Dear Cathy: Order a Salad, For God's Sake!

A random annoyance today. They come that way, for An Angry Man. 

The Angry Man was reading his comics online, and finds a couple of "classic strips," meaning the strip has been retired but the old strips are in circulation. This is just fine, because that's how An Angry Man reads "Tarzan." But it also means that this twerpy strip is still in circulation. 

This strip debuted in 1976 (look it up kids - your parents were kids and the country had turned 200) and ended in 2011, when cartoonist Cathy Guisewite retired. That's 34 years of ice cream, fat thighs, and chasing some nerk named Irving. 

Here's what I don't get. I must have heard a dozen women over the years identify with "Cathy." Or with Ally MacBeal or with the nutty one from "Friends" (don't know her name, never sat through a full episode), or those vexatious harpies from "Sex and the City," or "Sex in the City," whichever in Hell one it is.

What's great about us guys is that, generally, we identify with strength. We watch a James Bond flick, a John Wayne flick, an end-of-the-world flick in which some unassuming guy becomes a complete hero when faced with privation and marauding hoards of bikers and say "That would be me." It wouldn't, but still, we identify with strength.

Tarzan, Mad Max, The Ringo Kid in "Stagecoach," Shane - that's who we take for inspiration. OK, there was Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, but Kramden was a stand-up guy who provided for his family and maintained good friendships. He might have been a little downtrodden, but he was always strong.

And along the way, sports heroes. Did the American Male ever identify with the underdog? Hell no. You had to be a DiMaggio to get our attention, a true champion. The occasional weasel like Jake LaMotta who threw fights and hit his wife, or Dennis Rodman who played well but destroyed the tenor of what was an elegant sport, well, them we can do without, just fine.

Sure we've had a few missteps along the way, as entertainment goes. That icky Belushi period of the 70s and 80s when we identified with sloth. But baseball, football, James Bond and Dirty Harry still plowed along.

So Cathy Guisewite (author of "Cathy"), you retired, PLEASE retire the strip. It's anti-feminist. And Cathy (the character), enough whining about chunky thighs. Quit trying on bathing suits and stretching them out to the point that they're unsellable and decry the unfairness of it all. Order a salad, and leave Irving the Hell alone. He wants no part of an absurdly one-sided relationship with a perpetual whiner. You know what you call a whiny guy with a weakness for food? Undesirable, and the reverse is also true.

Gotta go. "Tarzan" starts a new story arc today, something about poachers and Watusi. Cool.