Same as the Late-2019 list (which is being closed because it’s gotten too long) and the previous versions, this will be accessible indirectly from the Your Random Comments link in the left sidebar. I wish WordPress made this simpler, but then I wish a lot of things.
[Edit Oct 1, 2020 EditorM: We’re trying placing all these Random Comments series in the left sidebar for direct access. Let’s see how it looks and try it out.]
Please remember 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 
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Also: A list of the site’s most recent comments can be found in the left sidebar. A database of all the comments, compiled by larK, is here.
And the site’s FAQ is here.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Executed with full acuity! (AKA 20-20 vision.)
Fiddlesticks, the switchover occurred right after I made sure that the “Guide to CIDU formatting” would appear at the top of the (last) page.
We don’t say it often enough, but THANKS, BILL!!!! for all the work you do here.
DITTO!
Thirded.
I too extend thanks to the great CIDU Bill. The best way to show appreciation, if you have the means, is a donation for his March of Dimes walk. That’s coming up this Spring.
On Facebook found “a group where someone will explain the joke for you if you don’t get it” . That’s at https://www.facebook.com/groups/898666953628934
(It was recommended by someone on another group, “Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Signage” , where for some reason explaining is frowned upon.)
Didn’t we just discuss Arlo’s crush on Lois? Today, Jimmy Johnson is highlighting that sequence.
(Coincidence?)
To amplify B.A.’s observation, that is at the Arlo & Janis site — https://arloandjanis.com/imagine-that-2 for today (Thurs 13 Feb 2020) has a retro strip from 04 March 1996, and a link to that one on Go Comics with the note that a sequence starts there. A few days later, at https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/1996/03/08 , it brings in Lois.
As a further, unrelated, coincidence, yesterday’s entry at the Arlo & Janis site, https://arloandjanis.com/preliminary-document for Weds 12 Feb 2020, was titled “To be or not to be?” . Apparently a question.
Lois Bailey? So she’s not married to Hi Flagston in this continuity?
Brian, she might have kept her maiden name.
Or maybe he knew her before she was married and is accustomed to calling her that.
I don’t think she goes by her maiden name in the strip. She’s been married for 15-20 years, so if he knows her at all he should be accustomed to her name.
@ larK – The comment harvester seems to be offline. I hope this is just a temporary problem…
@Kilby: it works ok for me.
@ Bill – Wow, you did a very nice job of updating the header of “Random Comments Mark Zero” (the “gateway” page linked to by the fossilized left-side menu). Beautiful!
P.S. @ Olivier – Thanks. The Harvester works for me today, too, but it didn’t yesterday. However, retroactively debugging temporary Internet connection problems is a futile exercise.
Random question: Was there ever a major character divorce in the funnies besides Michael Doonesbury and JJ, and Rip Haywire and Cobra? I know Dick Tracy and Tess went through a rough patch (Mad Magazine sent Dick into the comic singles scene, eventually to have an affair with Blondie) and more recently Judge Parker was temporarily separated from Kathleen, but actual marital dissolutions are evidently reserved for supporting or guest characters.
Romances bust up all the time, and here and there somebody gets widowed, but that’s not quite the same thing.
(In “Pearls Before Swine”, Stephan Pastis shows his strip avatar as having been thrown out by his wife’s avatar, and we occasionally see him in a basket on her doorstep, trying to look pathetic enough to be taken in. But the characters are not divorced. And in real life, Mrs. Pastis has resisted life imitating art.)
Didn’t Junior Tracy and the former Moon Maid divorce?
And I’m sure there’s been at least one Funkyverse divorce.
Junior Tracy and Moon Maid 1.0 did not divorce; she was killed by a car bomb, and Junior mourned her. But Junior’s second and current wife, Sparkle Plenty, is divorced from cartoonist/jerk Vera Alldid.
In JUDGE PARKER, Alan’s son Randy has been described as divorced from his dangerous sometime-professional-assassin wife (and mother of his daughter) April, but I don’t think the strip ever pinpointed the moment of such.
Over in REX MORGAN, supporting character Buck (can’t remember his last name offhand), who recently became a father again with his current wife Mindy, is divorced from his violent psycho ex-wife Doris. I think his teenage son is the product of yet an earlier (pre-Doris) marriage (which probably ended in death rather divorce?) but if that was depicted it was during a period when I wasn’t reading the strip.
And yes, Funky Winkerbean himself is divorced and remarried. He’s on pretty good terms with his ex-wife, who has since herself remarried to irritating movie actor Mason Jarre.
But you were specifying “major” characters and your mileage may vary as to which of those qualify.
I think Jimmy Johnson has several times said that some of Arlo and Janis’s relationship is based on his own life with his ex-wife.
Thanks for the clarification, Shrug: I don’t think I’ve read a Tracy strip since the 80s (when we left NYC and therefore the Sunday News).
I forgot about Funky. And if we’re counting not-quite star characters, JJ’s mother Joanie Caucus set a bad example by impulsively abandoning her family in the 60s to Find Herself (divorce came later and reconciliation with JJ later still). Motherhood didn’t work out too well for Joanie. In addition to JJ there’s son Jeff, whose substitute for a life is creating an online presence as the Red Rascal, rogue anti-terrorist.
“For Better or Worse” had Ted, a minor character, cheat on his wife resulting in divorce. The title character of “Shoe” has an unseen ex-wife (Wikipedia says several ex-wives), all dating from before the strip began. Comic generally cling to mother-in-law jokes, but here and there you have ex-wife jokes replacing them.
Belatedly remembered that Joan, Val’s sister and co-star in STONE SOUP, is divorced but (happily) remarried. Her ex-husband used to show up in the strip once in a while.
Also, if I recall correctly Edda’s mother (whose name I’m forgtting) in 9 CHICKWEED LANE is also divorced and (reasonably happily) remarried to some nonentity whose name I’m not surprised I can’t remember (or care about).
I’ll have to pedantically assert that it is “For Better or For Worse”.
Those who enjoy reading the “Perry Bible Fellowship” might be interested to learn that after nearly a three-month hiatus, there have been four new comics in the last six weeks.
P.S. I can’t count. The correct PBF tally is three new comics in the last four weeks.
There’s a Kickstarter for Bug Martini’s first collection.
GoComics has finally dropped the inexplicable banner advertisement for Larson’s new “Far Side” website, which had been running for the past few weeks. I’m sure it wasn’t a public service announcement; presumably it ran because Larson (or his website operator) was paying GoComics to display it. However, if that is the case, this would be conclusive proof that the new website has been set up primarily (possibly exclusively) to turn a profit.
