I think I might have liked thus comic better if it had been drawn with camels instead of polar bears.
I’ve heard the phrase “North Forty” but it just occurs to me now that I don’t actually know what it means. The joke is clearly that the “north forty” are *really* far north… but…. well, I’d probably understand it better if I actually knew what the the north forty are supposed to be… Why this is about no-one going there lately is unclear.
This is clearly not a global warming joke, but global warming jokes have become *so* expected it’s almost confusing to see a cartoon about polar bears that *isn’t* a global warming joke. (I’m assuming that is why kilby says it’d be funnier with camels … which it would be.)
Farmers are always out in the back forty. But if they don’t go to the north forty that often, the polar bears invade.
Assuming he’s in the north forty, it would also make more sense to me if he was thinking that no one had recently come back from there, rather than no one had been there. Polar bears are very fast and carnivorous.
@ woozy – The “forty” (regardless of direction) refers to parcels of land for homesteads, which were assigned in forty acre plots. Because of the squirrelly units, I had to look up the conversion factor, but it turns out to be a square that measures about 440 yards on each side.
@ Sili – Thanks, I stand corrected (homesteads = 160 acres, not 40), but the conversion precision in that Wikipedia article is not to be trusted.
Seems to me it probably is a global-warming cartoon. The north 40 acres were not (it turns out) on land, but on the top surface of the glacier where they all are living. In the time since Cal has been there, that much area has warmed and floated off as icebergs.
Oh no, no no no, that won’t work. Why would he be on a horse if they had long term been on a glacier? No, my mistake was in taking the background sky (with clouds) as background open sea (with floating ice).
Well, okay, it’s still a climate-change joke, but about things turning cold, not hot. This was cattle land, warm prairie. Now it is snow-covered and inhabited by polar bears who have migrated down — plus inattentive cowboy Cal.
I highly recommend the book, UNDERLAND, by Robert McFarlane, if you are interested in what is beneath the Earth’s crust, both natural and person-made. Especially interesting is what is being revealed by the melting of the icecaps . . . which is also discussed in the book, NUKING THE MOON: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board, by Vince Houghton. Many dangerous items buried ‘forever’ up there, aren’t so any more.
I *guess* the joke is just that it’s a *very* large area if the North 40 are that far north. Possibly, but not necessarily, because no-on has been there in a while the pesky polar bears have moved in. Or maybe the polar bears are not what caused the musing but he was just musing. But the joke just seems to be that the area is *very* large and it’s funny to see a cowboy in the arctic.
I’d say this was a deadline crunch strip except …. well, they can’t *all* be deadline strips.
“Back 40” I’ve heard the most. And I knew what that meant. North 40 I’ve heard second most. South 40 never. I’d have that North 40 had a more specific meaning than Back 40 but apparent it doesn’t.
More accurately, the Great White North Forty, eh?
@ Andréa – “dangerous items buried ‘forever’” – Right after the war, an enormous amount of ordinance was dumped into the ocean just off the German coast. One should be very careful when collecting what appears to be “amber” along those North Sea and (especially) Baltic coastlines. While most of it is probably amber, every once in a while a piece of white phosphorus turns up, which will spontaneously burst into flames as soon as it warms up and dries out. Never put those collected rocks in your pocket until they have been proven safe.
I’ll remember that, next time I’m swimming there . . . never. The last time I swam in the North Sea was off Zandvoort, sometime between 0-6 years old.
Getting back to the cartoon, apart from anything else, polar bears don’t typically live and hunt in packs, do they? There won’t be a whole lot of protein each for them if the five we see have to share that one guy and horse among them.
/// I recall once reading an old dime novel (a FRANK READE, I think) in which our heroes had to escape from a large *pack* of polar bears in *Antarctica.* You don’t often see scenes like that in today’s thrillers. . . (Charles Stilson’s somewhat later fantasy novel POLARIS OF THE SNOWS also has his protagonist, a Tarzan clone type raised to manhood by a hermit in Antarctica, fighting and slaying polar bears there the way Tarzan slew lions and gorillas in Africa. I shook my head sadly, but admittedly I wouldn’t have been impressed if Stilson had had Polaris prove his manood just by slaying penguins, either.)
Some years ago in the St. Paul zoo, a peacock got free of its cage and wandered into the polar bear enclosure, where it was promptly killed and eaten. I sometimes wonder if that was the first time in history a polar bear had tasted peacock, since the idiot birds don’t exactly infest the northern icefields. Probably made a nice change from seal (or cowboy), anyway.
Something I found on the ‘net some time back:
I just watched The Blob for the first time and not to spoil it but cold is the only way to stop it so they ship it to the arctic. And these old B movies get a lot of flack for not actually being scary but the last line of the film was that the blob can’t be killed but at least it’s stopped “so long as the arctic stays frozen” and lemme tell you that is THE most terrifying line a viewer in 2018 could hear.
Shrug, I remember reading about that.
And then the polar bear said “tastes like chicken.”
