Any alert reader who reads enough of my postings has come to know that something always reminds me of something else. We're all connected. We live on a Möbius strip. There is some giant doling out probability and sometimes I feel it's aimed at me.
What are the chances that talking about a John Prine lyric to my daughter Susan would lead to wondering about whatever happened to the comic strip Dilbert, to just a few days after that reading that Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, has passed away? Any takers? The answer:100%
And so it goes in the world I live in. I'm not sure exactly what lead me to buy another John Prince CD .I'm glad I did. It was before there was a piece on him being honored posthumously by a group of musicians. I already had one of his CDs, but I had just bought another, Fair and Square, released in 2005.
I always read the liner note lyrics with the first playing of any new CD. This hardly guarantees I'll remember the lyrics, no matter how many times I'll play the CD, but it is a read.
But lines from one of the tracks, titled "Other Side of Town," brought recognition. The poetry put to guitar music is John's love song to his wife. He loves her. Love being defined in the song as his ability to put up with her: "you might think I'm listening to your grocery list...but..." The list for what love is is long. Listening to grocery lists is on it.
And there it is! My wife giving anyone within earshot of her at the table what she's going to buy at the grocery store on her next trip, which knowing how often she goes to the store, could be any moment.
It's like a book. You can get the printed version, which is her written version of the grocery list written in the tiniest cursive writing that defies being able to be read, to the audio Kindle version which she will tell you even if you haven't asked what she's buying this week.
My daughters and I know this trait of hers very well. It doesn't just include what she's going to buy, but the order of her stops that will bring her to one of three stores she buys edible things at.
I purposely left the liner notes out for my daughter Susan to read and ask her who does this remind you of? I said, "see, Mom's not the only one who recites her grocery list to an audience."
My daughter, being related, said she was talking with someone about office personalities and found that person had the same experience as she was having with people in her office. (John Paul Sartre: ""Hell is other people.")
I said something that Dilbert fully captured what it was like to be to be a cubicle dweller faced with obtuse management. "Whatever happened to the comic strip? Is Scott Adams still alive." Turns out a few days later we're reading Scott Adam's obituary. My thought had nothing to do with. Mr. Adams had to have been diagnosed with prostate cancer long before I wondered about his whereabouts.
I first saw the news of Scott Adams passing in the New York Post, which doesn't usually write a tribute obit for anyone. "'Dilbert' maker logs out."
I didn't understand the "logs out" bit of the headline until I read the obit. Apparently, Mr. Adams had embarked on a podcast called "Coffee with Scott Adams." He was a Trump supporter and in 2015 predicted Trump would win when no one else even considered the possibility. Mr. Adams had a strong following. After all, who can't have a podcast these days?
As anyone who embarks on a opinion show, you can get yourself in trouble with those who want to take you on, or down. Mr. Adams met that fate apparently over some comments which out of context might have been skating near the edge, but when just prominently out-quoted spelled doom. I hadn't heard of any of this. Comics are in so few papers that I really didn't know Dilbert was gone.
His syndicators dropped him and Dilbert was gone from the funny pages. Such as there are funny pages. Few newspapers print comics, and they never restored the complete width of the panel cartoons. Once shrunken they have stayed shrunken.
The New York Post at least provided a sample of a Dilbert strip in their January 14, 2026 print edition, where the pudding-headed boss has trouble distinguishing Unix, a programming language, from eunuchs, male castration, when he tells Dilbert that more eunuch programmers are needed.
Dilbert, sitting at what is now an old computer, large monitor, has to explain that he, Dilbert, knows Unix. Of course Gilbert knows Unix. He looks like a NASA team member at Cape Kennedy with his pocket protector and spiked hair from a crew cut. He's straight out of control center casting.
The boss with the oafish ears and rotund belly, retreats and tells Dilbert, "If the company nurse drops by, tell her I said "'never mind'" Dilbert was the everyman who had a boss who had been promoted to their level of incompetence.
Then we get the New York Times obit where Scott Adams is basically treated a 6-column raspberry for being a Trump supporter. The whole obit is somewhat dour because of what the New York Times considers their enemy to be: anyone who is not them.
The print edition does not reprint a sample boss/Dilbert encounter, but rather in the online edition prints a color one that looks likes a Sunday's strip of Dilbert trying to start a bakery. The pudding-headed boss is not to be seen; the while premise of a Dilbert strip was his frustrations with dense management. The Everyman identification. No appreciation of the humor, but rather an essay on the political views of the creator.
The image is hard to read, but the towering boss is talking gibberish:
"Our goal is to leverage human capital and generate synergy to streamline the process and move the needle toward a paradigm shift, right? Circle back to me and we can dialogue further..."
The ambushed worker caught in a hive of management buzz words has the thought bubble: "Honestly, how much more of this can I take without Scott Adams in the world?"
Is the duel over? No.
The New York Post responds to the New York Times obit on January 16, 2026: Obituary Warfare: Left's Last Hateful Hit.
I don't have a scorecard, but I think it might be unprecedented that a paper attacks another one over an obituary. But it's pistols at sunrise as the decidedly right-leaning New York Post takes the decidedly left-leaning New York Times to the woodshed. It's almost William F. Buckley vs. Gore Vidal.
That's it, right? Wait for the coup de grace. Down comes the blade
In Sunday's New York Times Opinion section—as depressing a read if ever there was one—we are treated to the major hit piece by Joel Stein, described as a humor writer with a Substack newsletter. The headline goes: "The Man Behind 'Dilbert' Was Always MAGA." An out-quote goes: The resentments and cynicism in Scott Adams's comic strip are now a familiar worldview."
Mr. Stein produced a book in 2019 titled: "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You Are Better than Someone Who Didn't buy this book." How it sold I have no idea. I never heard of it, or Mr. Stein.
As research for his book, Mr. Stein once upon a time interviewed Mr. Adams in his California trophy home. Although the tone of the essay is polite, Mr. Stein can't seem to understand how someone like Mr. Adams, "who attended graduate school at Berkeley, lived in an overwhelmingly Democratic Bay area town, who put solar panels on his roof and made art for a living" left the tribe.. "Why would he suddenly turn against his class." Well, maybe he was never in your "class."
Mr. Stein, who describes himself as "a Jew from a liberal East Coast town" who apparently lacks a MAGA uncle at the Seder table, who can't seem to understand how there can be a Scott Adams.
William F. Buckley Jr. went to Yale and went in as a conservative and came out that way. As did pa and son Bush. Oh well. It's hard to understand what Mr. Stein doesn't understand.
And it's hard to understand why there is no puff piece on Dilbert himself, who surely would scoff at all that is being attached to him because his creator had a podcast.
Jesus guys. I'm a popular comic strip for a reason. Get it?.
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