And monkeys at typewriters.

Mary Worth.

6 August – 28 October 2018

The running story last time was about Tommy and Brandy’s relationship. Brandy’s father was alcoholic, and used drugs. Tommy’s been addicted to alcohol and painkillers. He’s quit for a year now, and hopes to stay clean. But he’s afraid when Brandy finds out about his past she’ll dump him.

Everybody Tommy knows gives him the same advice. So he takes it. He tells her about his painkiller addiction. That he’s not used anything in over a year. That he has a support group he feels confident in. That he’s found both God and Mary Worth. And she’s okay with that. She loves him, and trusts him. They stick together. So that’s sweet.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 18th of August, 2018. Not going to be snarky here. I’m glad a couple characters are trying to hope in and trust each other at the end of a story I had no reason to hate.

There’s a week of Mary and Iris talking about how happy everything is and how great Mary is. And that leads to the current storyline. And this one, as I warn, includes pet death treated badly. So here’s one last chance to ditch if you need to.

Without Denying That we Have More Urgent Problems

And I know I’ve got other stuff I need to do, but have you seen the WikiHow page How To Make A Rat Harness? Because it has more pictures than I would have ever imagined of people holding up string and thread to the body parts of a rat who is absolutely and completely furious than I had ever imagined I’d see all at once. (There’s like four pictures of this. I hadn’t thought about the topic much before and so my expectations were low.) You can see the withering contempt the cartoon rat has for someone who wants to put it in a harness. (Step Four is the most withering, but they’re all impressive displays of contained cartoon rat fury.) Anyone attempting this should know, they are never going to get one of those adorable pictures where the rat is sitting on their shoulder and grooming their hair. The poor rat is going to come over and kick you on the big toe. This won’t hurt physically. But it’s emotionally devastating.

Lost Pet Calls

We got a message about a lost cat on the answering machine. I mean the message was there. I had no idea there was some kind of service in the area spreading the word about lost pets. It was one of those messages created by stitching together prerecorded phrases that I guess they figure can describe a lot of animals. And all delivered in this weird upbeat tone. So what we got were chipper sentences about how this cat “is a friendly talkative type; he’s been neutered, and gets along great with dogs!” I’m still working on whether the logic of that sentence makes sense.

I’m glad to know the service exists. I suppose I don’t expect our pet rabbit to get lost, since he’s quite busy keeping a suspicious eye on me. And our other pets are goldfish. If they make a break for it I’ll be impressed. But I know they’re not likely to, not until they gather a thousand of their kin and manifest a dragon. Which, if they do, I want them to know I’m very supportive of their dragon existence and really want to know whether they have lost-pet messages recorded for that.

In Which I Am Tasked In The Pet Store

I was just getting some rabbit food at the pet store, but I paused to watch the guinea pigs, because they’re always soothing and fun. Someone was there with a little kid, and she was pointing out and naming the animals to him. “There are some rats,” she said, “fancy rats.” And the kid asked, “Why?”

And I understand the kid was just at that age where “why” is the response to any question, including “would you like this extra chocolate we happened to have hanging around?” But I also feel like I’ve been given the responsibility of writing a charming, slightly twee children’s book explaining why some animals are rats.

And I gotta say, I’m not the person to ask that. The best I can come up with, and this is after literally dozens of minutes thinking about it, is that there are some animals who just did awesomely well in Mouse College, and they went on to earn their Masters of Rodent Arts. But they got ultimately sound advice to not go on to a doctorate in Possum Studies or something like that, so that’s left them as well-equipped and highly trained rats prowling around the world and adding to it that charming Halloween touch and also those great pictures online where one’s looking right at you with big, sweet, innocent eyes and grabbing a hindpaw with both front paws. Anyway, this is why my nieces refer to me as “Silly Uncle Joseph”. I’m sorry.

Hack Work for May 2017

I have my tradition of setting free the scraps of writing I couldn’t use the previous month for the big Thursday/Friday-ish piece of the month. And I want to do that too. For example, here’s a bit I couldn’t do anything with all May: “you remember trituminous coal from how it got used to blow up the Amargosa observatory in Star Trek: Generations”. I don’t know what you would do with it either but let me know if you do.