P.S. I still don’t think that there’s much blood to be had squeezing that particular internet turnip.
I’ve added a bookmark for The Far Side, and have been reading the display panel and the one or two featured panels. I wasn’t following the strip during its original lifetime, so these are mostly new to me, or else worth a reminder. But I haven’t been shopping there for books or subscriptions or anything like that.
“Comments are closed”
That was on the HIDU post. I guess nothing more needed to be said!
@ Mitch4 – I think Bill was worried that further comments might devolve into a discussion of the character of the wearer, rather than just the character of the hat.
to Crimeweek or Arlo. (Also, I guess I confess I was wondering if it was purely precautionary or if something got posted that had to be deleted, and triggered the closing of comments.)
And by the way, here’s something to be said for Slovenia. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, which those of us of sufficient age will remember was in some parts a matter of outright warfare and even war-crimes, the separation of Slovenia was early and relatively peaceful.
Woops, truncation — should have started
Thanks, Kilby, that is what I pretty much figured. But did not recall seeing before, except for redirects to Crimeweek or Arlo. (Also, I guess I confess I was wondering if it was purely precautionary or if something got posted that had to be deleted, and triggered the closing of comments.)
What Kilby said: a hat question was asked, a hat question was answered, and we’re done.
“And how does your head feel under something like *that*?
Your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat.”
Did publish, then unpublish a strip titled “pardon my pooch”? It appeared in my feed, but the link was null.
I’m a WordPress blogger myself. Changing the link on the left to point here should be pretty easy, if you want to do it.
Minor curiosity: Lately both “Pardon My Planet” and “Mallard Fillmore” have strange, smaller lettering. A technical glitch (many strips and comics use fonts that simulate lettering)? Somebody messing about at the syndicate? Has this phenomenon appeared in any other strips?
A partial answer: “Mallard Fillmore” is being drawn by a new artist, but the Comics Kingdom website still has Bruce Tinsley’s bio with no mention of a change. Poked around the Internet and the change has been noted but no official explanation.
Carl, it did exist, on March 12. I have no recollection what happened, but I’ll try to figure it out.
Mystery solved: I was informed that it was overtly political (albeit not overt enough that I saw it), so I axed it.
How does one get a personalized icon like Mitch has? I remember I tried one option a few years ago, but they insisted on a name at least three letters long and I didn’t want to change my screen name.
B.A. You sign up for one at Gravatar. (Then use the same name when posting on Word Press.)
Mitch, Gravatar are the mean people who won’t let me register as B.A.
But thanks.
I’m just now noticing the AMP button on the WP interface in Chrome browser. Is it actually new or did I just miss noticing it before? Anybody know what it stands for?
What it does is apparently turn the article into a standalone page of some sort? Do you know what it’s explained somewhere as doing?
AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Page” and it’s Google’s attempt to hijack your web session by having you go not to the actual page, but to a cached copy on their servers, which they claim will be “faster” (actual results vary); what they definitely do get is all your information as you browse the page, something they only partially get now depending on how many of their bugs they managed to get embed in other people’s pages. I’d avoid it like the plague.
Thanks, larK, very helpful. Oddly, I was seeing it on my desktop computer!
Arlo, hon, I don’t think there’s anybody over the age of twelve who hasn’t thought of that.
Okay, the joke here is that Dad looks hideous and would embarrass her in front of her friends.
But in the Close to Home Universe, who’s to say what constitutes “hideous”?
To B.A.’s point re: “nine months from now”…I don’t recall any discussion in the media on the possibility of a future baby boom.
larK’s alternate index to CIDU seems to be down. I hope he’s okay.
I’m fine, thank you Arthur. Stupid internet provider in NYC seems to be down (again!) — we’re hoping it’ll just come back on its own, mostly because talking to the provider tends to be an exercise in frustration. It’ll probably come back up on Monday at the latest, if it isn’t really something (like a a cut cable somewhere).
Frustrating.
By the time I got around to using it, things were back.
Goes to show you how behind the curve I am on this lazy Sunday that I needed Brian to tell me my own server was back up…
Be aware that it would not have been archiving comments while it was down, so if a comment fell off the 10 newest comment list between when the server went down and now, it won’t be archived…
As a note, it’s down for me today at 3:30pm CDT.
Is it my imagination, or is Random Comments seeing FEWER comments since Bill made it a little easier to get to and got it included on the Recent Comments list?
@ B.A. – It’s your imagination. Random Comments goes through phases, like a roller coaster. Sometimes a conversation takes off and the thread propagates via the “recent comments” list, other times we’re all too busy talking about comics to pay attention to whatever’s going on here.
Andréa disappears. Then larK’s alternate index to CIDU goes down. And when it comes back, Andréa isn’t in the dropdown list of posters. This smacks of high-level nefarious doings, or Twilight Zone material.
Must be late, Arthur, because you had me going for a second there…
The everyone dropdown only shows the last 100 people who posted; if you want to see everyone who’s ever posted (since I’ve been scraping), you need to select “everyone ever” and submit…
(And there should be less disruption in service to our staging server now that we have made arrangements for it to keep cooler even when the office building it’s in shuts off the A/C because no one is there because of the current situation…)
If, hypothetically, Andréa had entered the Witness Protection Program and larK had been ordered to delete her from the list, we wouldn’t be allowed to mention it here.
larK, thanks for letting me know a bit more of the arcana of your site. It also makes me feel less worried that I might be disappeared, too.
Add the string “?prolificity” to the URL and then check out the everyone dropdown…
Wow. She’s been gone for a month and a half (or so) and she’s still at the top of that list.
Gravatar observation — when I changed my picture in Gravatar, it changed here in this WP site not just for new posts but for old ones as well. (It would make sense either way, but shows something about how they work together,)
Just saw that Mort Drucker of MAD Magazine has died at the age of 91. We were talking about him a week or so ago when Bill brought up “It’s a Mad, Mad, etc. World”.
“Just saw that Mort Drucker of MAD Magazine has died at the age of 91. We were talking about him a week or so ago when Bill brought up “It’s a Mad, Mad, etc. World”.”
Total coincidence!
New post in email notifications, but apparently dropped from real main feed?
”
He told me to Walk this way!
by CIDU Bill
Rosen knows this guy is apparently living on the floor of the Red Sea, right?
