Astral Codex Ten

Garfield

3 min read

Garfield

Article

Garfield is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 23, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “as the Garfield meme says”; “ohmigod we’re supposed to be at the 1950s now fuck fuck fuck Grant Hayes Garfield Arthur Cleveland Harrison Cleveland McKinley”; “The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”“. It most often appears alongside California, New York Times, Paul Krugman.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: June 23, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For June
June 23, 2021 · Original source
19: I’ve really been appreciating Glenn Greenwald lately. I think of myself as a pretty informed news consumer, but as the Garfield meme says, I am not immune to propaganda, and Greenwald has been doing a great job telling me which of the things I believed aren’t true. For example, the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there was false (edit: see here for some debate). And apparently there was no link between the Pulse gay nightclub shooting and anti-LGBT hate - it was just an Islamic terrorist randomly choosing a place to shoot up to make his geopolitical point. Weird.
Inline links: was false, see here, no link between the Pulse gay nightclub shooting and anti-LGBT hate
Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School
August 17, 2021 · Original source
(my own experience with these standardized tests is that eg my school’s social studies courses would move leisurely through the Native American and colonial era, get distracted talking about How Bad Slavery Was, and then a week before the standardized test go into “ohmigod we’re supposed to be at the 1950s now fuck fuck fuck Grant Hayes Garfield Arthur Cleveland Harrison Cleveland McKinley World War One World War Two labor unions Japanese internment ok good luck!” mode. If the day you miss is during that period, I can definitely believe you do worse on test questions about the McKinley administration one week later.)
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”. The quote became a popular sensation, inspiring t-shirts, coffee mugs, and even a hit single. But (as I’m hardly the first to point out) why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work!
Inline links: t-shirts, coffee mugs, a hit single