They'll Do It Every Time.

On the very first day I blogged, over two years ago, I wondered about the name of a comic strip that used to be in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch comics section. One of the names I considered for my blog was taken from said strip. Today, on my blog's 402nd-day anniversary, I can report that the name has been found.

Originated in 1929 by Jimmy Hatlo, a sports cartoonist for The Call-Bulletin in San Francisco, the feature was created on the spur of the moment when a syndicated cartoon was lost in the mail. The cartoon soon attracted the attention of readers, who submitted their own examples of human foibles.

This comic sometimes illustrated dumb things people do or say in daily life. Usually, the victim of said dumb thing had an arrow pointing to him with the words "Urge to Kill," sort of like stage direction. The best example I can find, sadly, is this recent comic (it's still produced daily, by another artist). Evidently the demons of poltical correctness have removed "Urge to Kill" from this comic's vocabulary.

The name of the strip became part of the vernacular for a while. Chuck Berry even used it in his song "Ain't That Just Like a Woman."