Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25

Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you're not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don't do it on a tree or your neighbor's house or whatever, and it's weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today's Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, "Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found," but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we're supposed to contemplate whether Grimm's biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?

Mary Worth, 9/3/25