Recent Comments

1. about 6 hours ago on Dark Side of the Horse

   Some years ago, my sister was walking with a cane while recovering from an accident. A mugger tried to hold her up at knifepoint.

   She handed him her wallet, and when he turned to go, she smashed him across the back of his knees with the cane. He went down hard, and she retrieved her wallet, as well as another wallet he had in the same pocket. He got to his feet and raced out of there – I guess he didn’t want her to hit him again in an even more sensitive spot!

   She checked the second wallet hoping for his ID, but it turned out to belong to another victim. She turned it over to the police, with a description of the guy.

   We used to speculate that the mugger would either give up the racket after that, or lower his sights to people in wheelchairs or kids with candy.

2. 3 days ago on Skin Horse

   If you’re still hungry, you can snack on Unity’s performance assessments.

3. 4 days ago on Basic Instructions

   I was born in Washington, and I’d never heard of Outlook until now. It’s officially a “census-designated place”, and you know what that means.

   Scott Meyer’s Wikipedia page needs updating.

4. 9 days ago on Barney & Clyde

   See yesterday’s strip . . .

5. 16 days ago on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

   Yep, it was so much better back before those Anglo-Saxons started using words such as “rain” and “love” as verbs. Oh, for the days when language was pure.

6. 17 days ago on Amanda the Great

   Because, tbh, that was a really dumb question.

7. 18 days ago on Skin Horse

   “Beware the Leopard”!

8. 18 days ago on The Middle Age

   I think we last saw her in 2019.

9. 19 days ago on MythTickle

   The Matter of Britain (the Arthurian cycle) has been re-interpreted many times in different eras, each time in the framework of the contemporaneous social views. Medieval English retellings emphasized the holy quest; French retellings emphasized the romance. Victorian retellings emphasized the pathos. Others have focused on the story as history or pseudo-history. Twain’s version, a satirical reaction against the Victorian romantic view of the cycle, presents Merlin as a fraud.

   T. H. White’s version was characteristic of his era, when magic elements in stories and songs were aggressively rationalized for the sake of explaining away the fantastic. The same era replaced talking birds in other stories with parrots — because parrots can talk, and other birds can’t — and watered down many other mythic elements in classical tales.

   It wasn’t until the later 20th century, when fantasy and magic became popular again in their own rights, that the Matter of Britain began to appear again with intact fantastic elements. Some interpretations since then still follow White, rejecting and explaining away the fantastic — especially pop culture versions such as the Disney cartoon and the 1950’s Broadway musical. But the “aging backwards” interpretation began with White, and every other writer who’s accepted it as “canon” is firmly planted in the early 20th century.

10. 21 days ago on Half Full

    Time for some self-reflection.