Please note that this is intended for public comics-related (or comics semi-related) comments only: if you want to send me a CIDU, or a comic for some specific folder (Ewww, Oy, etc), or you want to inform me of a typo, please e-mail me at CiduBill@gmx.com
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Lookin’ good!
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Bummer.
Isn’t the original one of the most famous strips ever? I’m pretty sure it was on this site’s Top Ten Iconic Comics list a few years ago.
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Or was it this one, by Gary Larsen . . .
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“Bummer of a birthmark” is what I was referring to, Andréa.
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Here’s something random.
I was reading Tom McCahill’s charming review of the new-for-1954 Cadillac in the August, 1954 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. Then I noticed the space-filling comic at the end of the article.
The setup recalls Marilyn Monroe’s legendary scene from The Seven Year Itch which was filmed that year, but a quick Google suggests the timing might not be right for this comic to be a direct reference to to Ms. Monroe’s skirt-flying scene. Would any of you know for sure?
Also, I don’t think this comic would fly in a similar magazine today.
(Page scan courtesy the Modern Mechanix Blog.)
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@Grawlix: Probably not a reference. The blast of air from below was a fairly standard feature in fun houses, sometimes automatic and sometimes triggered by the operator who could limit the gag to attractive women.
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Are there any styles of skirt or dress actually still worn today that could even theoretically flip up in an air jet like that?
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@Mitch4: I think so.
In 1990, I saw it happen in Paris to Japanese young women over a subway vent at the rond-point des Champs Elysées, in Paris. I laughed amiably enough that they came to me for directions to the place de la Concorde afterwards.
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“Are there any styles of skirt or dress actually still worn today that could even theoretically flip up in an air jet like that? ”
A few years ago I saw (on the Web) an image of a Brit newspaper. The headline had to do with the horrible people who take and view upskirt pictures. The teaser picture for another article was of some public figure with her skirt blown up by the wind, enough to show her panties.
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Just subscribing
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When the Flatiron Building was built in Manhattan in 1902, the combination of design and location created such an updraft that no skirts or dresses were safe. There was actually a “Flatiron walk,” a maneuver that women used to try to preserve their modesty while walking in front of the building.
So many men loitered in front of the building that a judge finally had to decide how long they could legally stand there before cops ordered them to move along.
(As time passed and the area was filled with larger buildings, this peculiar updraft stopped being an issue)
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This: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33426889
As somebody who doesn’t wear dresses and skirts in Manhattan very often (though probably more often than Bill), let me say the problem is neither in the past nor isolated: there are many areas where the wind does odd things
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I saw a video of this happening, but can’t find it now.
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Yep, that’s it! Kinda like walking in Chicago on certain days. Thanks!
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If you have seen “Putting Pants on Philip” starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy before they were Laurel & Hardy, you know that Scotsmen have the same problem that Marilyn Monroe did.
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If this is a new random comments board, I guess I can plug … (sounds of a scuffle and a door slamming again).
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I wasn’t aware of the ground effect winds around skyscrapers. Los Angeles only has (well, had when I lived there) one real cluster of skyscrapers and nobody goes there who doesn’t work there. Plus, of course, nobody walks in LA. I only knew about the Hancock building in Boston, where high winds created such an underpressure near the top that windows would pop out of the framing and fall to the ground.
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DemetriosX, not to sound like a New York snob, but… the first time I was in LA, we took a bus tour and the driver pointed out some “skyscrapers.’ my wife and I were unimpressed, because the apartment building we lived in was considerably taller.
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@Bill: Well, LA just doesn’t need to build up like NYC does.LA highrises are strictly office and companies can easily find places they can have all to themselves.
Of course, there’s also the problem that as tall as those buildings are now, they flex a lot in an earthquake. Top floors can oscillate by 3 or 4 feet. Any taller and things could get pretty hairy.
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” you know that Scotsmen have the same problem that Marilyn Monroe did.”
Their skirts are heavier, so it takes a lot more wind.
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But then, Scotsmen have a more extreme problem . . .
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I know, DemetriosX: what amused me was that the driver seemed so PROUD of his “skyscrapers.”
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“Their skirts are heavier, so it takes a lot more wind.”
In “Putting Pants on Philip” the wind was sufficient.
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@ Bill – It’s simply a matter of comparative scale: L.A. has vast areas with nothing over three or four stories, and the terrain is generally very flat, so there aren’t even hills to break up the monotony. The college I went to had only one “tall” building (a 9-story library), and it was built with a “floating” foundation, so that the entire weight of the building matched the weight of everything excavated below ground level. This trick wouldn’t work for Manhattan-scale skyscrapers, which are anchored to bedrock.
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Depending on when Bill was in LA, it might also be that the driver was proud not of the height of the buildings, but the architecture. Most of the downtown highrises were pretty cutting edge when they were built and of course on the older side there’s the old Capitol Records building which was intended to resemble a stack of records.
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SOMEWHERE, SOMETIME, in one of the threads, I’d recommended Linda Fairstein’s books and was gently flamed for it because of her prosecution of the Central Park 5 (about which I had no idea; all I knew is that the current WH resident applauded and encouraged their prosecution). In a bit of belated synchronicity, Leonard Pitts Jr, an editorial columnist whom I follow, wrote about it today, 6/9 – ‘What they see when they see us’ – about a NetFlix miniseries, “How They See Us”. I thought some might be interested . . .
https://www.arcamax.com/politics/fromtheleft/leonardpittsjr/s-2216806
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Here’s an article posted on Medium about “When They See Us”.
View at Medium.com
BTW, I also paused / abandoned the first episode about halfway thru.
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I couldn’t read it, as I’m not a member. However, I can imagine how difficult this would be to watch. I cannot read or watch ANYthing having to do with the Holocaust or even just WWII in general, and my family isn’t even Jewish. They did, however, go thru the Nazi takeover of Holland; I just seem to internalize it all.
Having said that, I highly recommend the long-ago (well, it seems that way) PBS series, TENKO. Also painful to watch, but worth it.
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Oh, sorry, I didn’t reckon with their paywall. I’m not going to try to work around it, but just summarize that the writer asks who could this direct depiction of oppression be aimed at, what audience could watch it and benefit? They then try out different racial / political categories.
Yes, I remember watching “Tenko”, a very powerful of the different sorts of mistreatment imposed on these women, both by the captors and later by the English bureaucracy after their return — and the forms of resistance they offered.
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I actually know someone who survived this as a child with his mother, but he doesn’t speak about it much. Don’t blame him, really . . . he now has a good life in Arizona with his dogs.
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” what amused me was that the driver seemed so PROUD of his ‘skyscrapers.’”
Sure. and the “mountains” of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina aren’t mountains, either.
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Mark in Boston – at last year’s “Long Island Occupied” event I found out that one should not sit lower than a Scottish soldier (reenactor). He was sitting on the stairs of the building and we were sitting on a bench on the ground. Thank goodness he wore modern underwear! (He did not come to this year’s event.)
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@Meryl A: https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave/2019/04/01
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Meryl: Be glad he wasn’t ‘manspreading’ . . .
