Hello all! I have this week's comment of the week for you, but before that ... a couple of notes. A few of you inquired about my safety in the current LA wildfires. Fortunately, we are far enough away from the fires that I'm not worried unduly (though we do have go-bags packed); we know people who have evacuated and lost homes but for us personally, the worst thing is the oppressive atmosphere (literal and figurative) from all the smoke.

However! I will note that somewhere very far down on the list of bad things about this disaster is the fact that it has forced me to eat a certain amount of crow. You may recall that I mocked the realism of the August 2020 Funky Winkerbean storyline, claiming that we would never see anything like the scope of disaster as depicted in the strip, which depicted a wildfire that hit both West Hollywood and Malibu; I assumed this would require a continuous wall of flame across 30 miles of the Santa Monica mountains.

But I hadn't considered another possibility: that we'd have two very wet winters followed by a very dry one, and then we'd get freak 100 mph winds that started apocalyptic fires in multiple places simultaneously.