“
Mitch, I deleted it when I realized maybe he wasn’t sitting on the floor of the Sea after all. Or maybe he was, so hard to tell the way it was drawn, but I decided it just wasn’t worth the bother.
I forget sometimes that if a post is live for a millisecond, that’s long enough for people to be notified.
There isn’t even a 5-second rule.
What happened to “on Pardon My Reporting”. There were several comments but the page seems gone. Off the rails?
Brian, if you read the comments, you know why it disappeared as completely as a photo of a dead cosmonaut.
@ Brian – That “read” in Bill’s comment is past tense {red} and not present tense {reed}. The thread vanished because it strayed way too far into political territory. Yes, that rule is as constricting as a “stay at home” order, but it keeps the flame wars down, and that’s the reason that CIDU seems like a comfortable “home” to many of us here.
Good grammatical point, Kilby: I should have gone with “If you’d read”
Oooh, I hope it wasn’t my post about “digital penetration” that pushed it off the safe area. That did involve electoral politics, as the origin of the story, but was really not about that as much as the language oddity.
It seems that Heart of the City now has a new writer/artist. This tweet was linked to from its gocomic page:
A few WWW searches give no other indication of the change. Anyone know anything about it (and are willing to share)?
I knew about a week ago. In fact, I emailed steenz to congratulate her. She won the Dwayne McDuffie aware, and Dwayne was a friend of mine.
http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/04/20/tatulli-passes-heart-of-the-city-to-steenz/
Thanks for the link.
Tatulli has posted about it, and it was widely reported in HotC comments. Which didn’t stop a bunch of people today posting, “What happened! Guest artist! Hope this over soon!!!!” Several comments by Tatulli himself, which is pretty unusual.
There are some ugly parallels between this changeover for “Heart” and what happened when “Nancy” changed authors a while back. If people don’t like what a new author is writing and/or drawing, then they should simply stop reading the strip: it’s not my (or anyone else’s) place to tell Tatulli (or the syndicate) what they are “allowed” to do with their strip. That said, a zombie remains a zombie, and although I would never stand in the way of Steenz turning her version of the strip into a successful, ongoing feature for others, I do not feel any need to contribute to her readership statistics myself.
Here’s Tatulli’s comment from today:
I made HEART OF THE CITY comics for 22 years. And it’s time to pass it down to the another younger artist; to create new adventures, characters, and events that the next generation can relate to and enjoy. Not everybody will agree with that decision, I know. But I thought it would be nice to inject some new blood into the printed newspaper comics pages, and maybe attract some new readers too. I care about the comics moving foward, and it’s incredibly hard for a new artist to bring a new feature to print today. Almost impossible, even. So we thought we’d try something new. And something new always pisses some people off. I’m sorry about that, truly. But progress is painful.
I guess my thoughts are along the lines that just trying to do an imitation of the original, like B.C. or Blondie, probably would be even worse. That being said, there’s nothing wrong with critique as if it were an original. For instance, the use of zipatone rather than real shading. Tatulli says it looks much better in color, and those might get distributed on GoComics at some point.
In the “Walk in the Park” https://comicsidontunderstand.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/walk-in-the-park/ thread, we had very nice summaries from IanOsmond and others, about Questionable Content and others, that raised for me the issue of whether and how to catch up on indie webcomics.
Alright, webcomic experts, I’ve fired up one of those petrified tab sessions, and here is where my not-caught-up reading stood at, for various series.
For some of these, I at one time tried to maintain two separate threads, one to read from way back and catch up, and one pretty much current, because those are more interesting or something. It was hard to do, and I know I lost track, but this strategy remains an option.
So, what are your recommendations for each strip? Wait, I should suggest more options:
x – I don’t know, this is not one I follow
y – Pretty much free standing, so you may or may not want to see things you missed, but there aren’t story lines to worry about
0 – This is not worth it at all, just give it up
1 – This one seems done for, never to return. Close your tab
2 – Just keep on plodding thru the past, no need to hurry to the present
3 – Just jump to current new ones, nothing to regret about missing those in between
4 – Try your fancy both-at-once
5 – This has been picked up by one of the big syndicate sites, you might prefer to follow it there
Okay, here is the last-read panel or strip number or date for some of these I’ve self-zombieized:
A) Don’t Get Any Ideas by Sylvia Odhner. Num 7, 2019-09-13. (This one started up after she brought Think Before You Think to a conclusion)
https://dontgetanyideas.com/comic/20190913
B) PUCK 510, 2019-09-02. http://www.puckcomics.com/?comic=puck-510
C) The Adventures of Business Cat , Training 2016-09-29 https://www.businesscat.happyjar.com/comic/training/ Okay, this I already know is both option 1 (in a good way — it is complete) and #5 (on GoComics
)D) Library Comics 597 2019-07-10 http://librarycomic.com/comic/597/ This one I do see current ones, via their weekly newsletter
E) The Devil’s Panties #13075 (there can’t have been that many!) from 2019-04-22 http://thedevilspanties.com/archives/13075
F) Chuck Lorre Vanity Cards #623 from 2019-05-16 http://www.chucklorre.com/index.php?p=623 But I’m not watching any of his TV, now that Big Bang has concluded.
G) Aha! Questionable Content, the series that kicked off this thread!
I have #3826 “Wacky Sidekicks” , date not shown
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3826
H) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, or SMBC “Potential” from around 2018-04-18 (that’s the date for the blog entry link below the comic)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/potential-2
I guess this is both a y and a 5, but the one on the website and the one on GoComics were always different so maybe people who really like it do read both?
The nice thing about the GoComics version is that it doesn’t use the rollover texts
I) XKCD #1944 The End of the Rainbow https://xkcd.com/1944/
J) Explain XKCD #1944 The End of the Rainbow https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1944:_The_End_of_the_Rainbow
I kept advancing this to keep aligned with XKCD itself, but would only read if truly puzzled by the XKCD, as the arch but still sincere yet somewhat supercilious explanations were usually too much to bear!
K) Bad Machinery 2014-03-04 http://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/?date=20140304
This was one I was trying to read old and new in different tabs, plus another of his comics, and couldn’t manage it.
And then it apppeared on GoComics!
And then about a month ago there stopped being new ones on GoComics.