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Thanks for sending this – it appeared before I began to read ‘Wallace the Brave’ [thanks for recommendation here] and I had to send it to a friend in England whose husband was in the Scots Army [or whatever it’s called] . . . I do believe, tho, that he wore his kilt correctly. Even when he was wheelchair-bound, he wore his kilt on special occasions. With a last name of McGuinness, what would one expect . . . .
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So what exactly does Arlo use them for? Is it just for keeping an eye on Janis around the hourse or are they all over town?
https://www.arlo.com/en-us/landing/arlo-pro-2/
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Is anyone else having trouble with the Comics Kingdom site this morning? (Thursday 13 June)
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(Comics Kingdom seems okay now)
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Just found another Bill Bickel. However, he isn’t real (as, I assume, BB1 and BB2 are). The Right Reverend William Bickel is a character in a short story book I’ve been reading today. What’re the chances??
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Andréa, there IS a Reverend William Bickel — though I think he goes by “Bill.”
I’ve gotten his e-mails. Apparently some assistant substituted my address for his in the church dirrctory.
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This is too synchronatic to be funny . . . and then even the incorrect religion.
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Found a turn-of-the-21st-century British book of Best Bar Jokes (no authenticating body was named). It included this:
“Why do Scotsmen wear kilts? Because the sheep can hear a zipper a mile away.”
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Thank you Olivier and Andréa. I had thought that I was seeing things until two of the other women started snickering a bit together. I am not sure if I hope he doesn’t come to our next of the same event in 2021 so we don’t have to worry about a member of the public – especially a child – seeing under his kilt, or hoping he does come as we need everyone can get for the event.
This year there seemed to be an English “soldier” who went about in ripped uniform – including his breeches – luckily he also had modern underwear under it. Though since when I saw him again later in the day he was properly dressed (a soldier in ripped uniform, especially with large holes in it, is never properly dressed), he might have been using the ripped breeches to sleep in as he was one of the fellows (and women) who camped out overnight during the event.
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How exactly does one buy “a bunch of stamps”? Do you have to hand the postal clerk “a handful of money”?
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A wad, rather.
Maybe the customer is not used to going to the post office or usually buys books of stamps rather than sheets.
I wonder what’s wrong with the stamps that they’re unable to “unload” them.
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“I wonder what’s wrong with the stamps that they’re unable to “unload” them.”
Nothing’s wrong with THEM; it’s that people don’t write real letters anymore and don’t need ’em. Except at Holiday times, perhaps. I order my Holiday stamps online when they’re available, as our local PO never has enough for me, if any.
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I get mine from the ATM these days. At VERY infrequent intervals. I rarely use stamps.
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“Nothing’s wrong with THEM; it’s that people don’t write real letters anymore and don’t need ’em. ”
I’ll admit that I don’t write real letters any more, but I do pay all of my bills via checks in the mail, and make all my charity donations the same way, and order books from out-of-town dealers who accept checks, so I go through quite a lot of stamps. But I don’t know what the “we never thought we’d unload these” comment is supposed to indicate either, since while some commeratives are more popular than others, I’m not aware of any that are/were horrible sellers (e.g. I don’t recall seeing remaining on offer at any of the P.O.s I frequent for more than a few months, other than the flag stamps and a few others meant to be permanent(-ish)ly on offer).
Especially since the stamps in question apparently turned out to be Batman tributes from a few years back, which someone (here or on Comics Curmudgeon, I forget which) pointed out were *very* popular and currently bring rather high prices from collectors.
Just Batiuk working out some personal hostility to the post office (and, in the current CRANKSHAFT story, to banks), it seems.
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Apropos of nothing:
“I count my chickens while they’re still eggs
It’s easier than when they’ve got legs.” – Emma Wallace
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I COL’d (Chuckled Out Loud) . . .
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Some things are worth repeating: it’s time to give the link to larK’s Comment Harvester a prominent position (almost) at the top of the page:
http://scrape.nowis.com/CIDU/index.cfm
P.S. @ CIDU Bill – The link doesn’t have to be added to the left menu: you could list it as part of the title block of this post (above), and then I’ll stop pestering with these repeats.
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Kilby, I’m not sure I understand where you mean.
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Bill, I think Kilby is suggesting that the link be added as part of your text starting, “Please note that this is intended….”
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Oh, as part of the blurb for the Random Comments Page! Sure, that’s doable.
Thanks.
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When Cartoonists “Squirrel” Their Own Comics:
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The email updates service apparently abhor a vacuum in the post title, and supply the number if there isn’t one posted. The one from Saturday June 29 featuring a Barney & Clyde and a Mother Goose & Grim was called “5770” in email but nothing at all (yet) in the website visible feed.
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@ CIDU Bill – Arthur’s answer was almost perfect: I wouldn’t put it into that paragraph, but into a new paragraph right before the line that says “The All-Old Random Comments Page is …“.
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MAD QUITS!! Yes, MAD magazine is quitting after 67 years . . .
https://comicbook.com/dc/amp/2019/07/04/mad-magazine-to-cease-publication/
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Old enough to remember buying MAD at the Rexall Drug Store, looking for a copy where somebody hadn’t tried to do the fold-in.
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Our library was the only one in the entire school district to subscribe to MAD for over 30 years. And all the issues were tossed by the new librarian.
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So sad when a librarian turns out to be a barbarian…
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That’s why I retired on my birthday that same year, the soonest I could. Within a year or two, the school’s library was gone . . . what my boss and I had spent 30 years building up as an integral part of the school.
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I thought there was an entry within the last week with *no* comments. I was going to comment on it just to bring it to the “recent comments” list. I also didn’t understand it, and I was hoping someone else could explain it.
But I can’t find it. It has to have been no earlier than the sixth because it was about the 7/6 Baldo:
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@ Arthur – No, you are not dreaming, that comic was there before, but it has since disappeared. Bill must have noticed that the CIDU readership was unanimous in not having anything to explain the comic. I’m not sure why he deleted the post, perhaps he’s planning on trying again later.
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Thank dog I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find it . . . my only question on it was . . . was the car ALWAYS that reduced? Or did someone steal the tires, too? BUT, I didn’t actually care enough at the time to post – I really do not like this comic strip.
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@ Andréa & Arthur – Bill ressurrected the “Car Courage” thread. It still doesn’t have any comments, but I’m not brave enough to be the first.
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re “Car Courage,” take two, I started to put in a snarky comment there about how I thought we had exhausted the topic the first time around, but then changed my mind, since it seemed funnier to see if we can all manage to ignore it this time too.
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No great mystery: since there were zero comments, I though it might have gotten lost in the shuffle or perhaps hadn’t uploaded properly.
Or, of course, nobody cared about it. But I figured I’d give it another shot anyway.
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Bill, not that nobody cared, but that nobody had anything worthwhile to say in explanation.
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In my case, I only check LarK’s scrape page. So I don’t see any that don’t have comments yet. I didn’t realize any escaped commentary completely.
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“Today’s quiz: what’s the normal amount of time between a kitchen being damaged by a leaking pipe and that kitchen being fully repaired?”
