The NecRomantics - Episode for 01/12/2006

This has to be the funniest thing I have seen in months. It's an "ex" knife holder (sorry guys, it only seems to come in ex-boyfriend flavours... is that saying something about your fear of committment? I dunno...). It comes in black and silver too, but I think the bright red is at the same time most Xmassy and appropriate. Knives are even included, doesn't that just beat the living daylights out of the tired old standby Voodoo Kit?

I think it's great that society can laugh at this kind of thing, even as it engages in the sublimation of basic post-relationship hostilities with petty vengeance. Gotta love the human species that way... or else we'll buy little plastic effigies of you and stabbity-stab-stab them.

Hey, on the topic of ex's, I've got exactly two entries for our Merry Widow, both of them puns. I just want to say how much I love my friends, because I really do love puns. I refuse to subscribe to the hoary old belief that has been systematically foisted on us for generations now, that puns are the lowest form of humour.

In fact, I want to set the record straight on this since it's one of those things that gets my goat: people using half quotes. It's like using statistics without knowing what they mean, or taking a news item completely out of context and using it to emphasize the inverse of its original intention.

Here's the thing. Everyone, but I mean everyone has heard "The pun is the lowest form of humour" before. I've been punning all my life and I'm just as guilty of quoting it this way. Just now, I looked it up to see which humourless bastard in history had the poor grace to make such an awful review of my favorite mode of comedy.

Boy was I surprised to find it was only half a quote. "The pun is the lowest form of humour... unless you thought of it yourself". There are variations on the theme, but attribution appears to go equally to either Doug Larson or Oscar Levant. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to go and hunt down who has paronomasiac precedence on this one.

I think one of my favorite classic authors said it best:
"The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." — Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849

All of this being said, the two entries for our latest female lead are : "Mary" Widow and "Poison Pen"elope.

I'm still open to other suggestions, but if I don't hear from anyone by end of next week, keep an eye out for her new name in a near-future strip.

Back in a couple...