Thing is I’d just got back to something kind of normal-ish with my computer woes when I got a cold. It’s not much of a cold. I’ve been lucky the last couple years in not getting really big colds. Not the kind where you have to stay in bed all day, no longer wiping your nose because the tissues hurt too much and even the lotion-filled ones have abraded your face to a smooth, featureless mass of weeping flesh. Nor the kind where you get a fever that can’t be measured because your thermometer melts into a puddle and your loved one repeats the mention of liquid crystal display until you finally holler that yes, you got it the first time, you just don’t have the power to giggle at a line like that even if you did feel like giggling at it, and then your loved one apologizes for trying to make light and you have to spend the rest of the day everyone in a sullen silence over how they each failed a little bit to be empathetic enough and nobody knows how to apologize exactly.

No, my cold has been the typical sort of light one I get. I spent a while feeling warm, which is nice, because I haven’t really felt warm since 2006 when I last lived in Singapore. Singapore is on the equator, and it has the climate you’d get if you jumped into the middle of an open-faced kiss between a fire-breathing dragon and a smaller ice-breathing dragon, all humidity and heat and sudden surprising blasts of air conditioning and sometimes the food kiosk has an offering that looks like some kind of organ meat. Not everyone’s taste. But at least I didn’t need to wear a little something extra over my shirt.

Also I’ve spent my time coughing. I won’t pretend that I’m a world-class cougher. I never got past the state level (14th place, 2010, New Jersey; 7th place, 1999, New York, although that was later vacated as I’d had a throat infection, a purely administrative change of ruling which does not reflect on my ethics). But serious coughing is tough competition. We do some impressive stuff. Back in the cold of October ’15, without even seriously training, I coughed hard enough in the shower that I threw out my back, causing my spine to rebound off the shower wall, clobber my right shoulder blade, and then sucker-punch me in the kidneys. I think there were deeper issues at work here and the coughing just a pretext. But what a pretext! It was so painful I even admitted that it kind of hurt.

Still, the coughing’s been going on nonstop since Tuesday. It’s triggered by some events, like taking too deep a breath, or too shallow a breath, or trying to say a whole word. I’d be fine with this really, since given the choice I’d like to just sit still and not say anything out loud. But then I have to reassure my love that I’m fine, really, the coughing is just annoying and not something we need to get to emergency care for, and it can take as many as twenty-two minutes to get through a sentence that complicated. Also work wanted me present for a conference call with people who were in the main office’s Echo Testing Chamber. I don’t believe we got any work done, but absolutely everybody has a headache.

I’d like to credit all this coughing to being exercise. I can feel the burn in my abdominal muscles, and I’m all set to smash my head into the steering wheel as I drive to the emergency care clinic. Oh, also I’ve been trying to build some kind of piece around sorting the nightshade family of plants into those that are edible versus those that are deadly, but I can’t figure a way to do it that isn’t just a factually useful chart. It feels a little xkcd-ish to me anyway, and that’s fine, but it isn’t me.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped a point on learning that four percent of Michigan employers will allow their workers to bring pets into the workplace, because this is a fair bit below the national average of seven percent.

207

Why I Haven’t Been Writing As Carefully As I Ought To Lately

So for one thing I’ve come to realize I ought to spend some time petting our pet rabbit. The easy thing to do is brush his head and ears until he indicates he’s had enough by some standard expression of bunny joy, such as doing a little happy shake or biting me to get me out of the way. So I’ve been busy with that for the last 196 hours straight. Also after last weekend when it turned out I didn’t have a 1933 Jack Benny Program where he did a “real old-fashioned style minstrel show” on my old podcasts list, I ended up listening to some 1942 Jack Benny Program where he went ahead and did that anyway. I’m hoping to get back to some nice safe ones like where Jack Benny’s polar bear is eating boarders.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index gained a point, which has got investors all excited about how there’s clearly a new trading floor somewhere around 140 and it’s just impossible we’ll ever see a bear market ever again. They’d probably have gained two points if it weren’t for that whole Jack Benny Program fiasco.

149

Not Explaining The Convention We Didn’t Go To

My love and I were wondering last weekend when MediaWest*Con might be. This is a small but ancient science fiction/TV/movies/et cetera convention that’s been held in Lansing for the past Like 37 years ^[1]. We had no idea. We only found out about it last year because a friend was going to it and asked if we wanted to meet up for dinner during a slow stretch. It turned out the convention was being held just that weekend, right as we were wondering when it might be.