“I’ll get back to you on Tuesday.” Of course, there’s no telling *which* Tuesday.
This doesn’t sound like a hypothetical question. I wish you good luck and quick service.
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Alas, that ship sailed a year ago, Arthur.
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Bad news: the “comicsrss.com” site seems to have been hit with a “cease and desist” order, the preview functionality (which was the primary advantage of the site) has been removed. The site now displays the following warning:
“The preview functionality has been removed to avoid copyright infringement.
If you used this site because you prefered its interface compared to gocomics, perhaps try https://licensing.andrewsmcmeel.com/comics
Unfortunately, there are watermarks, so it’s not a complete win.“
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Kilby, I’m seeing the actual comics on http://www.comicsrss.com/ and I’m not seeing the warning you saw. I tried it with several comics.
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An hour after I dropped Hubby off at the airport for his week diving in Belize, on 8 June, monsoon season began. As did a leak in the roof above a bathroom. It’s now 13 July, and all that’s happened so far has been: rain, leaks, rain, a looksee and estimate, rain, leaks, a contract signing, rain, leaks, growing mold, rotting wood (hello, termites!), and rain, ad infinitum . . . I’m waiting to hear a loud CRASH, which means that now the entire ceiling’s come down.
Roofing companies are so far behind in their workload because of the continuous rain (yes, it’s RAINY season; no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, I mean, MONSOON season). I’m just thankful we no longer live in a one-bathroom house.
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re: RSS . . . I just tried the 50 or so comics I use RSS for, and every. single. one. has that warning. DANG!!
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Today, many of GoComics’ pages are blank – karma!
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Monday morning database problems. Happens. It’s usually corrected by the time I get up and check.
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[“my only question on it was . . . was the car ALWAYS that reduced? Or did someone steal the tires, too?”]
Funnily enough, my impression (without actually looking) was that the artwork for the car had been reused from a previous strip. Not only is the tire missing, but so is half of the front suspension. Rather important bits that don’t wander off for no reason. Weird stuff happens to project cars, but that grabbed my eye.
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Incomplete synchronicity …
I saw this exact joke in another comic recently, but now have no idea where. (I don’t think it was in CIDU, but maybe?) And if it was on a Thursday, maybe that means it was a week ago — but for such a specific joke that shouldn’t entirely cancel the synchronicity.
Anybody recognize it?
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I, too, saw a ThrowBACK Thursday joke recently . . . just so you know you’re not imagining it. However, no idea anymore where, and now that GoComics no longer has rss, it’s too much work to look it up . . .
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Thanks for the confirmation! (And specifically “throwN-back”)
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You’re right that it was last Thursday:
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Have you noticed that the links are taking us to the correct place, even though it’s on the second page? OTOH, it’s depressing that this is remarkable.
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Some things are better left unresearched. Since Throwback Thursday is an Internet meme with its own hashtag and Wikipedia page, it’s simply impossible to find an isolated (recent) comic on the subject. There’s too much spurious garbage floating around, and this nonsense has been going on for at least four years, as this Rubes (from 14-May-2015) shows:
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P.S. I stand retroactively corrected. Not impossible, but one has to have additional information to weed out the junk.
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Kilby, I wouldn’t have been able to find it except that it’s only a week old, and it’s part of my daily feed.
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@ Arthur – For me, the search produced one extremely valuable result: I finally discovered an app that permits viewing the page source on a mobile phone (or tablet), making it possible to extract the image URL from a GoComics page without having to use a desktop machine.
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Funnily enough, my impression (without actually looking) was that the artwork for the car had been reused from a previous strip.
There are a couple of standard views of the car. Oddly, this side-view seems to be a different year than the first.appearance. His father first presented the car on 4/20/2019. On 4/22, the first side-view was shown, missing all the same parts. Commenters complain about the cement blocks being oriented in dangerous fashion.
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Thanks Arthur, that’s exactly the one I meant!
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Me, too.
If you put throw ‘back thursday comics’ in google, that would narrow down your search. The one w/the fish (and many others) came up for me, but NOT the one Arthur found and we remember.
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@ Andréa – That just happens to be exactly the search string I used to find the Rubes with the fish.
P.S. I’m not at all surprised that the bot crawlers have not yet indexed last week’s comics.
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Where was that thread with the post-it left inside the patient? Here is a related …
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@ Mitch4 – The “Post-It note” thread is located here.
P.S. @ Bill – Another minor defect in this template is that the site search is hidden down below the 15 most recent comments, instead of underneath the “Home” and “Your Random Comments” entries. Yes, I know you probably can’t fix that, but I thought it could go on the wish list.
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Actually, Kilby, that’s something I think I CAN change.
Unless they changed the rules again.
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@ CIDU Bill – Well, that wasn’t the location that I expected, but the search field is certainly more useful up at the top than it is buried under everything else. Thanks!
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OMiGosh! I didn’t know for sure what you were even talking about.
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Well Kilby, if I’m going to move something, I might as well move it a lot.
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I was expecting a “sideways” shift (to become the fifth item on the “main menu”), but I figured that might be hard, because of the
difficultyimpossibility of editing the “random comments” link in that list.LikeLike
@ CIDU Bill – Are we supposed to figure out the answer to the “Today’s Quiz” by counting the number of days that the subheader has appeared?
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Alas, Kilby, the correct answer is “the number of days between April 2018 and some yet-undetermined future date.”
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@ Bill – Ouch. :-(
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I share your pain; we FINALLY signed a contract for what WAS a $2800 roof leak repair and has become a $15000 roof replacement. However, as we seem to be in monsoon season, it will be August – September – October (I assume 2019) before this will happen. Meanwhile, the bathroom ceiling gets worse and worse, as does the attic mold.
Ah, the joys of living in the tropics!
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Does anybody know what’s going on with the Nib? Nothing new for over a week. Did they move or something? I didn’t get the memo.
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“Nib”?
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All I know is that they went independent and were looking for donations to continue their work. One 31 July, Matt Bors wrote . . .
Today is our last day with First Look Media, where The Nib has been housed for three and a half years. Thus ends a great run where we published thousands of comics and saw the launch of our magazine and Nib animation.
The Nib will continue as an entirely membership supported publication after today. I’m going to take a brief pause to get some things in order, then publishing will resume on August 12.
The Nib would not be the publication it became without the contributions of Eleri Harris, Matt Lubchansky, Sarah Mirk, and Andy Warner, many of whom have been working with me for more than five years on this project.
They’ll continue to contribute to The Nib, but I’ll be the only one working on it full time for now. If you don’t already, keep up with them on Twitter at @elerimai, @Lubchansky, @sarahmirk, and @AndyComics. They will be doing a lot fo great work worth following and my hope is I’ll be able to get as much of it for The Nib as possible.
And also if you don’t already, please support The Nib by becoming a member. The newsletter, the website, the magazine—it all continues but only with the help of our readers.
See you in a week and a half. Viva Nib!
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So, you need to become a member to enjoy The Nib . . . I just joined.
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Political cartoons.
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A member? I had no idea. Thanks, Andréa.
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You hadn’t received all their notifications that they were going independent?
