Recent Comments

1. about 10 hours ago on Nick and Zuzu

   What’s really key is that this, according to the letter that inspired the cartoon, wasn’t about revenge on an ex. The argument the letter writer mentions below, that “this must have been an accident,” really shakes me up:

   “We got married overseas and did the “legal bit” in a courthouse. Since the courthouse was small, we invited only close family and the wedding party, no significant others — who joined us for lunch after.

   “Friends and family were fine with this. However, my now-brother-in-law’s girlfriend interpreted this as a personal slight. BIL sent my husband a barrage of texts arguing for her to attend. I met with her to explain the seating (my aunt’s husband wasn’t going!) and said it wasn’t meant as a slight. She made clear she would not forgive me.

   “The courthouse ceremony went well, so imagine my surprise when she wore a transparent mesh dress with a black thong and no bra to our religious wedding. She has no history of wearing revealing clothes. I’m an only child, and this was an important day for my parents, so I am angry that she thought this was the way to voice her frustrations.

   “… My husband and I have always been friendly with her. We’ve privately not had a high view, since she screams at waiters, is rude to my brother-in-law’s friends (I think he’s been isolated from them), etc., but never voiced these concerns. I don’t even know how to behave around her now.

   “It doesn’t help that my husband’s family insist this must have been an accident and we are being paranoid. They want my husband to reach out to his brother to “hear his side.”

   “We think his brother will propose soon, which is obviously his choice, but means even more time with her. I want to let this go, but on top of feeling disrespected by the girlfriend, I now feel betrayed by the family. How do I move forward?”

2. about 14 hours ago on Adam@Home

   I came up with a short story, years ago, in which the main character used the “live in fear” line on the person who’d wronged him, but had no intention of ever coming back and actually doing anything…. I never wrote the story, realizing someone else had already done a better job of it.

3. 1 day ago on Adam@Home

   You’re lying in the last panel, Clayton. She didn’t look even remotely innocent.

4. 4 days ago on Nick and Zuzu

   The letter to Carolyn Hax, published 19 June, on which this was based can be summed up as, “Mom dropped the letter writer’s stepdad [who may’ve been the only father the writer ever knew] for her college friend — and wants her kid to be as happy about it as she is.”

   Ms. Hax’s response included the words: “Your mom discarded your stepdad possibly with infidelity and apparently without compassion. And she’s oversharing shmoopie new love details without regard for your interest in them. And seems unwilling to consider that you can simultaneously care about your stepdad, want her happiness and want a little distance from it all.”

   Ms. Hax also said that Mom’s reaction to her kid’s lack of interest in the “shmoopie new love details” – “At least [so-and-so] wants me to be happy” – made Ms. Hax “want to jam my thumbs a little too hard into my own eyeballs.”

5. 4 days ago on Shoe

   Livin’ in a powder keg and givin’ off … KABOOM!

6. 4 days ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Who else imagined Marigold in panel 5 using the “outrrrageous accent” of the French soldier taunting King Arthur as a “silly English k’nigg’t”?

7. 5 days ago on Adam@Home

   Reminds me of a book about French Foreign Legion soldiers in Vietnam, before the U.S.A. made the mistake of getting involved. One soldier sneaked a couple of live grass snakes – harmless ones, I think; it was a prank, not attempted murder – into a particularly mean sergeant’s bed while he was asleep. He woke up feeling something squirming, working their way up along his body, then one stuck its head out from under his sheets and flicked its tongue at him….

8. 7 days ago on Frank and Ernest

   A bizarre thing: I, too, thought the song at that point says, “look at that, look at that” … but a few years back I learned that the official lyrics are instead “boogity-boogity.” In the official music video, “Boogity-Boogity” is even shown in print across the image at least once.

9. 7 days ago on Peanuts

   One of Rudyard Kipling’s poems involved a guy using shaving soap (before the spraycan type was developed) to fake “epileptic fits of an appalling kind.” The narrator adds,

   [Of his modus operandi only this much I could gather:—

   “Pears’s shaving sticks will give you little taste and lots of lather.”]

   — “The Post That Fitted,” 1865

10. 7 days ago on Frank and Ernest

    “I hollered, ’Don’t look, Ethel!’ But it was too late….”