“Is this strip a rerun? It looks familiar”, Mike Doonesbury says to his wife Kim (Rosenthal) in the final panel of today’s (3/26/23) Doonesbury strip — in which Mike and Kim savage a (mock) Prevagen commercial they are watching on tv. And it’s an inside joke, because this Doonesbury strip is in fact a (slightly altered) rerun of the one from 2/14/21, which I wrote about in my 2/15/21 posting “The brain health product”. So Kim responds, in today’s (meta-)strip: “Wow. Good recall! No Prevagen for you!”
As I wrote in the 2021 posting, in the mock commercial,
the dietary supplement is openly hawked as a useless (but expensive) placebo for treating mild forgetfulness (with a digression in the 5th panel on a secret ingredient in it derived from the fabulously memorious jellyfish)
And the final panel of that strip Mike asks (echoing the commercial): “Are placebos right for us? I forget.” To which Kim replies: “If they come in gummies, I’m down with gummies.”
The two strips for you to compare. First, the 2021 version, which is deeply snarky but straightforward in its critique of the Prevagen commercials:
(#1)
Then the meta-joke version, with the last two panels altered:
(#2)
And no Prevagen for me, since I recognized the rerun.
Sick days. I’m able to bring you this posting because it required minimal time and effort in preparation — while I have essentially no time and am barely able to use my hands (at the moment, one of my knuckle joints is visibly, and very painfully, swollen).
This is Day 3. On Day 1, all the joints in my right foot and ankle screamed with pain, so I mostly just avoided trying to walk anywhere, except to care for very basic needs. My hands were barely usable, and I was sleeping 16-18 hours a day (not narcoleptic sleep, thank god, but still). Mostly in my recliner chair, wrapped up in my velour bathrobe, because I was cold, cold, terribly cold.
Day 2, yesterday, was like Day 1, except that the foot pain had moderated to background chronic-pain levels and I was able to get to the mailbox, very carefully, to get my mail.
Here I am early in Day 3, with the hand-pain worse and already 12 hours of sleep. A brief period for this posting, which was a kind of little gift, then I’m back to sleep. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do an ordinary posting, which takes around 10 hours of preparatory work.
March 26, 2023 at 10:38 am |
Wishing you better health as quickly as possible!
March 27, 2023 at 6:00 am |
I’ll admit that I didn’t remember the earlier Prevagen strip, but I thought the “rerun” line might be in part a reference to the fact that the weekday Doonesbury strips are in fact reruns these days (and in my opinion the Sunday ones might just as well be; I think Trudeau has kind of run out of steam).
March 30, 2023 at 10:41 am |
The strip is not 100% a rerun – besides the dialog change in the last panel, Kim has been redrawn as well.