Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 03, 2012

Originally published on January 18, 2011.

Though I’ve seen this strip before, I still find something new in it: a deeper insight into Alex’s personality.  She’s capable of outrageous self-deception — just as Jeff Redfern is. Why does Trudeau “write” such a trait into certain of his “creatures”?

Leo’s mother is right: Alex looks like a terrier. She’s not as intelligent as one, though.

She has everything worked out – except maybe for one little detail.

For such an intelligent child, she certainly does regress easily.

Well, I don’t find Alex’s behavior so odd. About 47 years ago, I got so enthusiastic (and certain) of marrying my wife that a week before I asked her, I told all our friends we would tie the knot. Fortunately, she only made me wait another week to say yes. It just seemed to be inevitable.

The number of Doonesbury characters seems to grow exponentially. Thus he must necessarily leave loose ends everywhere. But this strategy enables him to keep up with the quickly changing world of events — to some extent anyway. Sometimes he misfires, as he did with The Donald’s abortion of a campaign for the GOP nom. Trudeau may be a contemporary genius, but he’s no prophet. 

“… Zeke Brenner and that biker bum who tried to burglarize …”. Nice alliterative phrase.

Hey, guys, Pearls Before Swine went all political today and the commenters are yanking on each others’ hair. BTW, I think Alex is like a lot of MIT types. They have Aspergery traits – good at book learnin’ but have some blind spots when it comes to social awareness. I have a little of this myself, though I wouldn’t fit into the math-whiz class . . .

“You mean, some people are not self-deceiving?” I mean, not everybody is clinically and legally schizophrenic.

Love the profile shots of Alex and Mike. Couldn’t mistake them for anything else but family.

Alex is just infatuated with the wedding itself – a chance to dress beautifully, get lots of presents and be the center of all eyes for a while.

Re intelligent – I married a software engineer who, in terms of books and academics, was brilliant; martial arts, chess tournaments, and so on. But emotionally he was frozen; he had poor manners because he had no empathy for others; he had the words of a lover, but no heart. I learned that one can be book-brilliant and still be a failure as a person. Hopefully Alex will not be that.

I LOVE her. I know girls like her. Used to, I mean.

My favorite Alex is when she’s interviewing her grandmother who mentions thank you notes, and Alex asks her “What’s a thank you note?”

Married once, devoted to his 3-year-old daughter, though at time he talks about raising her as though he were running a really interesting experiment. His wife is almost as science-minded as him. They seem to have plenty of friends, more than I do. I think he gets along well with his students, though he is no easy taskmaster. In fact, as I am on my second marriage, and have few friends and none close, I fit your description better than he does. Still, as someone else said, empathy for others is something he could use more of. My social skills certainly could use improvement. But yes, I am aware of it, too. And hope I am improving!