L) Existential Comics #2361 Philosophy News Network , date not shown, http://existentialcomics.com/comic/294
M) Classic Bobbins 1999-01-06 http://www.scarygoround.com/bobbins/index-archive.php?date=19990106
Aha, here was the other old John Allison
N) Nikki Sprite — the less said the better, I guess https://nikkisprite.com/comic/sorry-but-nikki-is-on-an-extended-break/
O) Sheldon http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180912.html
I didn’t get much into this
P) Least I Could Do or LICD Last one read seems to be 2018-03-30, which (speaking of date formats) they show on the comics page as 30.03.18 . https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20180330
For a while I was following this as sort of a defiant gesture of political incorrectness, especially after reading a column/review by Shaenon Garrity that I thought was excessively bent on eviscerating this, in the company of a truly nasty one that I thought did deserve her scorn.
But then it became less interesting, when all that external stuff faded and the internal value was all that I was getting. Also, they changed the website mechanics, and the next/previous weren’t working as well.
Q) Think Before You Think 2019-06-21 http://thinkbeforeyouthink.net/?comic=20190621-wedding-cake
This comic came to a conclusion and is done! Item A is the artist’s next project, and I confess I’m not getting into this as much. But I thought I would list this before closing the tab, to share the comic with CIDUers reading this far (!) who may not be familiar with this comic and might enjoy it in retro.
R) Doc and Raider – https://docandraider.com/ Woops, doesn’t seem to be specific older entry. WP blog format.
S) Out There by R.C. Monroe #2226 , final 2016-03-09 or one later. http://outthere.keenspot.com/
Done. New readers may want to see http://outthere.keenspot.com/NewReaderGuide.html first.
I guess this went to a successful conclusion. My feeling as a reader at the time was that something was wrong as the schedule went to fewer and fewer updates per week, and the artist seemed to turn his attention more to a couple other series from approximately the same universe (at first). For reference, those were http://clicheflambe.keenspot.com/d/20130607.html and http://inhere.keenspot.com/d/20130603.html
T) Girls With Slingshots. Sorry, I don’t have the links anymore.
This was a completed story. Then the creator got a artist to work on coloring the whole series (which had been b/w mostly).
Please don’t counter-recommend Something Positive, I don’t know why but I never cared for it. Maybe because Girls With Slingshots had to take over his cat with the melting bones, or whatever it was.
I mentioned in the Lio thread that the new Heart of the City strips are now in color on GoComics. I forgot this was where we were discussing it.
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/tatulli-dude-you-might-have-overestimated-how-funny-the-coronavirus-would-feel-by-mid-april/comment-page-1/#comment-57253
I like(d) to buy print collections of online comics I like but can’t keep up with (which would be pretty much all of them,, except xkcd, and even there I bought the print collection…). Reading a physical book, it is much easier to remember where you were, and also see how much more there is, so it’s not the endless clicking that goes on deep into the night; buying the book also was a good way to support the strip, I always thought (don’t know if there’s a consensus among creators if this is true or not). I always preferred to buy the collection off the site itself, rather than Amazon, or even some of the specialty press places, even if it cost more to buy it direct. Again, not sure if there’s consensus from creators about what’s best, but I liked doing it that way. Scary Go Round I remember buying stuff from England rather than the place he had a US distribution with, even though it was more expensive, but you’d get extra perqs, personalizations, or extra material not available elsewhere. In the end, I bought from all sources, of course. I found those particularly rewarding to read in print, you’d get the whole arc, and could get a really good feel for the story when he was on fire, much more poignant in one go than any individual strip. Again, reading on the web, you never really know how long you’ll be there, and it’s hard to pick up again if you stop.
The problem was often creators would do one collection, and then be scared off and never do another, so I’d be sitting there, waiting and waiting in vain. Real Life I was sorry to never get a second volume, Mac Hall, ditto.
Now, funnily enough, just the other day I was brought back to Strong Female Protagonist, which I read up to a point online, maybe twice, before losing my thread, or catching up to current and then having to wait a while to binge read again; so bought the book, and then started that like two or three times before getting distracted, so it really had this stigma for me, that when I finally sat down to read it, I would read it all uninterrupted, so I never did. It was sitting at my bedside, and my wife the other week picked it up and got really into it, such that I was galvanized to go online and buy the second volume (which I almost missed out on — had to get it from second hand places, rather than direct from the website). So now I have both volumes, I just need to sit down and start it (again)…
But definitely, if I find an online continuing story strip I like, I really, really like to buy the print version.
Good thinking, larK. I did get print books of some of the comics I wanted to follow, and as you say, it made for better continuity in the pretty strictly serial ones — e.g. “Out There”.
Such as Topatoco, https://topatoco.com/ a mix of books, clothing, and knicknacks
One of the all-time great Meta strips, ruined by the rule that Frazz needs to have the self-important final word.
Did we previously discuss the appearance of a geezer-adapter like this one in some comic?
Oh. My. Dog. Is that a joke, or really a thing, Mitch4?
Well, I didn’t follow up and click the SHOP button, but it looked legit in my Facebook feed. Of course there must be an element of presenting it as a novelty item, but still it had better work!
A quick search shows that there appears to be more than one model of “retro handset” so that one can indeed be real.
There also is an attraction for people to create “retro style” rotary dialer.
https://greendiary.com/rotary-mechanical-smartphone-combines-steampunk-with-minimalism.html
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/05/engineer-creates-rotary-mobile-phone-hates-texting-12353788/
B.A. : Frazz does have a point though, and so that strip works for me.
With the postings of a wonderful variety of songs of late I was reminded of this one my Michael Stipe that was reportedly written in response to the current situation, but the more I read the lyrics the more I realize I don’t know for sure what they mean. I still find the performance moving.
What do you think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCHfdpbyY84
I’m wondering if I can refresh my confused memory of some old CIDU “special collections” — akin to the Arlo Page and Award, or the recent Grim Reaper theme threads, I half recall a couple older ones. But maybe they weren’t CIDU!
I wasn’t reading CIDU in 2000, if it was even around then anyway — yet I recall a special page for gags about “hanging chads”. (A key term in the disputed election of 2000, for you younger readers.) Or maybe that was just a premonition of the pop cultural bashing of people named Chad, that came along in a later decade?
Also not sure if it was on CIDU or elsewhere that someone collected products, services, and software that used the number 3000 in the name. (Yes, it was a genuine fad. Maybe people just wanted to jump ahead a thousand years.)
Anyway, this came up for me when I saw a current Bizarro using a 3000 product name!
https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2020-05-04
(Sorry about using Comics Kingdom, this one isn’t on either Bizarro blog yet.)
Yes, Mitch, we were keeping track of hanging Chad references, to try to pinpoint how long after the year 2000 cartoonists would finally realize there were no new variations of the gag. Unfortunately, the Great Experiment ws lost during Comicgeddon.