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I signed up for The Nib‘s e-mail subscription service as soon as it was announced. This is the second restructuring that they have had to endure. I really hope that Matt Bors will be able to find an economic model that is attractive enough to keep the system working, so that The Nib can still provide a continuous flow of high-quality comic material.
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I second that emotion.
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@ Andréa – Over the weekend I finally converted all of my editorial comic links back to GoComics (since the comicsrss “preview” feature is gone for good). The load time (which used to be just a few seconds) went right back to intolerably long, and once again it is necessary to click through to “today’s comic” on every single page. It’s pretty obvious that GoComics has intentionally made their website as annoying and inconvenient as possible, just to induce readers into paying for a subscription. A pox on them and their insidious mercenary hostility.
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That seems to be a common new business model, Kilby: offer a free option but then deliberately make it annoying to use hoping thus will encourage people to subscribe to a pay version.
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And my wrist is hurting from all that clicking thru about 50 comics on GoComics. What I have to do now is OPEN ALL IN TABS and walk away for a while, then come back and do the ‘click thru’ and become veeeerrrryyyy patient. Yes, I miss the RSS; it was great while it lasted.
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re: The Nib. It’s back, as of today. 8/12, if anyone is interested in political comics.
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I’d bet the site wouldn’t be much better if you did pay for it, and it might even be worse… Our bank recently changed their bill pay, and it is much, much worse than it used to be — and what absolutely slays me as that what we had back in 1999 with Wingspan.com bank was superior to what we have now. Imagine if they’d just tweaked the Wingspan site over the years, instead of constantly (badly) reinventing the wheel — a site that was usable, fast, and responsive in 1999 would absolutely fly today…
Also, I have to wonder, if this crowd won’t pay for the current offerings, then there is something really off with their business model…
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“Also, I have to wonder, if this crowd won’t pay for the current offerings, then there is something really off with their business model…”
Good point! Just as I, a newspaper and politics fanatic, will NOT pay to read NY Times or WaPo, etc. And to think I used to pay for THREE newspapers/day, which was much more $$$$. I think their misteak was to offer it all for free and THEN try to make us pay for it. Nope. No way.
I spend my $ on ‘independent’ cartoonists, both comic and editorial, who are not getting support (and restrictions) from syndicates: Claytoonz, Felix Colgrave (weird but beautiful), Keith Knight, Raging Pencils, Doc & Raider, Stonekettle, Comics Curmudgeon, Library Comic, Jesus & Mo, Sheldon. And CIDU, if it had a Patreon subscription, would be included.
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For the Reaper collection …
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My Pratchett DEATH’s JOURNAL arrived today, with many quotes and lovely drawings.
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I wonder how often comic strip writers begin a week-long arc and by the time they’re completing the Wednesday or Thursday strip they realize “Oh, this is just brutally awful, what was I thinking?” but by now they’ve invested too much work into it not to just soldier on and complete the week and hope they haven’t lost too many readers.
I’m not mentioning any names, but there are three of them I COULD name this week.
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Pastis has mentioned starting a week-long arc and dropping it midweek because it didn’t support 5 (or 6) strips.
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“That seems to be a common new business model, Kilby: offer a free option but then deliberately make it annoying to use hoping thus will encourage people to subscribe to a pay version.”
You can blame them durn kids and their cell phones for this one.
Videogames have gone through three distinct eras. The first was the arcade era. Games were developed for coin-op arcades, which meant they had to catch you quick with the first quarter and then convince you to keep putting more quarters in.
The second era was the home console. They got all your quarters up front, so to speak, so they didn’t have to be designed to keep the quarters coming.
The third era is the smartphone model and “microtransactions” They’re back to trying to get more quarters out of players And the best way to do THAT is to get people to download and play the game. And the best way to do THAT is to make the game free to download and start playing. But if you want to actually WIN, you need to buy this upgrade, and buy that upgrade, and buy this other upgrade. (Another offshoot doesn’t require you to give them any money… but before the level can start, you have to watch a commercial. The ubiquity of their commercials has convinced me that I do not want Liberty Mutual insurance, ever. I am also tired of hearing how I could save 15% on my car insurance. They have some clever ads, but the clever wears off with repetition. The same is true with Progressive’s advertising offerings. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m tired of having insurance companies advertise to me when I only buy car insurance twice a year.)
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The cartoon that Mitch4 posted reminds me of Laurel Winter’s great “egg horror poem”
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306183940AAb1nJC
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@ CIDU Bill – While you are thinking about how to change that tagline, you might want to figure out whether you can insert a functional link there, so that clicking on “CMT” in the tagline will take people wherever you want to send them (your first CMT post has already percolated down to page two of CIDU).
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Nobody ever got every answer correct on a test before?
Well, even that wouldn’t work here, because Gracie hopes to improve on her grade.
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@ B.A. – When the comic doesn’t relate to an existing thread, it would be better to submit it via e-mail to Bill, so that he can give it a thread of its very own. It even says so in the header above.
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As CIDUers are so well-read and erudite, I will mention [with permission] a Kickstarter by Dave Kellett, author of SHELDON and DRIVE. His new book-to-be is a collection of his ‘Anatomy of Authors’ comic strips, all of which have been, and continue to be, quite funny.
His previous book, ‘Pop Culture’, is a must for those of you who thought you knew all there is to know about Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, etc. The Kickstarter for that has come and gone, but I’m sure it’s available online. Even I, who has little to no knowledge of this pop culture iconography, found the book to be LOL-worthy.
I now return you to the regularly-scheduled Random Comments. Thank you for your attention.
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Anachronistic subtitling dept. Watching an early episode of Are You Being Served. Due to transport stroke, staff is camping out on their floor overnight. Mr Humphries steps out of his tent in a kimono. Another person (Capt. Peacock?) says something about “Anna May Wong” I think, and verify that was name of an actress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_May_Wong. .
Closed captions have “Anime 1” . Hey, pretty close phonetically! But I doubt many people in 1973 UK even knew the word anime.
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Many YouTube videos have auto-generated captions, which can cause some amusing results. That’s especially true if the speaker throws in a foreign word, as the captioning software will usually try to make something English out of it.
One of favorite providers says the Japanese word “Itadakimasu” before she eats something in a video. It’s traditional in Japan, meaning “I humbly receive”, and she picked it up while working there. It’s pronounced along the lines of “ee-ta-dakee-mas”.
People in comments started noting the various auto-caption results:
“eat the ducky moss” (she started offering this on merchandise)
“meet the lucky moms”
“we need to vacuum Oz”
“get the knocking off”
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I just got a “Sorry, this comment could not be posted.” message with no additional information . I don’t think I did anything to get on the Scheißelist. Any thoughts (assuming this one posts)?
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@ B.A. – That’s not necessarily a reaction to the contents. It might have been a “WordPress choked, try again later.“
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I just watched something where the closed-captioning transcriber consistently wrote then when a speaker used the comparative than. And this was clearly human-written or at least human-edited, not some fully automatic foolishness. It really seemed like the transcriber just wasn’t up on the traditional distinction of these words.
