I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. I’m a mischievous little monkey! When this cartoon first ran ten years ago, it caused quite a dust-up over at the Web site “Comics I Don’t Understand.” As I hope you know, “Comics I Don’t Understand,” or “CIDU” to the intitiated, is a highly entertaining comics-related Web site that obviously has been around for a while. Today, site author Bill Bickel is a friend and frequent visitor to arloandjanis.com. Also, needless to say, “Arlo and Janis” appears regularly at CIDU.

However, when this strip first ran in 1999, Bill was agitated, literally siding with the poor card being shoved off the mantel. Bill and commenters at CIDU achieved a lot of mileage from discussion related to this comic strip, and before it was over Bill and I exchanged a couple of terse emails on the subject, something I’m rarely provoked to do.

That all was smoothed over and is now ancient history, and I’m not going to relaunch the original discussion here. I’ll leave that to you. I will just say that this strip resulted from picking up a raw topic, “There’s always one greeting card that persists in falling off the mantel,” and applying the comedy-writer’s craft. In his defense, Bill said he didn’t understand it.