The “3000” thing is a mystery to me.
By the way, CIDU began in May of 1996, though I can’t pinpoint the exact date (that was lost when my computer crashed in 2007).
I thought you might get some schadenfreude from GoDaddy’s latest gaffe:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/godaddy_ssh_login_details_compromised/
But it’s the customers suffering, Arthur: no potential for schadenfreude there.
You’re right, of course. I wasn’t thinking it through.
Frazz might have a point, Grawlix, but he completely Squirreled the point Caulfield was making, and ruined the meta nature of the strip.
To paraphrase the WW2 slogan, “Is this quip necessary?”
“he completely Squirreled the point”
I like that — brilliant!
Full disclosure: CIDU Bill has already used that as a verb.
Nice avatar!
Your idea to conserve some electrons and have them returned to stock, by deleting your exploratory posts, is admirable. But we might all pause and notice that the substitution is retroactive! Actually not so surprising, it just shows which way the inclusion works at WordPress.
I must thank Kilby for his super suggestion how to work around the “minimum three letters” rule.
By the way, I notice I haven’t been rescuing Moderated comments on the Crimeweek and Arlo pages as often as I should have. My apologies.
Also BTW, if not hard to do, both those sites could benefit from a Recent comments list. Thanks!
Mitch4, larK’s alternate Recent Comics Archive includes comments to the Arlo pages.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. But there’s still a different functionality best served by the built-in Recent Comments — just browsing for “anything been happening here?”.
I’m not sure what you mean. That’s what I used LarK’s page for. That’s why lobbied to get the URLs to be styled so that you can tell the difference between a followed and unfollowed link. When I do a search, the last one that I read will be the highest followed link. Any links above that have new content.
It was when Bill today mentioned he had released several moderated comments on the alternate sites. I was about to say I couldn’t look them up thru the larK archive because I didn’t know the names of the threads to look for. But just now it seems you may just be looking under Everything?
if not hard to do, both those sites could benefit from a Recent comments list
Your wish is my command.
(as long as it’s easy)
Yes, I always search for Everything from Everyone.
Bill – Thanks! I see them in place already; and they have already been helpful!
Brian – I guess I see how that works — if this is your primary interface for reading. I use it just for searching, and ordinarily rely first on email notification, followed with browsing on the site(s) it(them)self(ves) for comments on threads I haven’t myself commented in hence do not get email alerts.
Just a reminder that my archive won’t capture a comment that was too long in moderation such that it fell off WordPress’ Recent Comments list — ie: if I have a comment in moderation, and before it comes out of moderation ten more people comment (without any of those going into moderation), by the time my comment comes out of moderation, it won’t show up on WordPress’ Recent Comments list (specifically the RSS one) because the newer comments will have pushed it off, and so my scraping the comments will not capture that comment — at all!
So if there are an abnormal amount of comments in moderation that Bill comments on it, it is very possible, nay probable, that a lot of those will never be captured by my scraping system.
Just in case anyone is confused by larK’s reference to “ten recent comments” (I know that I was, so I looked it up): The list of 15 recent comments in the menu on the left is controlled by the page template, and is not the same as the “RSS Comments Feed” that WordPress also supports (and which once upon a time was listed on the left below “RSS – Posts”). The WordPress RSS feed is (currently) limited to 10 comments, and even if there is a way to change it, it’s unlikely to be somewhere to which Bill has convenient access.
I know I’ve asked before, but if anyone knows a way to maybe parameter-hack the rss feed so it will display more comments, I’d love to know about it.
if this is your primary interface for reading.
It’s my only interface. I don’t have email notifications turned on.
Murray, New Zealander: He may be dead.
Dave, American: He maybe did what?
Synchronicity, sort of: Following a bunch of vintage strips at Comics Kingdom. Postwar Phantom is helping a blonde who was thrown unconscious from an airplane over the jungle (with a parachute). Postwar Mandrake is aboard a pilotless airplane that contains an unconscious blonde. Both strips were created by Lee Falk
Bux Sawyer is busy landing his experimental rocket plane, and meanwhile his wife Christy has flown hher small civilian plane into an arms test range and managed to land her damaged plane in a nearby canyon. So while Buz is otherwise occupied, his best friend and erstwhile c.o., Jeff, a widower, has been leading the search party, and has found Christy in a remote canyon, and is talking her out of her clothes. So that he can treat her injuries, of course.
… And every time they say “canyon” I ask “you mean Steve Canyon? When did we last hear from him here, anyway?”
I don’t remember seeing Buz Sawyer as a kid, but the Sunday paper had a gag strip starring Roscoe Sweeney, an orange grower who was billed as “Buz Sawyer’s Pal”. Once in a while, we’d get a flashback glimpse of Sawyer when Sweeney regaled local kids with a tall tale, but he never actually visited. For military action there was Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates.
I miss the days before nearly everything became gag-a-day. Soaps and adventures were plentiful, many with nicely rendered ladies for the almost-adolescent reader. Eve in “The Heart of Juliet Jones” … pretty much any female in Steve Roper … Blondie … The Jackson Twins … Moon Maid … and every so often, an elaborately languid maiden in Prince Valiant.
Would they really be watching much more television now? Did we really see them out of the house all that much PRE-Virus?
From Wayno’s blog. A group video call of Blazek, Wayno, Whamond, and Parisi. (Though it seems Blazek placed the call or anyway took the screenshot, as his screen says “(You)”.
Didn’t we just see this?
@BA: right here: https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/05/25/ice-cream-social-distancing/
[Off-Topic] Does anyone know what happened to the language selector menu in Wikipedia? <aggravated rant mode ON>The idiots seem to have removed it, in favor of a cookie-based selection option, which is not nearly as convenient for people who need (or want) to switch between several languages. Why couldn’t they have implemented a simple system in the URL, so that we can automatically access the search field in the desired language?</rant mode OFF>
P.S. I remember that there is at least one Wiki-admin or moderator among us, but I do not remember who that was. Any information about this user-hostile novelty would be most welcome.
Hmmm, off-topic from “Random? Okay…
And ON your topic .. I looked in Settings / Preferences and somewhere there was this:
Languages
Use a compact language list, with languages relevant to you.