We couldn’t go. They only sell 700 attending memberships and were sold out. But we found this magnificent question and answer on their web site:

3. Why do you have Apocryphal memberships and allow pets?

We found some people were buying full memberships for their stuffed critters, so we started offering Apocryphal memberships for stuffed or live critters and for alternate identities so as not to take up already limited regular memberships.

As for pets, we had started bringing our dogs to the con so we didn’t have to board them, which cleared the way for others to bring their pets, as long as they get along with the other animals and members (which goes for the humans as well!). Some people miss their pets too much, and some pets don’t do well without their people.

This is my favorite sort of explanation. It’s clear, concise, and doesn’t explain a thing. That thing: wait, there were so many people buying memberships for their stuffed dolls that it was creating resentment in the standby list? How many people was that? Surely not one, because who’d notice that? Ten? Again, nobody would notice ten people not there because toys were instead. 680? That’s more plausible. It suggests there a time in Like 1994^[2], when the convention was twenty people and hundreds upon hundreds of plush dolls dressed in Star Trek, Blake’s 7, and Bruce Campbell costumes. All staring at the people who couldn’t get in. And someone declared, “there must be something we can do! And I know what it is!” And that lone person was a stuffed Vulcan-eared teddy bear dressed up like George Francisco from Alien Nation, and was the voice of reason.

Also I like how pets are allowed because hey, pets.

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^[1] 35 or 38 years depending on how you count some stuff.

^[2] For example 1993, 1995, or possibly 1994.

What Amazon Thinks I’ll Buy

Yes, it’s annoying that big corporations insist on knowing everything about us. And insist on tying everything into big identity profiles ready to be swiped by hackers or sold to marketers. But at least they repay us by being uproariously bad at guessing what we might want to buy. From a recent Amazon list of suggested things I might give them money for:

Deeper in the e-mail, Amazon guessed that I might want a cabin air filter or an omelette pan. They are right so far as I want omelettes, but not so much as to actually do anything myself about them.

OK. Headphones, I can’t really argue with. I’ve got consumer electronics, I’ve got ears. We have a plausible match here.

Nutritional diet for cockatiels. I don’t have a cockatiel. I never have. I can’t get within four feet of a cockatiel without it eyeing me and opening its beak to figure out how it can eat as much of me as possible before I can react. I get enough of that from my friends, I don’t need it from my pets. My best guess: they worked out somehow that my sister had a cockatiel, back during the Reagan administration, and they’re hoping that she still has that bird, that it’s quite old, and that I want to give my sister pet supplies for Christmas. We don’t have that kind of relationship. She takes care of horses, so her wish list consists of incomprehensible pieces of horse gear that, based on the price, are made of high-grade americium lined with platinum, plus some e-books. I buy the e-books.

Lightning cable. Can’t argue that much. I did buy an iPod Touch over the summer, and of course it can’t use any of the estimated 28 USB cables we already had around. Well, the iPod Touch came with this cable, but I’ll lose that one eventually. They’re just premature here.

Mendini Clarinet. Just … no. Amazon, I hate to break this to you, but woodwinds? Me? I’ll have you know I played violin from third to like seventh grade. I can’t say I was the best violin player in the world, just the best one in my elementary school. I was able to always hit the notes you get by just running the bow across the strings, and I was often able to hit the notes you get by putting your fingers on the strings before running the bow. So if you need a scratchy, nearly-in-key rendition of Jingle Bells, the Theme to Masterpiece Theater‘s Non-Challenging Opening Bits, or the musical Cats’s Memory, well, find me a violin and give me some time to warm up again. But a clarinet? Rank foolishness, that’s all there is to it.

Though looking at it … this does seem like a pretty good deal on a clarinet, doesn’t it? Except according to this a three pound bag of cockatiel food normally retails for over one hundred twenty-five dollars and sixty-nine cents and they’re marking it down to ten bucks? Of all the things they think I might buy, they’re putting that alleged fact on the list?

Our Pet Rabbit Meets A Dog

I’ve been known to exaggerate some aspects of interaction with our pet rabbit so I want to be clear this isn’t one of those times. We had brought him in his little pet carrier to the veterinarian. He’ll put up with being in the pet carrier while he’s actually being carried. Set him on the floor with nothing going on and he’ll give you about two minutes before deciding he should be out. He starts punching the bars of the carrier to remind us that he’s inside the carrier and could be outside instead.