Fifty North Forty or Fight!
Arthur: Also in 2019.
What was left is LOTS of radioactive garbage in an experimental station. Probably worse than anything The Blob could come up with, and it’s REAL.
I wonder how there could be a north 40, south 40, east 40 and west 40 when those 160-acre plots had boundaries that lined up east-west and north-south. It would have to be the northwest 40, the northeast 40 and so on unless those subplots were right triangles.
Polaris of the Snows? So why wasn’t Polaris simply raised in the Arctic? BTW “Tarzan” means “white-skin” in Mangani. What does “Polaris” mean in polar bear?
I don’t recall if we’re ever told why he’s named Polaris, except that his father who named him thus:
*************
“My father has told me much, but not all. It is all in his message which I have not seen,” Polaris answered. “But that which I tell you is truth. He was a seeker after new things. He came here to seek that which no other man had found. He came in a ship with my mother and others. All were dead before I came to knowledge. He had built a cabin from the ruins of the ship, and he lived there until he died.”
“And you say that you are an American gentleman?”
“That he told me, lady, although I do not know my name or his, except that he was Stephen, and he called me Polaris.”
***************
I suppose if you live as a crippled hermit in a hut in an Antartica infested with polar bears and your only protection is a healthy young giant of a son, you probably wouldn’t want to tempt fate by naming him Cuthbert or Wilbeforce of anything like that.
As to why the south polar regions, that’s because that’s where the lost hidden city of classical-era Greeks live, in a volcanically-warmed valley. No room for valleys full of classical-era Greeks in the north polar regions, I assume. (Not to worry; Polaris speaks classical Greek, thanks to education by his father. Of course.)
The Project Gutenberg “book” is only the first installment of the original pulp novel, but probably more than most will want to peruse:
Gary Larson wasn’t above having either polar bears or penguins at the wrong pole:
The polar bears who come to visit in our “teddy village” in winter, seem rather well behaved. One even judges the snowbear making contest. They do leave when spring comes.
@ Brian in STL – Larson pleaded “mea culpa” in his “10th Anniversary” book, in which he also admitted the sin of juxtaposing cave men with dinosaurs.
P.S. I’m still confused: is your “STL” supposed to mean “ST. Louis”, or “SeaTtLe”?
Have you done a web search for “STL”? It is almost universally used for St. Louis. I have not found anyone who lives in Seattle using that.
gee, I just guessed it was St Louis as it was the first 3 letters of same and I figured it had to be someplace well known.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think I might have liked thus comic better if it had been drawn with camels instead of polar bears.
I’ve heard the phrase “North Forty” but it just occurs to me now that I don’t actually know what it means. The joke is clearly that the “north forty” are *really* far north… but…. well, I’d probably understand it better if I actually knew what the the north forty are supposed to be… Why this is about no-one going there lately is unclear.
This is clearly not a global warming joke, but global warming jokes have become *so* expected it’s almost confusing to see a cartoon about polar bears that *isn’t* a global warming joke. (I’m assuming that is why kilby says it’d be funnier with camels … which it would be.)
Farmers are always out in the back forty. But if they don’t go to the north forty that often, the polar bears invade.
Assuming he’s in the north forty, it would also make more sense to me if he was thinking that no one had recently come back from there, rather than no one had been there. Polar bears are very fast and carnivorous.
@ woozy – The “forty” (regardless of direction) refers to parcels of land for homesteads, which were assigned in forty acre plots. Because of the squirrelly units, I had to look up the conversion factor, but it turns out to be a square that measures about 440 yards on each side.
Probably referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_40 somehow.
@ Sili – Thanks, I stand corrected (homesteads = 160 acres, not 40), but the conversion precision in that Wikipedia article is not to be trusted.
Seems to me it probably is a global-warming cartoon. The north 40 acres were not (it turns out) on land, but on the top surface of the glacier where they all are living. In the time since Cal has been there, that much area has warmed and floated off as icebergs.
Oh no, no no no, that won’t work. Why would he be on a horse if they had long term been on a glacier? No, my mistake was in taking the background sky (with clouds) as background open sea (with floating ice).
Well, okay, it’s still a climate-change joke, but about things turning cold, not hot. This was cattle land, warm prairie. Now it is snow-covered and inhabited by polar bears who have migrated down — plus inattentive cowboy Cal.
I highly recommend the book, UNDERLAND, by Robert McFarlane, if you are interested in what is beneath the Earth’s crust, both natural and person-made. Especially interesting is what is being revealed by the melting of the icecaps . . . which is also discussed in the book, NUKING THE MOON: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board, by Vince Houghton. Many dangerous items buried ‘forever’ up there, aren’t so any more.
I *guess* the joke is just that it’s a *very* large area if the North 40 are that far north. Possibly, but not necessarily, because no-on has been there in a while the pesky polar bears have moved in. Or maybe the polar bears are not what caused the musing but he was just musing. But the joke just seems to be that the area is *very* large and it’s funny to see a cowboy in the arctic.