The “compact language list” was a link, going to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Compact_Language_Links
Which in turn has this general passage before the details:
As the editors of Wikimedia projects write more and more content in more and more languages, the lists of interlanguage links in the sidebar grow longer. Articles such as “Barack Obama” or “Sun” have more than 200 links, and that becomes a problem for users who need to switch among languages. It is not easy to find a specific language in those long lists. With compact language links the list that is shown initially is made shorter by showing a subset of languages the user is most likely interested in and the user may access the rest in a separate panel that allows searching for a language easily.
The Compact language links feature is part of Universal Language Selector (ULS) – the extension that provides language selection and access to various language related settings. ULS has been in use on all Wikimedia wikis since 2013. Compact language links was available as a separate beta-feature since 2014 when it was created in an OPW project.
That article merely confirms my opinion that the Wikipedia admins are ivory tower idiots. They have removed a very simple, intuitive menu selector, which was extremely easy to use, and replaced it with a politically correct, user hostile monstrosity that requires 28 paragraphs to explain. The entry page for “www.wikipedia.org” does not have a “preferences” option anywhere on it. If it is necessary to create a user ID and profile to use this feature, so much the worse. I did not have to “log in” to be able to use the old menu selector, and I refuse to do so now. Wikipedia used to be an informal, independent association of people interested in sharing knowledge. Requiring users to identify themselves just to use fundamental features is just as bad as Google’s permanent fixation on siphoning tracking information for profit.
Sorry about that, Kilby. Yes, those “settings” I was looking at were after signing in.
Al Jaffee retires.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/06/06/al-jaffee-mad-magazine-retires
@ Mitch4 – I can scarcely believe that there was any causality between the two events, but less than two days after letting off all that steam in that rant, Wikipedia has restored the language selector menu.
Kilby speaks, Wiki listens! :-)
Has anyone else been having trouble reading “Rhymes with 0range” at “Comics Kingdom”? The website has been down (or at least only occasionally accessible) for at least a week or two.
Kilby, I can see it. Not that it’s especially worthwhile these days
Thanks, Chak. The RwO URL has been so unreliable lately that I’m about to give up permanently on anything published by King Features. Not that this would be a significant loss.
I think I figured out the concept of the Luann strip: Nobody actually has sex, but they’re all obsessed with EVERYBODY ELSE’S sex lives.
Hmm, “unsane”? Wouldn’t it “sane”, “resane”, or “uninsane”?
I was looking up info on the older names for Sri Lanka, and quite by accident found some valuable facts about a semi-fancy modern derived abstract noun.
@ Mitch4 – … and … ???
Mitch4 is saying that he found that information serendipitously.
Sail on, Mitch4.
How long do you all keep with a strip that changes? Do you give it a month or two to get on its feet? I’m thinking right now of Heart of the City and Rhymes with Orange. So far, both are very disappointing.
@ Arthur – That’s fine, of course, but Mitch4 might have had the decency to identify the “semi-fancy modern derived abstract noun“, so that the rest of us don’t have to sit on the edge of our seats, waiting (in vain) for it to become obvious.
Okay, Kilby, here you are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Princes_of_Serendip
Hope you didn’t mind the obscurity, felt to be necessary to set a little puzzle.
Good comments and solutions!
BTW, I only once ate at the restaurant called Serendipity in New York. The story there was that the furnishings, flatware, etc, might all be for sale if you found something you liked.
@Chak, I don’t use a different rule for comics “that change” (assuming you mean “change creators”). When I stop enjoying a strip, I stop reading it.
I think Heart is actually improving over the last couple of weeks. It isn’t as brilliant as Tatulli’s best strips, but then he wasn’t at top form out of the gate either.
Chak, I didn’t even notice the change in Rhymes With Orange, any more than when Rina Piccolo took over a few years ago.
Heart is a completely different strip now (even if it copies some elements from the old Heart of the City strip) and I gave it a couple of weeks the same as I would any new strip.
Heart is a completely different strip now
Arrrgh! Remember what happened the last time somebody said this!
I’ve been reading Rhymes with Orange since Piccolo joined it,, and found it funny twice.
I wanted to give Heart a good break-in period, but again, not funny. And neither one seems to have any redeeming social value.
No one should read a strip they don’t enjoy. I still don’t agree that Heart has radically changed. I think if Tatulli had produced strips with the plotlines of recent months, there would be little complaint. To be sure, a number of people were unhappy when the time-jump occurred, but that was him and a significant time back. The main thing Steenz did was drop the C19 strips that Tatulli was doing and went back to Heart and gang in middle school. I thought that was a great idea. I think she has stayed very true to the characters, although of course the drawing is very different.
So… he stands there and examines his work before he flushes?
The truth is, I’d dropped Heart a few months before her growth spurt and came back to check out the new
(-ish) story line. I stuck around until Steenz turned it into something I didn’t recognize.
I think I understand her concept, though: she seems to be writing Middle School Heart for middle school girls. Which is fine, and maybe a brilliant decision marketingwise, but just not for me.
B.A.: Also, we’re a little too obsessed with coronavirus if that’s the main health risk we associate with inhaling our own fecal matter.
‘she seems to be writing Middle School Heart for middle school girls’: my exact feeling.
Re: flushing, examining the works before can alert you if anything unusual shows up.
“So… he stands there and examines his work before he flushes?”
As did Dr. L–n in Smollett’s novel HUMPHREY CLINKER —
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2160/2160-0.txt
” he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with
business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging
over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it
about under his nose; nor was this effect to be wondered at, when we
consider that this substance abounds with the self-same volatile salts
that are so greedily smelled to by the most delicate invalids, after
they have been extracted and sublimed by the chemists.–By this time the
company began to hold their noses; but the doctor, without taking
the least notice of this signal, proceeded to shew, that many fetid
substances were not only agreeable but salutary….”
(and much more before and after the above excerpt)
Ambergris, anyone?
@ B.A. – If you want to discuss a perverse fixation with fecal matter: the (older) standard type of toilet installed in a very large number of (older) German homes is called a “Flachspüler” (literally: “shallow flusher”). Apparently people used to like to look at the stuff before flushing it down the pipe. Luckily, most modern houses (and virtually all public facilities, including restaurants and hotels) have the traditional “deep flushing” toilets, as are used nearly everywhere else in Europe and America.
Kilby, I did read once that Germans have a bit of a Scheiße fixation.
(Oh, I didn’t know my Kindle keyboard could do that!)
Guy in the comic isn’t examining his poo. He’s simply bending over to reach the flush lever on what appears to be a commercial toilet, not a home model. Those ones do flush ferociously.