The trouble is the vet’s was crowded, and they weren’t quite ready for us, so we had to wait. He wasn’t into the waiting. I told him, “You don’t really want to go out now.” He wasn’t buying it. He punched again. I told him, “You won’t be happy with what you see out there.” He was unconvinced. I rotated the carrier so its door faced away from the wall.

Our pet rabbit has met dogs before, mostly those of my love’s parents. Those were very senior, very shy, amazingly timid dogs terrified by such things as our pet rabbit, or me, or the existence of sounds. He’s not bothered by them. What he hasn’t seen before is dogs that’re still very good about being dogs, such as a German Shepherd snuffling around and working out what might be interesting in the area.

He stopped punching. And while I turned the carrier back around so he didn’t have to acknowledge the existence of dogs any more, he also didn’t start punching again. Back home, he spent the whole day inside the innermost reaches of his hutch, sulking. He’s only come out to eat and glare at me since.

(The German Shepherd left moments later, but I didn’t turn the carrier back around. The only other dog in the area was some small dog, maybe a Pomeranian, I forget which and called it a ‘chinchilla’ when describing the situation to my father. But it was smaller than our pet rabbit and I didn’t figure anything good could come of introducing that to the situation.)

After Our Rabbit’s Holiday

“So you’ve been a bit of a terror, by reports,” I said to our pet rabbit. He was looking at the open pet carrier, and considering whether to punch it.

“They were desperate times,” he finally pronounced.

“They were times at your vacation cottage.” This would be my love’s parents’ house. They watch our pet rabbit when we have to be away more than a day. Our pet rabbit can’t be left unattended that long, because he’ll run up long-distance telephone calls. The funny thing is they’re not even calls that would make sense, like ordering stacks of particularly tasty hay. It’s like he just gets carried away with the fun of dialing. In many ways our pet rabbit is a little kid, except that he doesn’t give us colds or tell us complicated and rambling stories about what happened in school.

“There were dogs chasing me!”

“I know those dogs. They’re four years older than the letter `W’.”

“So they’ve had time to practice their fiendish ways!”

“They don’t have fiendish ways. They’re barely up to falling down anymore.” He sneezed, because somehow our pet rabbit sneezes, and then turned that into a snort. “They haven’t even been growling at me because they can’t work up the energy for that anymore.” And this is true. When I first started visiting my love’s parents, the dogs would take turns barking furiously at me, because they were afraid that if they didn’t, I might go on existing. Eventually they would settle down, only for one or the other to suddenly realize that I was still a thing that existed, so they had to go through it all over again. Since then, sadly, the dogs have gotten more frail. They’ll wander up to me and mutter a half-articulated hwurmf. I tell them that’s very good barking and then they collapse on the floor where they are. I’d pat their heads if that didn’t seem like taunting.

Our rabbit put his paws together and shoved on the front of his carrier, a traditional rabbit way of expressing the concept “I want this shoved over there a little”. It works better on hay and towels and light vegetables. I picked him up by his hind legs and shoved him in the carrier, a traditional rabbit-keeper way of expressing the concept “if you won’t go in I’ll just put you in”. He turned around and punched the carrier’s bars.

Finally he said, “I can scare dogs away.”

“You can scare those dogs away. They’re very timid dogs.”

“I didn’t even have to bite and the bigger one ran away!” The dogs are the same size, but perhaps there are rabbit ways of classifying dogs I don’t understand.

“That dog’s been scared away by clouds. You’re not saying you’re just as ferocious as a cloud, are you?”

“Bring me a cloud and I’ll see who scares who!”

“You’re figuring to make a cloud quiver its knees? What has got into you?”

“I had to spend forever fending off dogs!”

It struck me: the “larger” dog came up to the edge of our rabbit’s pen before running away, while the “smaller” one was too afraid of the interloper to get that close. By “running” I mean “kind of shambling about in a way that isn’t technically falling over most of the time”.

“Luckily,” he said, “I know what to do with dogs.”

“You know what to do with those dogs. You’re an expert at existing.”

“I spent my whole life getting ready to exist!”

Our pet rabbit, existing, with panache.

“You could be in trouble if you had to face other dogs, you know.”

