Stone Soup: You want us to spend New Year's Eve at a SENIOR CENTER??

In the next very special installment of Stone Soup: Alix and, um, the other one learn a valuable lesson about old people.

Stone Soup: The Spacebook thing.

This is apparently the week for annoying comic strip characters to spout hilarious cliches about cleverly named Facebook proxies.

As it happens, I'm the only person of my generation to not actually have joined Facebook. And now I don't have to, as the comics above prove it's either dead or should be.

Stone Soup: From your lips to God's ears.

And so God hates the characters in Stone Soup.

I sympathize. With God.

Stone Soup: I live in a whinery!

If the waiter in this comic strip were real, he would probably be feeling what I am feeling right now after reading this comic strip. Which is abject misery.

Stone Soup: Twitter.

This cartoon is hilarious because birds tweet and twitter just like how on Twitter you tweet. It's a good thing Stone Soup is around or no one would have ever made this observation, except possibly for the people who invented Twitter.

Stone Soup: Tell her she won't die if she has to wear closed-toe shoes!

Today's Stone Soup would make more sense if Alix weren't wearing closed-toe shoes in yesterday's Stone Soup.

Stone Soup: For an old lady she's got a good arm!

This comic is hilarious because Gramma is abusive.

Stone Soup: But we seem to be in a monsoon.

This, sadly, is what passes for a subtle metaphor in the comics section.

In fairness, the comic strip is not a medium that lends itself well to subtlety. Part of this is because of the combination of imagery and words; there's a fairly significant tendency to draw something and then have a character explain the drawing.

That's most of the problem with this Stone Soup. It would have been a more interesting strip if the author had allowed the punchline to fall on the image. Just seeing the two characters standing together silently in the rain would have been more in fitting with the melancholic subject. Instead, she went for the easier laugh, and the comic suffers accordingly.