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That’s such a common mistake these days, and some do it so often that I think they don’t know better. The words aren’t even related.
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By “traditional distinction,” I assume you mean “correct.”
I saw the exact same thing the other day: maybe we were watching the same show (or movie, I forget)?
It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen closed captioners enter a similar-sounding word, and I’m willing to chalk it up to being forced to work too quickly.
And I’m particularly inclined to cut them slack because I’ve had to type up a lot of my own interviews from recordings, and I know it’s not easy.
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Maybe the Gaffigan standup special on Prime?
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Can anyone else see the latest XKCD (“Throw”, #2198)? I see the title and the menu, but no drawing.
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No drawing for me.
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The xkcd in question is using a script to render the drawing. If you have disabled scripting, you get nothing.
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The explainxkcd.com site has a static image to show some of what you’d see if you allowed scripting.
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Worked for me.
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I guess I’m banned again?
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beckoningchasm, I’m note sure what you’re referring to: nobody’s been banned,and none of your comments are in any sort of limbo.
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CIDU Bill – There was a while, fairly recently, when I would comment and the comment would not appear. Or it would appear, and then shortly thereafter it would disappear. I know not the cause or the resolution of this state of affairs.
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But I guess the shroud has departed.
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What’s weird for me is that sometimes I’ll make a comment and a link shows up in the recent comments link, but the comment isn’t yet actually on the page yet. Other times, it’ll show up on the page, but take some time before it gets a link.
Unrelated I had my turn in moderation hell, where for about a week everything I posted went into moderation for no known reason.
The ways of WordPress are mysterious and unexplainable.
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As long as we remember that “the ways of WordPress are mysterious and unexplainable,” we’ll all remain fairly sane.
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Oh, golly! I can’t find the recent thread about Ethan Frome and school reading. (And did that morph into The Lottery, or was that separate?)
Anyway, I wanted to add this Tweet from NPR host Scott Simon:
Didn’t see the debate. Back-to-school night. Our 16 year old daughter’s English class has 9 students. They’re reading In Cold Blood, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Things They Carried, The Glass Menagerie. I asked, “You got room for a tenth in here?”
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mitch4: Do you know you can do site-colon search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agodaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com+ethan+frome&oq=site%3Agodaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com+ethan+frome
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Thanks, WW!
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Mitch, this reminds me of a special thing they did in my sons’ high school (when they were in 9th grade, think): they assigned a novel for the students AND one parent to read separately, and then one afternoon everybody met in the classroom to discuss it together.
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You can also type search criteria into the search window on this very page.
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I’m sick to death of Google, but the site parameter “site:godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com” works just as well with
https://duckduckgo.com/
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I thought this series would be relevant to CIDUers, but don’t know where to post it, so here ’tis . . .
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You can also type search criteria into the search window on this very page.
You can, but my experience with that has been less than successful. The last few times I tried to find a particular post that failed and I had to use the site search from a search engine.
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Andréa, thank you. I first knew about him from this obit:
https://www.honoraryunsubscribe.com/lee-salem/
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I forgot to add his links (that was the ‘see below’ in one of the strips) . . .
From The Washington Post:https://tinyurl.com/y4beyzqr
From The Daily Cartoonist:https://tinyurl.com/y6eot3yo
A past interview on MrMedia.com:https://tinyurl.com/y4o2r8fl
A great tribute from Cathy Guisewitehttps://tinyurl.com/y6pw4eum
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Kilby: You can use the site-colon operator at DuckDuckGo. Whether it works as well is a different question. Currently, I get no results with this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Agodaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com+ethan+frome&t=hd&ia=web
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NEWS ITEM: ‘THE FAR SIDE’ TEASES ITS RETURN
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. . . and . . .
https://www.thefarside.com/
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In another thread, Andréa said, “And just an aside: The Knight Life will no longer be published.”
That explains why it hasn’t been updated since Sunday. A search doesn’t show me any indication that it’s officially over. Can anyone give me a link to such? (I only discovered it a couple of years ago.)
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I’m a patreon, so today Keith Knight posted
My final Knight Life strip!
What a way to go! After a decade of not being read by anyone under fifty years old, I’ve decided to lay my daily syndicated strip to rest.
I had to. Nine deadlines a week were killing me. The addition of writing for a TV show would’ve broken me.
I considered having folks cover me for four months, but then I watched this motivational video by the Rock, and decided to quit right then and there.
The good thing is, Life’s Little Victories will return to the K Chronicles as a regular feature, instead of as a regular Sunday feature of the Knight Life. Send some vics my way, will ya?
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Andréa, thank you.
I’ll have to consider whether to work my way through the strips from before I started reading and/or read the K Chronicles (which I hadn’t heard of before).
A couple of years ago, Edge City also ended, though I would have been happy to have it keep going. They, though, announced in the strip that it was coming to an end and had about a month of coda.
It would have been nice if Gocomics had an indication that the Knight Life had ended.
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You could buy his books, thereby supporting him. That’s what I’ve done.
His last few strips were leading up to this, unbeknownst to any readers, however.
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Andréa, good point. I’ll take a look at what’s out there in print.
And yes, now that I know the strip is over, I see several strips over the last couple of weeks pointing to it, especially the last non-Sunday one.
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This is possibly the stupidest thing any character in a semi-realistic comic strip has ever said.
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B.A.: Why? Assuming Arlo and Janis are honest and open enough in their relationship to not carry any baggage about what went on before they met each other, Arlo doesn’t care; so if you meant it was stupid to incriminate herself in front of Arlo, she knows he doesn’t care, so why self-censor? And otherwise, I don’t understand why you’d say it was stupid: it’s wonderfully ambiguous, so we don’t know exactly why it would have been worse if Joey Greene were posting, but it makes for a wonderful punch line, especially with that fourth panel. Maybe she doesn’t like Joey Greene, and thinks it would look bad on her to to been seen giving him hickeys as opposed to Freddy Baxter, who at least is seen as OK; maybe she did something much more notable with Joey Greene for his “first”… Whatever the case, she’s not ashamed about it, only embarrassed to have it come up this way, and obviously not embarrassed in front of Arlo — so I just fail to see how it is stupid to talk about it.
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larK, it looks like this was news to Arlo.
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He’s grinning in the first panel, so even if it is news that Freddy got his first hickey from Janis, it clearly doesn’t bother him; beyond that, we don’t know what she did or didn’t do to Joey, and that’s reason enough for the blank expectation look from Arlo — did she give Joey his first hickey? Did she give him his first something else? Did she do nothing to Joey, she just doesn’t like him, and is glad that he isn’t the one she’s connected with in these revelations?
As I said, I don’t think Arlo cares: he’s clearly amused by the first situation. Would he care if yet another guy got his first hickey from Janis? I doubt it. Would he care if this other guy got his first something else from Janis? I doubt it. (Was he living under the delusion that Janis had no lovers before him? I doubt it.) And like I mentioned, this also may be a case of Janis-logic, that she did nothing with Joey, she just prefers Freddy to Joey, so good thing she did nothing to Joey that he could then write about. Arlo knows Janis, and knows that this, too, is on the table as a possibility, hence the blank expectant look, but does he care, as in stupidest thing to say ever, which it is? I highly, highly doubt it….