As for some…uh…self-examination…you’re supposed to do that. It can give you many clues about you health. I’m talking about visual inspection. You should look for blood, excess mucus, colour, amount. Note any changes. And let’s not talk about worms…
@ B.A. – I truly do not understand how a country so renowned for superb engineering could come up with such a stinker of a design, and (even worse) manage to make it the standard default for most of the 20th century. Even today, there are (seriously!) Internet pages (only in German, of course) devoted to describing which type of toilet is “better” – as if this question would take more than half a second to decide (for anyone with a functional nose, that is).
However, I just ran into a wonderful comparison (in English) by the German comedian Vince Ebert:
1. You wear the mask to protect others, not yourself. I assumed everybody knew that by now.
2. Davan’s coming awfully close to these unmasked people: You’d think he’d be avoiding them like the Plague.
3. Odd that the Son of the Confederacy is the only person in the strip who seems friendly.
Elsewhere in Facemask Follies… Shouldn’t the girl already be wearing a mask? Or did she remember the sign but not the mask?
(I’m just kidding, of course: These Lio/Coronavirus strips haven’t had a real punchline yet)
By the way, was the girl ever given a name? Kind of a tough thing to do in a strip with no dialogue.
Oh, and “SHARE A MASK”???
@ B.A. – According to Wikipedia, Liō‘s heartthrob is named “Eva Rose”. It does not explain how the name was established.
I guess three possibilities, Kilby: the name was written on the front of her notebook. we saw Lio write “Lio [heart] Eva Rose” somewhere, or Tatulli mentioned it in an interview at one point, because that was the name of a little red-haired girl he had an elementary school crush on.
Her name is written on occasion.
https://www.gocomics.com/lio/2008/04/11
https://www.gocomics.com/lio/2012/02/11
https://www.gocomics.com/lio/2013/02/11
I can’t find it, but somewhere or other here somebody posted a link to a video of Freddie and the Dreamers doing “I’m Telling You Now”. Quite coincidentally, John Allison has started a new storyline at Destroy History in which the Beatles never made it and Freddie and the Dreamers are the band to “take music into the jet age”. Shelly Winters, the Ginger Ninja herself, has gone back in time to set things right. The story starts here: https://destroyhistory.com/comic/toe-tapper/
@ Brian in StL – Nice catch! Lio is normally so devoid of dialogue that I didn’t even think to try the text search at GoComics. The results there show that her name appeared at least once a year from 2007 to 2015, but not at all since then.
P.S. Sorry, my geezer eyes missed Page Two of the results. There were four later appearances of “Eva Rose” in “Liō”, most recently on 7-Dec-2019.
For the Fourth:
In seventy-six the sky was red
thunder rumbling overhead
Bad King George couldn’t sleep in his bed
And on that stormy morn, Ol’ Uncle Sam was born.
The incomparable Paul Robeson, for whom this was written.
Tangent from our thread on record formats and “album” .. My family had this as an “album” of two discs at 78rpm, four sides. You can sort of hear where the musical action stops and lets you turn over the record.
IN case anyone is interested, Gary Larson is back . . .
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff
Never apologize for offering interesting trivia, Arlo!
But he left out the detail that makes it relevant: many of the Acadians ended up in Louisiana, where their descendants are called Cajuns (which is somehow a corruption of “Acadians.”
Some of us had to read “Evangeline”. Or maybe something else by Longfellow, and then stuff about him which would include a description of “Evangeline”.
But even for those spared a detailed encounter, the opening line:
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
will be long preserved in a list of examples of feet in different metres.
B.A., thanks for posting the A&J, and let me note that the sound-change to take Acadians to Cajuns is pretty easy, and the part involving affricating or “softening” the ‘d’ to ‘dzh’ is something you can find in informal speech today, quite often.
Honestly, while Acadians-to-Cajuns seems logical in hindsight, I would not have made the connection on my own.
In case it wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean to say anything against the fun or surprise of having the Acadian => Cajun development pointed out! But wanted to position it in the ‘lawful’ bin rather than ‘crazy’.
And actually, it isn’t easy to pick out forms in contemporary speech where both versions are flourishing side-by-side. To continue with national / ethnic names, would you be shocked to hear someone say “Canadian” more like “Canadjun”? I’m on the fence about whether I could expect to hear that someone plays the “accordjun”.
Not precisely the same thing, but when the -ion suffix for making a noun abstraction is added onto a verb ending with a dental , we can see the stop turn into a sibilant, all the time. Decide + ION = deciSion, collide + ION = colliSion. etc
A German comedian once quipped that the name “Canada” came from an immigrant who, upon arriving at a deserted shoreline, exclaimed “kaineh da!” (southern German dialect for “keiner da“, meaning “nobody here”).
And Arkansas has been named by people who wanted their own Kansas.
geographical fugue by ernst toch
malaga malaga canada canada rimini rimini brindisi
This one maybe more spirited:
@Kilby
So this comic is a horrendous, despicable racist? All the millions of North American natives who who lived here before the Europeans arrived were clearly “nobody,” not people, right? The Inuit, Athabascan, Tlingit, Kwakiutl, Iroquois, Huron, and many other nations count as nobody?
Yeah, my remarks are not funny. They’re at least not as actively evil as your comedian.
Mitch: it took me a really long time to make the connection between the artist I knew from texts as “Titian” and the one I kept hearing people talk about, “Chishan”…
@ Carl Fink – Anyone who has ever tried to swim in the northern Atlantic knows why Canadian beaches are sparsely populated (the water is freezing). It was a standup comedy gag, and there wasn’t any indication or reference about whether the rest of the continent might be teeming with inhabitants. Sometimes a pun is just a pun.
@Carl Fink: Oh, please… You jump to the most extreme possible interpretation so fast you fail to consider it’s a dig at all present Canadians, First Peoples and all: Canada has a very low population density of 4 people per square kilometer, making it the tenth least densely populated nation on Earth according to Wikipedia (Mongolia is #1 with 1.9, and Australia has 3…)
It’s not always racism.
@ larK – Actually, when I heard it, I thought it was more of a dig at the ignorance of rural southern Germans.
Andréa asked me to post this:
Thanks to a link provided by a CIDUer a few years back, I began reading Doc and Raider and enjoyed it immensely.
On 3 August 2020, Sean Martin died of pancreatic cancer, which none of his readers even knew about. Here is his obituary:
https://www.mcclurefuneralservice.net/obituary/Sean-Martin
OMG, that’s terrible. I so enjoy Doc & Raider, even though I could never tell who was who.