He almost stopped wriggling his nose a moment. “What other dogs?”

“You know there’s more than two dogs in the world.”

“No, I heard them both.”

“Did you ever notice the dogs going over to the window and barking like crazy, then stopping and hiding from the window?”

He nodded, which is the sort of thing that involves a lot of ear-flapping. “When they forgot where I was!”

“No, that’s when they saw there was another dog walking past, outside. They stopped when the other dog noticed them.”

He pushed the carrier door with one paw, letting his fingers melt through the bars. “So there are … 98 dogs in the world?”

“More than that, even. Some dogs they didn’t notice.” I figured it not worth mentioning some of the dogs were walked past the house several times, mostly on different days.

He sniffed. “More than 98 dogs seems like too many. Let’s get home.”

I don’t agree with him on the dog count, but getting home was what I hoped for too.

Robert Benchley: Hedgehogs Wanted

Reading the newspaper has always been a great source of inspiration for humorists. For example, in this piece from My Ten Years In A Quandry And How They Grew Robert Benchley sees brilliance in an ordinary-looking advertisement. It’s a short but perfectly-crafted piece.

Hedgehogs Wanted

An advertisement in a London paper reads: “5,000 Hedgehogs Wanted.” Of course, it’s none of my business, especially as it is an Englishman that wants them, but I trust that I may speculate to myself without giving offense.

One hedgehog I could understand, or possibly two, to keep each other company. There is no accounting for taste in pets, and I suppose you could get as attached to a hedgehog as you could to a dog, if you went about it in the right way. I, personally, would prefer a dog, but then, I’m dog-crazy.

But 5,000 hedgehogs seem to be overdoing it a bit. When you get up into the thousands with hedgehogs you are just being silly, it seems to me. And, aside from the looks of the thing, there is the very practical angle that you might very well find yourself hedgehog-poor.

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There must be something that hedgehogs do that I don’t know about that makes them desirable to have around in large numbers. They may keep away flies, or eat moths, or even just spread out in a phalanx and prevent workmen from lying down on the ground, or picnic parties from camping out on private property. Whatever their special function, it must be preventive.

Of course, there may be something in the back of the man’s mind about quills. He may be forming a gigantic toothpick combine or starting a movement back to the old quill pen. In this case, he has his work cut out for him. Shearing, or plucking, or shaving 5,000 hedgehogs is going to be no sinecure. And he is going to run out of swear-words the first day. Just the plain, ordinary “ouch” is going to get him nowhere.

On the whole, my advice would be to give the whole project up, whatever it is. Unless, of course, the advertisement has been answered already and he has his 5,000 hedgehogs on his hands. In that case, I don’t know what to advise.

Discovering Stuff About Guinea Pigs

A history of the local zoo mentioned that the place used to have a guinea pig mound. It supported this claim with one of those slightly blurry black-and-white photos you get in local histories, showing what is certainly a mound maybe twenty feet across and not so high in the middle. This inspires all sorts of questions, like, why don’t more zoos have guinea pig mounds? An individual guinea pig might not be a very exciting animal, what with it mostly wanting to stand where it is and stare back at you with the expression that says, “I have some projects I could get to too, if you wanted to leave”. But get a big enough mass of them together and at any time you’ll have maybe two of them scurrying along as much as two feet before deciding they could just stop and stand where they are instead.

Another question it raises is: so, guinea pigs live in mounds, then? And I don’t know. Back in middle school I bred guinea pigs (the guinea pigs did most of the breeding, while I did the hard work of explaining to my parents why their cages didn’t need cleaning, even as the odor melted my bagged Star Trek comic books off the walls where they’d been hung as horrible decoration) but that’s in the highly unnatural environment of ten-gallon aquarium cages. I now know ten-gallon aquarium cages are terrible places to keep guinea pigs, and I wouldn’t do it again, but that’s what the guide books back then suggested was perfectly all right. I should have known their research was suspect, since the books were published by leading manufacturers of rodent scuba gear, but I was young and the guinea pigs thought they looked great in wetsuits. Plus several of them said their favorite superhero was Aquaman. Who would be suspicious?

Still, do guinea pigs live in mounds? A friend wisely noted that of course they do, if all you give them to live in is a mound. But if a mound weren’t at least tolerable, the guinea pigs would have words with their keepers. Most of those words would be “fweep”, with a couple “wheep” phrases included for good measure, but it would get the point across, especially when the keepers needed to sleep.