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larK, are you saying you DON’T think Arlo looks flabbergasted in the final panel?
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I clicked on the cartoon to see a bigger version, just to be sure, but no, I don’t think he looks flabbergasted; expectant, mildly perplexed (for reasons I outline above), but not flabbergasted, shocked, or anything else to suggest he is outraged at Janis; just curious as to what she meant.
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It looks to me like he’s expecting to hear WHY it’s fortunate that ol’ Joey isn’t the topic, and isn’t getting an answer (considering that he laughed at the Freddy situation, it’s not entirely surprising that she isn’t immediately forthcoming, even if there isn’t a secret she would keep from her husband in there.
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Okay, first of all, this seems disconcertingly like something Adam Huber would draw to show the marriage counselor.
And second, using “you’re” should be automatic grounds for divorce.
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@ B.A. – Third of all, this comic should have been sent to Bill via e-mail, so we could all slice and dice it in a separate thread. As it says above: “if you want to send…a CIDU, or a comic for some specific folder (Ewww, Oy, etc), or you want to inform me of a typo, please e-mail …”
And fourth, Adam is almost as famous for his typos as Bill is. As soon as someone mentions them in a comment, he usually fixes the artwort.
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P.S. On the other hand, I am famous for my inability to properly close an “italics” tag. </i>
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But Kilby, this DOESN’T fit in a specific folder, and therefore meets the definition of “random.”
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I rec’d this today, 9/23 . . .
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. . . as well as ‘her’s’ . . .
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@ B.A. – Then it’s high time we asked Bill to create a new category: how about “Gripes” ?
P.S. I didn’t figure out your “marriage counseling” joke until I looked at it again: now that first panel seems funnier than the rest of the strip, and almost worthy of an ArLOL nomination.
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“. . . he usually fixes the artwort.”
I actually LIKE that word.
And, if they have a daughter, their VENN diagram must’ve touched a little bit more than ‘barely’
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@ Andréa – On the subject of Lee Salem:
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P.S. @ Andréa – I do not know how I did that: the T is three and a half keys away from the K, and I cannot blame Autocorrect, because I always disable it.
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Hadn’t read today’s comics yet (got involved in a Pencian tweetstorm), so thanks for this . . .
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I just finished up The Great Typo Hunt. Not surprisingly, apostrophes are a major source of the errors they found. The guys were delighted with one shop owner’s fix to her sign. They also learned an important lesson about fixing an apostrophe error on a sign without permission.
To bring things around to the theme of the site:
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I always liked this blog of signs with unnecessary quotation marks. (It’s not updated anymore, but as you might guess, it gets repetitive after a while anyway.)
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/2015/09/new-cheeses.html
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@ WW – That “quote mark” blog could have had a whole section on “Mutts” (I even looked, but it didn’t). Back when McDonnell was still hand-lettering the strip, he had the annoying habit of using quotes for “emphasis”. Now that he has switched to a computer font, he does the same thing with bold, but he tends to apply it to the wrong word.
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FYI: The reruns of Ink Pen have cycled around to the “going out of business” thread. Presumably, the strip will then start over from the beginning at GoComics. Both events are sure to be worth (re-)reading.
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Comics about cartoon/comic characters . . .
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@ Andréa – Yes, it looks like I completely misread where this arc will be going.
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The only reason he’s still alive is that the cheerleaders are so hideously ugly.
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Well, be that as it may, but the Chinless Wonder isn’t good lookin’, either.
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I’m just trying to figure out if she has both arms in one sleeve. Looks like two hands gripping the suitcase.
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In reference to the Pumpkin Spice thread, have any of you tried this one?
http://www.thesodajerks.net/soda-reviews/2015/3/23/maine-root-pumpkin-pie-soda
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I’m not a soda drinker, but I’d try this for sure. I like the writing style, too. Thanks for the chuckle, Grawlix!
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The surgery is NOT going to be pretty.
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. . . which is why I’d submitted it as an EW ‘-)
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Here’s another one from the same soda site:
http://www.thesodajerks.net/soda-reviews/2017/10/25/heb-pumpkin-creme
And yeah, his reviews are fun, especially for the sodas he didn’t particularly like.
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Do you think that’s a real iguana in his pics?
I agree – who wants to buy a 12-pack, if you could even find that. I’m not a soda fan, so one can would do me for the year.
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I have yet to receive an aroma-liquefier from the government, let alone one each year. I demand an investigation.
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I suspect the iguana is merely a replica.
One could drink that soda with this pizza:
https://fun107.com/pumpkin-pizza-returns-to-rhode-island/
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@ B.A. – Adam Huber did in fact post a corrected Bug Martini the very next day, but I didn’t notice it until now, because my browser was still displaying the cached (incorrect) version:
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I’d order that pizza for dessert!
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Bill, I just saw your cry for help — can you point on this picture of Charlie Brown exactly where the Internet touched you?
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Not a clue what you’re talking about, larK.
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CIDU Bill: I also saw “marshmallow”
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Things that bother me about Mutt and Jeff:
— Although Mutt is married, he shares a bedroom and sometimes a bed with Jeff.
— Married man Mutt and bachelor Jeff both chase girls.
— Mutt’s son looks exactly like Jeff with a shave.
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Minor Annoyance, all three things fit together: there’s only one bed and on the nights Mutt’s out chasing woman, it’s Jeff and Mrs. Mutt sharing it.
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Dear Mr. Mallett: We don’t all live in Michigan.
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“We don’t all live in Michigan.”
Nor do you to need to to get this joke.
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That’s true, James, but it’s gratuitously specific for the rest of us.
Of course it’s not as if Mallett has a habit of excessive name-checking…
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@ XKCD fans – Last night I was lucky enough to be able to see Randall Monroe’s presentation at a university in downtown Berlin. It was a very enjoyable evening, with a lot of amusing anecdotes, but it was a little shorter than I had hoped. The most amazing detail was the price of the tickets: €0.00 ! (Apparently it was financed entirely through sales of the German edition of “How To?“.) Presigned and freshly signed copies were available in abundance (€16.00), we waited about 30 minutes in line so that a friend of mine could buy a pre-signed copy (I declined, because the English version was no longer available. The translations are OK, but I prefer the originals).
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Thanks for the report . . . I never even realized he was doing personal appearances.
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@ Andréa – Check out the XKCD website. The notice about the Berlin event showed up for me, but the page is set to identify the IP (not only did it mention the appearance, it did so in German). I know that I saw other listings, but I can’t find them right now.
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Nope, I don’t see anything about personal appearances on any of his pages. I doubt he’d be coming around to my area anyway.
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@ Andréa – The list wasn’t on the XKCD site, there was just a link from there to it (I think it was the publisher’s page). A new general search turned up absolutely nothing of value, and a lot of spooky garbage, so I have no idea whether there are any more appearances planned.
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“. . . a lot of spooky garbage, . . .”
Well, ’tis the season, after all.
