Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 05, 2022

The Reverend may have miscounted by a power of 3 or 4.

Do not install any metrics, and you will remain a happy rev.

They probably say, “SHADDAP, ALREADY!!”

Ah, those happy, naïve early days of the ’net.

The reverend has yet to learn of Analytics.

You mean he doesn’t have a hit counter on it?

“literally flock to”?! His congregation consists of birds?! (Sorry but I take “literally” literally!)

It stands to something, but not reason.

The pandemic has made this a reality for many churches

Everyone is a rock star, in their own mind, on the net.

Oh, gods… this dredges up an old Spider Robinson gag:Early in the 22nd century man-kind discovered a small planet orbiting a small yellow star with obvious signs of a previous civilisation.

There were ruins of course, mostly of buildings and roads,but the most curious feature was an enormous statue of a bi-pedal humanoid which even though “sitting” was over 30’ high.

Of course as you might imagine Earths archaeologists were thrilled to have this new civilisation to study, and compare with Earths, hereby providing data to test “birth of civilisation” hypothesis.

All was going smoothly, until they started too examine the statue. when they attached their measuring devices they discovered that it was no statue at all but a life form, the thing that stumped them is that dust and other factors around the giant showed no signs of it having moved in centuries.

Of course Earths top biologists were called in to study this curious phenomenon, but try as they might they could not get it to move.

After years of fruitless efforts one of the biologists cried out in frustration “How can evolution possibly produce a life form that is simultaneously so large and yet so inactive”

At this the giant stood up rubbed it’s chin thoughtfully for a few minutes before announcing “It can’t”

At which it promptly sat back down, once again becoming completely immobile. To which the biologist exclaimed “Of course! It only stands to reason”

The Reverend is a prophet, foretelling the coming of COVID and the way many churches would be run. Isn’t this from 20 years ago?

Optimism it the key to self-delusion, unless you’re right. Then it’s just common sense. Right?

Man, that punchline just reeks of the dot-com bubble.

“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock’.” —Christopher Hitchens, author and journalist

Talk about art imitating life…or maybe foreshadowing. In the age of covid, that’s exactly how my church conducts services now.

Doesn’t panel two suggest a trend toward worshippers become more isolated from one another- each to their own ideas, and farther from a community? When they become far enough that their individual needs become incompatible, how much farther is it till they become unsympathetic to one another- and from there to intolerant? Sounds alarmist, but not impossible.

All this was before COVID.

Well, he did say, “must draw two million hits”.

Maybe that’s the number of insomniacs in the country.

Holy bad metrics!

Is he doing that international thing where they swap the comma and decimal point?

If I didn’t already know this was taking place in the ‘90s, I’d say he was likely being trolled by K-Pop stans…

How can there be “virtual” holy water and communion wafers?

Pity there aren’t new daily strips.Tomorrow’s would have been a doozy.

“And the Lord said, you will die miserable deaths in isolation”

This comic first came out in the 1990s. Trudeau was ahead of his time.

Kind of late, but here’s the definition of “feghoot” in Wikipedia, since I looked it up…

A feghoot (also known as a story pun or poetic story joke) is a humorous short story or vignette ending in a pun (typically a play on a well-known phrase), where the story contains sufficient context to recognize the punning humor.

The Rev uses the #SoreLoserMan method of measuring his popularity …