In the hope of finding some dubiously sourced, not-quite-grammatical sentences that were almost but not quite on point, I went to Wikipedia. Their article mentioned how guinea pigs aren’t found naturally in the wild. They’re creatures of domestication. That’s a heady thought. There are things it’s obvious there would never be if humans didn’t exist — Saturn V rockets, Dutch stroopwaffel, competitive Rock-Paper-Scissors leagues, Elvira-themed pinball games, Phil Harris’s novelty song “The Thing” — but how many such items would you have to list before you thought to mention “guinea pigs”? I needed at least six.

But the guinea pig article says that cavies, which is how people who want to sound like scientists but are not actually scientists refer to guinea pigs (scientists just say “guinea pigs” and giggle at people who say “cavies”), or their wild counterparts “are found on grassy plains” with no mention of mounds. So guinea pigs are perfectly camouflaged to live on mounds and not so perfectly for grassy plains. It also mentions guinea pigs “occupy an ecological niche similar to that of cattle”. It’s been days since a sentence delighted me so much.

Now my mind swirls with thoughts of herds of guinea pigs roaming the plains like ankle-high cattle. Itty-bitty cowboys, possibly costumed mice, watch over the herds, with lassoos made of dental floss and perhaps riding the backs of hares. All the cowboy-mice stay alert, listening for the sounds of mass “wheep”ing that marks the start of a guinea pig stampede. It’s a massive, thundering squirming of the critters that can get as far as four feet before all the guinea pigs remember that instead of running, they could be not running. And all this could be going on just underneath our line of sight, at least if we live near grassy plains or mounds. It’s inspired me to spend more time looking down.

Really, Though, Comic Strip _Momma_ Going Quite Mad

I don’t mean to harp on this too much, but, did you see Mell Lazarus’s Momma for today? No, because there’s only fourteen people under the age of 50 who read the comics and most of them have better sense than to read Momma. But, well, just look at the strip for the 17th.

Mell Lazarus’s baffling Momma for the 17th of February, 2015. Also, I question whether it was actually Heritage Day in Canada.

While I criticized a couple strips last week for not making sense, I have to admit that at least the comic from the 13th is a joke-like construct: Francis talks about how his boss yelled at him for seven hours, Momma asked a question about this, and we get back a non sequitur response. Momma’s question doesn’t make contextual sense, but it at least has the grammar; the structure is right even if the humor is lacking.

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 13th of February, with a setup that just … I don’t know. I just don’t know.

The Lincoln’s Birthday one hasn’t got the structure of a joke, but it does have the pop-cultural-reference form of things, by showing off a thing (Abraham Lincoln) and then some things that remind you of that original thing (“four score and seven years”, “civil”, “mint julep” — well, he was born in Kentucky). This “here’s a thing that reminds you of another thing!” form in brilliant hands gives you Mystery Science Theater 3000, the movie Airplane!, and those Bugs Bunny cartoons stealing jokes from then-current radio comedians. In clumsy hands, it gives you the Scary Movie franchise and Animaniacs and the like. These might be the humor equivalent of junk food — a quick laugh that, on reflection, you really can’t justify having found funny — but it is at least a form that inspires a giggle.

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 12th of February — Lincoln’s birthday — 2015.

But this, well, I don’t know what there is even to giggle at. Maybe some vague nervousness at elderly people acting kind of daft? That seems cruel in an abnormal form for Momma, though.

So as not to be too negative on an otherwise decent day, let me close with this picture of our pet rabbit doing that thing where he’s nodding off but keeps waking himself up when his head droops too fast. Also he might be melting through the bars of his play area.

Our pet rabbit doing that thing where he’s nodding off, but keeps waking himself up because his head droops too fast.

Why I’m In A Good Mood (Pet Store Edition)

I was in the pet store and after spending enough time watching the guinea pigs (who just had a litter of six! Six! Can you imagine?) I wandered into the aquarium supplies, to get food for our goldfish. There they had a gadget for catching snails, which apparently people need to do every now and then.

The Snail Collect was labelled, in English, as a “snail trap”. Fine enough. It was also identified on the box as, in French, “piège á escargots”, which is maybe better. And then in German it was “Schnecken-Falle”, and I can’t decide whether the French or the German is more wonderful. I have got to find out what this is called in Dutch.