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@ Andréa – One site claimed (without any proof, nor any indication that he was actually affiliated with the site) that his speaking fee was 30 to 50 grand (which is obviously hogwash, or the tickets for last night’s show would have cost €50 to €100)
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A “speaker’s fee” doesn’t necessarily represent what a person gets every time they make a personal appearance. If they call you wanting to make an appearance, the rules are different. But if you call them trying to get on their schedule, it’ll tell you about what to budget.
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New Yorker cartoonist Dana Fradon passes away at 97.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-timeless-cartoons-of-dana-fradon
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Referencing something we discussed here a few weeks ago:
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@ B.A. – Not only was WordPress unable to parse the image, the link did not work. Yet another argument for submitting comics to Bill, instead of posting them here.
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Kilby, I do send them to Bill when they fall into specific categories. But when they don’t, they’re “random comments” and I stand by their randomness.
Of course now I’m going to have to find this and send it to Bill after all.
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B.A.: “Getting this graphic online has become way more trouble than it’s worth, but here it Is:”
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A better final line would have been “I’ll just put ‘Maurice’ on the cup.”
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The big news in our family today is that our son-in-law, Luke Kruger-Howard, has a cartoon published in the Nov 4 issue of the New Yorker – his first.
This isn’t my favorite cartoon of the ones he’s submitted, but hey, I’m not going to second-guess the New Yorker cartoon editor.
However, as we spread the joyful news today, we’re discovering that this is a CIDU to many – evidently Terry Gross isn’t as well-known as we thought.
Link to cartoon below.
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The New Yorker believes that anything familiar to New Yorkers is familiar to everybody.
Though to be fair, it’s not called the Everybodyer.
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I’m not going to name names here. because I know the rules, but…
Once a comic strip starts focusing more and more on minutia only the artist’s friends will understand, shouldn’t it migrate over to his personal CompuServe page?
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BOZO THE CLOWN HAS DIED.
https://www.syracuse.com/celebrity-news/2018/03/bozo_the_clown_dead_frank_avruch.html
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Hmmm, somehow I mistyped and ended up in 2007.
https://comicsidontunderstand.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/hello-world
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Okay, it’s not a comic, but it deserves an “oy” anyway:
http://abc7chicago.com/pets/lincoln-park-zoo-names-baby-camel-alexander-camelton/1374995/
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I’m not sure where that final “8” came from, but it gave me a 404. This worked:
https://abc7chicago.com/pets/lincoln-park-zoo-names-baby-camel-alexander-camelton/1374995/
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Gahan Wilson has died. Here is a note posted by his stepson Paul Winters:
” Gahan Wilson
2/18/1930 – 11/21/2019
The world has lost a legend. One of the very best cartoonists to ever pick up a pen and paper has passed on. He went peacefully – surrounded by those who loved him.
Gahan Wilson leaves behind a large body of work that is finely drawn, elegant, and provocative. “
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Well, that puts an end to his stepson’s raising money on gofundme to ‘support’ Gahan Wilson, but was actually to buy a ranch to them.
Mr. Wilson suffered from dementia; it seems to afflict creative minds (or at least, we learn about it more often), such as Sir Terry Pratchett, Peter Falk. Tim Conway, et al.
If only more money was put into dementia research . . .
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Gosh! I didn’t know there had been questions raised about that fund-raising campaign. That’s a bit shocking to learn in retrospect.
In any case, I hope we all who have seen his work over the decades can join in remembering them as special.
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Absolutely.
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“And you’ll learn to lie like a cheap rug.”
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The Arlo Page has a nice Peter Arno drawing as most recent post. But it somewhat mysteriously is called “Bonus LOL: December 1, 2019” which was not the date when it posted (on Nov 27) nor today (Nov 28). So is that a reference to something about it? I don’t see what it might be.
Also, though I may have just missed the post here on CIDU-proper, it seems to violate the note that “Please note that nothing will appear here without a link from the main site.” .
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Mitch4, my guess is that Bill preloaded that page, and the link from the main page will appear on December 1. You weren’t supposed to peek before the proper time to open the presents.
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Thanks, Arthur, sounds pretty much right,
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Mitch, you’re correct about the rule — but I had to break it this time around because I’m going to be without my computer for a few days.
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A Thanksgiving gag I contrived years ago for an illustrated place card, and think nobody else has hit upon yet. The visual is a pilgrim couple in a pillory. The woman says, “Next time you give thanks, keep it general and leave my name out of it!”
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For those seeking a definition of Geezer: The tipping point is when you switch from fudging about how far back you remember reading the funnies to quoting Nixon-era “Doonesbury” strips.
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In my book, Breaking the Fourth Wall ALONE does not constitute a punchline.
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Esp. when it’s grammatically incorrect.
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Even more especially when The Family Circus is almost always up at the top of a comics layout, so he’s not even gonna be pointing in the right direction….
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The joke was not the breaking of the 4th wall. The joke was that the circle was in a corner.
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Is it just me or are the “Previous post” links circular tonight?
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Is this the first “The Grinch’s heart is now dangerously large” comic of the season?
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Recently caught an old “Big Bang Theory” where annoying genius Sheldon brought up that point, and went on to say the Grinch was his hero up until he succumbed to social pressure.
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Does anyone (perhaps Bill, or larK) know whether a “moderated” comment gets added to the top of the “Recent Comments” list after Bill retrieves it from moderation purgatory? Or would that only work if the retrieval occurs before 14 other comments have been made?
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kilby: from my observations, the latter — the post enters where it would have been in the stream had it not been delayed, which means if more comments are younger than it when it clears moderation, it will not show up in the recent comments list. If it doesn’t show up in the recent comments list, I can’t scrape it, so it is lost to posterity in my system. I mention this quirk as a limitation on my page.
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larK is correct: comments, when approved, are time-stamped from when they were submitted.
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Which is why some of us may get upset a reply apparently never got posted, when we should have scrolled up to where it should have been. I’ve been fooled at least once myself.
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Related, I think it is confirmed that those who have subscribed to email updates for a thread will get mail for a newly-released comment that was in moderation, even if it is at that point not the newest one. (I don’t know if that also applies to RSS subscribers.)
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I scrape the RSS feed, so no, it doesn’t work there.
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Some really far-fetched personal synchronicity that is, yes, comics-related:
In 1973, I lived as an Army Wife in New Jersey for six months or so. My Mother, being similar to Cathy’s Mom, sent us clippings and comics she thought would be of interest to us (and they were).
One comic we particularly enjoyed was Peanuts, particularly Snoopy.
I’m [finally] unpacking totes that were shipped from WI to FL; one had a packet of letters she sent me and, of course, I had to open and look at them again.
The sequence of Snoopy comics she sent me in 1973 was the same sequence I was reading on GoComics last week.
Forty-seven years older, and I’m still reading the same comics.
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Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but has anyone else noticed that the links are now bringing us to the correct page when there are multiple pages of comments? It’s hard to believe they’ve finally fixed a bug that should have been fixed almost as soon as it cropped up.
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Which links? The ones from LarK’s page still have the problem.
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I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It stopped working just that fast.
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The Smithsonian published an article about “Celebrating a Century of Women’s Contributions to Comics and Cartoons” (back in November, but I just rediscovered it today).