I’d say this was a deadline crunch strip except …. well, they can’t *all* be deadline strips.
“Back 40” I’ve heard the most. And I knew what that meant. North 40 I’ve heard second most. South 40 never. I’d have that North 40 had a more specific meaning than Back 40 but apparent it doesn’t.
More accurately, the Great White North Forty, eh?
@ Andréa – “dangerous items buried ‘forever’” – Right after the war, an enormous amount of ordinance was dumped into the ocean just off the German coast. One should be very careful when collecting what appears to be “amber” along those North Sea and (especially) Baltic coastlines. While most of it is probably amber, every once in a while a piece of white phosphorus turns up, which will spontaneously burst into flames as soon as it warms up and dries out. Never put those collected rocks in your pocket until they have been proven safe.
I’ll remember that, next time I’m swimming there . . . never. The last time I swam in the North Sea was off Zandvoort, sometime between 0-6 years old.
Getting back to the cartoon, apart from anything else, polar bears don’t typically live and hunt in packs, do they? There won’t be a whole lot of protein each for them if the five we see have to share that one guy and horse among them.
/// I recall once reading an old dime novel (a FRANK READE, I think) in which our heroes had to escape from a large *pack* of polar bears in *Antarctica.* You don’t often see scenes like that in today’s thrillers. . . (Charles Stilson’s somewhat later fantasy novel POLARIS OF THE SNOWS also has his protagonist, a Tarzan clone type raised to manhood by a hermit in Antarctica, fighting and slaying polar bears there the way Tarzan slew lions and gorillas in Africa. I shook my head sadly, but admittedly I wouldn’t have been impressed if Stilson had had Polaris prove his manood just by slaying penguins, either.)
Some years ago in the St. Paul zoo, a peacock got free of its cage and wandered into the polar bear enclosure, where it was promptly killed and eaten. I sometimes wonder if that was the first time in history a polar bear had tasted peacock, since the idiot birds don’t exactly infest the northern icefields. Probably made a nice change from seal (or cowboy), anyway.
Something I found on the ‘net some time back:
I just watched The Blob for the first time and not to spoil it but cold is the only way to stop it so they ship it to the arctic. And these old B movies get a lot of flack for not actually being scary but the last line of the film was that the blob can’t be killed but at least it’s stopped “so long as the arctic stays frozen” and lemme tell you that is THE most terrifying line a viewer in 2018 could hear.
Shrug, I remember reading about that.
And then the polar bear said “tastes like chicken.”
Fifty North Forty or Fight!
Arthur: Also in 2019.
What was left is LOTS of radioactive garbage in an experimental station. Probably worse than anything The Blob could come up with, and it’s REAL.
I wonder how there could be a north 40, south 40, east 40 and west 40 when those 160-acre plots had boundaries that lined up east-west and north-south. It would have to be the northwest 40, the northeast 40 and so on unless those subplots were right triangles.
Polaris of the Snows? So why wasn’t Polaris simply raised in the Arctic? BTW “Tarzan” means “white-skin” in Mangani. What does “Polaris” mean in polar bear?
I don’t recall if we’re ever told why he’s named Polaris, except that his father who named him thus:
*************
“My father has told me much, but not all. It is all in his message which I have not seen,” Polaris answered. “But that which I tell you is truth. He was a seeker after new things. He came here to seek that which no other man had found. He came in a ship with my mother and others. All were dead before I came to knowledge. He had built a cabin from the ruins of the ship, and he lived there until he died.”
“And you say that you are an American gentleman?”
“That he told me, lady, although I do not know my name or his, except that he was Stephen, and he called me Polaris.”
***************
I suppose if you live as a crippled hermit in a hut in an Antartica infested with polar bears and your only protection is a healthy young giant of a son, you probably wouldn’t want to tempt fate by naming him Cuthbert or Wilbeforce of anything like that.
As to why the south polar regions, that’s because that’s where the lost hidden city of classical-era Greeks live, in a volcanically-warmed valley. No room for valleys full of classical-era Greeks in the north polar regions, I assume. (Not to worry; Polaris speaks classical Greek, thanks to education by his father. Of course.)
The Project Gutenberg “book” is only the first installment of the original pulp novel, but probably more than most will want to peruse:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35426
Gary Larson wasn’t above having either polar bears or penguins at the wrong pole:
The polar bears who come to visit in our “teddy village” in winter, seem rather well behaved. One even judges the snowbear making contest. They do leave when spring comes.
@ Brian in STL – Larson pleaded “mea culpa” in his “10th Anniversary” book, in which he also admitted the sin of juxtaposing cave men with dinosaurs.
P.S. I’m still confused: is your “STL” supposed to mean “ST. Louis”, or “SeaTtLe”?
Have you done a web search for “STL”? It is almost universally used for St. Louis. I have not found anyone who lives in Seattle using that.
gee, I just guessed it was St Louis as it was the first 3 letters of same and I figured it had to be someplace well known.