The Big Insecurity

Our pet rabbit, as seen outside in the yard.

“I can’t put food in your bowl if you don’t get out of the way,” I told our pet rabbit.

“This is more important,” he said back, and don’t think that was something I expected to hear him say. I’ve seen him judge getting food as more important than sleep, not going up the stairs, getting out of the pet carrier, and eating what he already has.

So I kneeled down to about his level and said, in my most sincere voice, “What’s wrong?”

He stood up on hindpaws and looked left and right, and in a soft voice said, “Am I big?”

I nodded. “You’re quite good at being big. You’re bigger than I was through fourth grade,” which is my normal hyperbolic answer, since he’s only actually bigger than I was through third grade, when I grew considerably thanks to discovering if I was quick about it I could have two bagels for breakfast, lunch, afterschool snack, and dessert.

“But that’s still big, right?”

“Oh, yes. Quite.” He’s a Flemish giant, a genre of rabbit that’s known to grow to as much as 26 feet long not counting ears and whiskers, although he is a smaller example of the breed.

He pushed his head into my hand. “And I’m not getting any smaller, right?”

For once I had a flash of this thing I think the humans call empathy and didn’t say he wasn’t going to start shrinking for another year or two. “Not a bit. You still are remarkably big.”

He dropped back down. “Then why didn’t he?”

“Why didn’t who what?”

“Why didn’t he remark?”

“Which he?”

“The one you had in to come make all that noise on the ceiling!” A couple months back we had some roofers come over. They replaced the nearly four square feet of perfectly good shingles we still had on the house, as well as a bunch of others that looked like someone had spilled a deck of cards into a nauseated food processor, and put on a bunch of new ones in a different color. From inside all you could really tell is there was a lot of noise from up top and then stuff being thrown into the driveways, which might have got us in trouble with the neighbors except they were going through a monthlong stretch of having just vanished. We still don’t know about that.

“The roofer? He only came in to talk about the work, give us an estimate. What did he do?”

“He didn’t remark! He didn’t say anything about how big I am!”

“Everybody who comes into the house mentions how big you are. I would’ve thought you’d be glad for a change in the conversation.”

“But he didn’t say anything! What if I’m not … big?”

I sat down so I could better pet his head, which he likes, and his back, which he supposes is better than nothing, most of the time. “But you are. You’re the biggest rabbit I’ve ever known personally. You’re big enough you could — ” and I thought better of mentioning how he could easily yoink the remote control off the coffee table if he really wanted, because I didn’t want to encourage that — “probably push me over if you tried. You’re so big we joke that the Sparks song `Big Boy’ is about you.” And that’s true, although the Sparks song is really more a chipper tune about the Biblical story of David and Goliath and I didn’t want to mention how Goliath probably didn’t care for how that story came out.

“But why didn’t he say anything?”

“Well, maybe he didn’t notice you. He was only in the living room a short — a little — a brief while, and he was thinking of shingles and maybe rain gutters at the time. That throws off your ability to notice rabbit bigness.”

“If he didn’t notice me how big can I be?”

“Aw, bigness isn’t any guarantee you’re going to be noticed. I’ve seen things many times your size that I never noticed,” and he looked at me the way he does when he suspects I’m imitating his chewing. “I mean until they were pointed out.”

“Would you tell me if I wasn’t big?”

I rubbed his ears. “I promise. Look, you wouldn’t be nearly so scary to squirrels if you weren’t big.”

He rubbed his chin on my knee and hopped off to nibble on some hay, apparently soothed. I left the room, crawling on my knees.

How Our Pet Rabbit Celebrated His Birthday

“Happy birthday,” I told him.

He was staring at some sheets of paper in his pen and just grunted a little. Or maybe he sneezed, because he sneezes a lot and it sounds like the buzzing of the restraint bars on an old-fashioned roller coaster.

“Um … and many more?”

He got up on all fours and hopped to the edge of the pen. Then he stood up on his hind legs, using the pen to brace his forelegs, looked at me, and rolled his head to the side while yawning, and sticking his tongue out. He left his tongue sticking out — the shape of rabbit mouths means this comes out from one side, and tilted — dropped back to the ground, ran back to his paper, and flopped over on his side, exposing his bright white belly in a flurry of adorability.