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“Tonight, CIDU enters its fourth decade”
Of the two likely meanings, I’ll guess this means The Nineties, The Aughts, The Teens, and now The Boring Twenties. (As against, having reached a 30th anniversary.)
I haven’t settled on whether to be happy to be able to claim one more decade than some people of my approximate age, as I showed up in time for a few days of The Forties.
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You guess correctly, Mitch4. We begin our 25th year in May (which isn’t chopped liver either).
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I did not realize that it had been around that long. However, absent a definite marker, I often lose track of when events happened. I was surprised recently when research revealed that I had replaced my air-condition 15 years prior. It didn’t seem that long ago.
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Brian, the earliest incarnation of the site “went public” in May of 1996. Before that, it was just a workaround method of sending comics to a friend whose e-mail wouldn’t accept graphics (“You know… Prodigy lets us make webpages, so I have a crazy idea that should work…”
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You can tell Dave Blazek is a man: Mrs. Penguin probably sees at least a dozen shades of white.
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Whenever a website or organization uses the statement “Now in our 4 th (or whatever) decade, ” it only serves to make me feel old.
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How do you think it makes ME feel, Grawlix?
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You started doing this in 1980? Or are you saying YOU are 40 years old?
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No, in “four decades” means that the site was active in “the 1990s”, “the 2000s”, “the 2010s”, and “the 2020s”.
Hockey player Gordie Howe played in five decades, in a career that began in 1946 and ended with his final retirement in 1980.
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And so now are you saying it’s 10K comments per decade?
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Was it Blazek who did the same gag with copulating dinosaurs not long ago?
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Is it just me, or have the names disappeared from the comments for other people, too?
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To answer my own question: It’s just me and a few others. I run without CSS for various reasons. I get to see the comment numbers. Until a few hours ago, I also saw the names on the comments. *Something* changed then and I no longer see the names.
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Well just don’t ask me, Arthur, because I wouldn’t know a CSS if it bit me on my css.
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The Smithsonian reported today that Paris museums are now offering downloadable art. I suspect that in a few weeks, “That is Priceless” will experience a sudden upsurge in French masterpieces.
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@ B.A. The strip you are referring to is almost certainly by “The Perry Bible Fellowship“. The website doesn’t offer dates, but it is numbered #257, so it must be at least five years old (and was presumably a recent rerun on GoComics):
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Arthur: I wouldn’t rely on it, but the old hijack site I had set up apparently still works, and it has numbered comments with css! But as I said, I wouldn’t rely on it, I haven’t done anything with it for two years, or whenever it was that I tweaked it to display comment numbers.
For me, wordpress has done something recently where the tabs don’t work in my (old) browser. Don’t know what they did or why, and how they think whatever they got is better than a gracefully degrading website, but I’m sick of the web developing game anyway…
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Kilby, that’s it of course.
I wonder how many PBF strips are out there, because they seem to cycle through at least once a year.
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I’ve got to remember this trick. Whatever I mention as changing on this site changes back as soon as I post it here. The names are back.
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@Arthur: I’ve got to remember this trick. Whatever I mention as changing on this site changes back as soon as I post it here. The names are back.
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Can you make Windows7 come (safely) back? Thanks in advance.
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@ B.A. – The total number of PBF strips is more than 300, but probably less than 350. All the older PBF strips were numbered, but newer strips are not. The switch happened when the PBF website was redesigned (which also removed a lot of old strips from the online archive).
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P.S. @ B.A. – With the exception of #308 (Candle), none of the PBF images after #301 (Gentleworms) carries a number. The “current” (most recent) strip is “The Treat” (from Halloween), which would probably have been #317 by the old numbering scheme.
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what happened to cleo and company? It has dissapeared from the internet……
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And here I thought something was wrong w/my connection for the past week or so. I haven’t an answer, but I’m glad you asked.
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Do any of you follow “Bent Objects” ? That one appears to have vanished from the Go Comics site.
And then I just just now came across the darker side of BO…”Really Bent”, which also seems to have ceased updating its blog years ago.
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There was some discussion of comics or related artwork that used real objects in a pose (including somebody adding examples from a friend of theirs), and I wanted to mention and link Bent Objects — but couldn’t remember the name, and when I scanned my Go Comics page and couldn’t see it I figured I must have dropped it from my list. But now it seems it is just gone.
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Given how awful Andi’s cooking supposedly is, wouldn’t tv dinners be a welcome respite?
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Good point. And . . . are they still called ‘TV dinners’? We just call ’em ‘frozen meals’.
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I still think of them as “TV dinners,” though I almost never watch TV, and can’t recall the last time I did so while ingesting one. (Several months, at least.) But I do sometimes eat the less messy ones while reading stuff on my desktrop, so maybe I should start thinking of them as “computer dinners.”
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“Frozen dinner” could mean last week’s okra casserole, while “tv dinner” is easily recognizable.
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Perhaps, but in this house, no one makes casseroles, okra or otherwise, nor any other kind of meal, so ‘frozen meal’ means one that was purchased and is now sitting in the freezer.
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True. But in the syndicated Andréa and Company comic strip, they’d probably still go with “tv dinners” in order to make the joke work.
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Wouldn’t ‘tv dinner’ be a geezer reference by now?
From Wikipedia: “The term TV dinner was first used as part of a brand of packaged meals developed in 1953 by the company C.A. Swanson & Sons (the name in full was TV Brand Frozen Dinner). The original TV Dinner came in an aluminum tray and was heated in an oven.”
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I would have said that the point is that they’re trying to get her to go, but it doesn’t really make sense that way either since she’s putting her coat on already.
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Could her saying that “the tv dinners are where they were last night” mean that the tv dinners (bought a few days ago for tonight) have already been eaten? They’re trying to have her stay and prepare dinner as usual.
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So I’m unpacking stuff that was in our WI basement and then shipped to FL house. Some of the items were wrapped in 25 November 2000 newspapers; I decided to check out the ‘funny pages’. At that time, these were in the Kenosha News; it’s surprising to me that so many are STILL being read, albeit in reruns:
Real Life Adventures
Family Circus
Zits*
Blondie
Agnes
Get Fuzzy*
Overboard*
For Better or Worse*
Dilbert
Geech*
Garfield
Crankshaft
Fox Trot*
Funky Winkerbean
Cathy*
Hagar the Horrible
Hi ad Lois
Lola
Shirley and Son*
Pluggers
Ziggy
*I still read these, online.
This was the year of the Hanging Chad, so there were several editorial cartoonists; however, their names are illegible and I doubt any of THEM is still working today.
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With some very rare exceptions, nobody ever sees the last comment at the bottom of the page.
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Here’s a quick guide on how to decorate text in CIDU comments:
Italics = <i>Italics</i>
Bold = <b>Bold</b>
Strikeout= <strike>Strikeout</strike>This is how to encode a link (to hide a long address):
Link = <a href=”http://(destination URL)”>(Visible link text)</a>
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P.S. Those tags can be nested, too:
Bold Italic = <i><b>Bold Italic</b></i>
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