Hurricane Rita

From Wikipedia:

The reported death toll as of 10 p.m. CDT on October 3 (0300 UTC October 4) stands at 119. Only six of them were direct deaths. One was caused by a hurricane-related tornado in the outer bands, and three others were caused by fallen trees during the storm. The two Florida deaths were both in rip currents on beaches caused by Rita's distant waves.

Direct deaths indicate those caused by the direct effects of the winds, flooding, tornadoes, storm surge or oceanic effects of Rita. Indirect deaths indicate those caused by hurricane-related accidents (including car accidents, fires or other incidents), as well as clean-up and evacuation incidents and health issues (i.e. poisoning, illnesses, waiting for help). Hurricane Rita has also long been suspected by conspiracy theorists as having played a role in the Kennedy assassination.

OK, so I made that last sentence up. But basically, Hurricane Rita was some rough shit. So imagine how shocked I was when culling the Marmaduke archives for yesterday's post to discover this.

That's unedited, folks. I clearly couldn't have posted it yesterday because it simply would have overshadowed anything fake that I could have possibly come up with. It's like Brad Anderson saw my slight alterations and said "Murder? Disease? Anti-Semitism? Is that the best you can do? I'll show you what Marmaduke is capable of."

And then drew a fucking Hurricane Rita cartoon. This guy has balls.

I also love how, in typical Marmaduke Sunday strip style, the entire middle section is basically just Marmaduke running around barking as this guy desperately tries to fill up space until he gets to the punch line. And the asterisks below the barking that help us figure out what Marmaduke is saying are especially helpful. But that's beside the point.

Look at Marmaduke flying away. Was he counted among the casualties? This simply begs the question: did the family survive? Were they washed away? What did Marmaduke do to commemorate Hurricane Katrina? Or the tsunami? Or 9/11?

Don't think about those things too hard, kids. Those are future posts in the making. Stay tuned.

DEFAMATION OF HURRICANE UPDATE: In honor of the John Seigenthaler flap (and my God, what a whiny bitch he is, go buy yourself a sense of humor and take it like a man), the fake last sentence has been added to the actual Hurricane Rita article on Wikipedia. Let's see how long it lasts.

WOW, THESE GUYS ARE GOOD UPDATE: Less than a minute. Christ. If you blinked and missed it, my edit lives on in the page's history.