“What was that?” I had to know.

He pulled his tongue back in. “Homework.”

“You have homework?”

“Internet course in advanced cute.” I tried to peek at his paper, but it was printed out in rabbit, but I had some idea now why we keep running out of printer paper too soon.

“You’re taking cute classes?”

“I take my responsibilities around here seriously.” And he licked a paw, to groom the side of his head, while flopped out like that, and reaching for the end of his ears.

“Excellent work,” I admitted. “Good luck.”

He splayed his front paw’s fingers out and licked between them. “Thanks!”

Our Pet Rabbit Is Proud

“I have a stick.”

I nodded to our pet rabbit. “Stick-wise, that is indeed a thing you have.” The phrasing seemed to confuse him; he shook his front half out and set down the chew stick again.

“It’s my stick and I have it,” he said, “And I can do anything I want with it.”

“I know. For instance, you can chew it.” This stopped him in the middle of chewing on it, so, that’s how I knew this conversation was going to go. “Or not, if you don’t want to,” and that should have him completely flummoxed.

“You know why you don’t have a stick?” My thought was that I could in some sense be said to have every stick on the property, including as a subset the sticks that our rabbit has. But is that the same conceptual theory of having that he was working with at the moment, and if it’s not, is it compatible enough for us to have a meaningful conversation? This is the kind of thing that goes through my mind whenever, say, the waitress asks which kind of bread I’d like for my toast, which is why I’m always running about four minutes behind the conversation. Here, for example, our rabbit answered, “Because I have it!”

“I know you have the stick. I gave you the stick.”

“As well you might!”

“In fact, I gave you all those sticks,” pointing at a partially-tied-together bunch of chew sticks, most of which were scattered around his front paw, and a couple of which were rolling out of his pen, and one of which he was taking turns holding in his mouth and putting down to lecture me about.

He nodded and said, “I chewed the twine off them!”

“And we were glad to see you do that. It proved to us that you’re not a fascist.” And here I have to point out that while I exaggerate certain aspects of my conversations with our pet rabbit for dramatic effect, the “not a fascist” joke is one that my love and I actually did observe while watching him chew the bundle of sticks loose, which shows you what kinds of jokes we have flying around the house.

He scrunched forward, looking kind of like a sack full of rabbit flowing forward under the tides, pushing his front paws onto the sticks, which was adorable. It struck me he’s been doing a lot of adorable stuff lately, more so than usual.

“This is about the mouse, isn’t it?”

He jerked his head up and back. “You think?”

“Are you worried we kept that mouse in here?”

“Why were you keeping a mouse right on top of my cage?”

“He wouldn’t fit underneath you.” The mouse we had found wandering around the dining room, at the height of winter, and we caught him and put him in a cage because we weren’t so cold-hearted as to release him to the wild while it was still too cold for molecular motion out there.

“He smelled.”

“Male mice can’t help how they smell,” I said. “Biology dictates that they use an atrocious body wash so that female mice know they’re engaged in important male activities.”

He barked, somehow, which might just be his way of snorting. “He made that wheel squeak all the time.”

“You can’t blame the mouse for following his biological imperatives of running on a wheel, smelling bad, and hoisting things.”

He flopped over on his side, which is again, adorable, and said, “Mice follow too many gender-normative stereotypes.” I allowed that. But I reminded him, we let the mouse go several weeks ago, and he hasn’t been back. “And I’m better than a mouse.”

I had a hunch. “Are you worried we were going to get a mouse to replace you?”

“No mouse could replace me! Not ten mice mousing together could replace me!”

“I’d guess not. We’d never think of replacing you.”

He rolled up onto all fours and cried, “Ah-ha!” So I gulped. “If you never thought of it then how come you just asked if I thought you were thinking of it?”

There might be no way out of this. “Well. We once got to talking about what would be the worst thing that could possibly happen” — he frowned a little less, which is how rabbits smile — “and we agreed the sudden and irrevocable failure of the electromagnetic force would be the worst. But having to replace you with anything would be one of the four or five worst things.” He actually came in third, but, I didn’t want to swell his head too much after comparing favorably to the complete dissolution of the laws of physics.

He looked satisfied, and announced, “I have a stick,” and picked his chew stick up again.