Thanks for letting us know.
Me, neither, but it never mattered. I’m HOPING someone will keep the site going and re run them all; I really don’t like binge-watching comics, so I’ve not gone back to its beginning.
If we had any historical re-enactors to enjoy this …
BTW, caption doesn’t seem to have been incorporated into the image. It was:
At what point are we no longer reënacting churning butter and actually just churning butter?
@ Mitch4 – “If we had any historical re-enactors…”
But we do have (at least) one: I am sure that Meryl A. will appreciate that comic!
P.S. On a recent visit to a “glass creamery” just south of Berlin, each of the kids in the tour was given a small plastic jar of heavy cream, which they were supposed to turn into butter just by (vigorously) shaking the jar. The trick really does work (smaller kids needed help), and the result was very entertaining, if a little soft.
(Yes of course – but I was letting it be a shout-out by description, rather than directly by name)
Does anyone else have objections to the current story arc in “Mutts”? I’ve been loyally following the strip for many years. It went a little downhill when McDonnell replaced his hand lettering with computer fonts, but the current (extended) thread based entirely on characters “borrowed” from Popeye(*), and especially two Sunday strips in a row using the same xeroxed image of Hokusai’s “Wave” make me think that he could use a creativity sabbatical. I’m seriously considering deleting “Mutts” from my daily link list.
P.S. (*) – Just because both strips belong(ed) to King Features doesn’t make it right. After all, he could have simply waited until 1-Jan-2025 for Popeye to become public domain.
P.P.S. The relevant section of the story arc begins here (skipping the initial setup to avoid at least two ads that are interspersed in McDonnell’s archive). Perhaps the first of his two Hokusai copies was a hidden reference to the “Popeye” story arc:
I’ll be glad when it is finally over.
Popeye has been in the public domain in Europe since 2009, so, no problem for us.
P.P.P.S. Sorry, wrong image; here is the correct Sunday strip:
I had the SAME thought . . . it seemed to be a very uncharacteristic week of MUTTS. At first, I thought maybe there was a ‘guest artist’, but it didn’t appear to be. I didn’t like it at all, and I usually like everything. Maybe it’s ’cause Crabby and his cursing was in there all week; I can tolerate it for one strip, but not for an entire week. And I don’t like Popeye, either, so it was a double whammy.
I was happy to see a return to normal with this Monday’s and Tuesday’s comics.
I don’t read Mutts, so I haven’t read the storyline you mention — but as a one-off, I think the 7-29 strip is pretty funny.
That’s base on the painting “The Great Wave”.
@ Bill – I agree with you on there (as a single example), but after two weeks of Popeye masquerades, it got awfully tiresome.
@Kilby: It might have been at the syndicate’s request. They’ve been bringing in outside artists for Popeye lately. Randy Milholland of Something Positive did like a month of Popeye strips and I think Shaenon Garrity did at least a Sunday strip. Maybe McDonnell agreed to do some Popeye stuff in his own strip. The second and third panels of the first strip (the one you accidentally posted instead of the Hokusai) are identical in layout and dialog to the very first Popeye strip. Just replace Crabby with Castor Oyle.
Kilby, I looked at re rest of the sequence, and I totally agree: what’s funny once can get really tedious after a week
‘Tis the season . . . for Pumpkin [Pie] Spice. I received my first catalog/advertisement a week or so ago, but today’s entry beats ’em all . . . .
Andréa, that must be for the people who miss sitting in starbucks smelling that every fall.
Or Michael’s, where it must be sprayed all day long, in the fall. After that, it’s pine for the Howlidays. I supposed someone will come up with a pine-scented mask ;-)
Speaking of autumn coming early this year, this just came into my comics feed . . . altho, my catalogs and Big Lots, etc. are all pushing autumn decos and ‘Halloween is just around the corner’ ads.
This was a prelude panel for Piraro’s Bizarro blog.
I get that the main gag is the visual of the Great Stone Faces,wearing masks and the contexts that led to it. And a nice minor touch is that some of them had trouble getrting the ear elastics to fit right.
But also a fun second joke would be that the location is Easter Island and a couple of the masks have Easter-themed pictures: a decorated egg on the green one in back and of course the chocolate bunny on the front right foreground.
Raising the question: what are the other two mask designs, and are they also Easter related?
While my comment with an extracted image-direct link is held, let me point just to the containing page, and ask, Are the first and fourth masks also Easter related (like the second and third)?
https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2020/8/17/goals
And speaking of Aku-aku imagery:
The first is the face of a rabbit, the fourth looks like Bizarro’s Easter egg (!) rabbit.
Thanks, that definitely helps me with the 4th one! It is the “secret symbol” rabbit, sure enough.
I’m still having trouble with the first one. How does it parse as a rabbit face? The little pink heart at the top right, what is that? Nose?
@ Mitch4 – The pink blob is half of its nose. The part where the outline intrudes upward is supposed to be a nostril.
At least he didn’t have to wear pineapple.
I like anchovy on pizza, although I prefer it with sausage so it’s not too one-note.
Pineapple and anchovy. I must remember and try that.
@ B.A. Or broccoli (if you happen to have seen Pixar’s “Inside Out”).
‘Congratulations San Francisco, you’ve ruined pizza’: lol.
Honestly, San Francisco ruins just about everything: it’s this bizarre foodie town where you can’t get anything normal. You want spaghetti? They’ll only give it to you with baby arugula sauce.
In fact I said to my wife during that scene “At least it isn’t pineapple” — because San Francisco is the first place we ever saw pineapple pizza (and I thought it was a joke at the time)
Yes to anchovies; not available in many pizza joints, I’ve found. Usually the smaller, family-run places. Also, I request anchovies with my aglio e olio (garlic and oil) on angel hair pasta. IF/when Florida’s covid cases are in the double digits (I should live so long), that will be my first restaurant meal.
Now I’m hungry for pineapple on pizza again. (Haven’t had such since last week.)
Among other thought-by-some abominations, I’m also fond of taco pizza (with lots of lettuce). Though our basic mix and match variety order is Genoa salami, green olives, and feta cheese.
I suppose anchovies on pizza wouldn’t be more horrifing to me than the thought of eating any seafood anywhere else ever, but I have a Special Relationship with pizza, so it sounds even more disgusting than usual to me.
Has anyone here ever heard of a dessert pizza? A friend took me to a Pizza Hut, out in the suburbs somewhere, and they offered a dessert pizza, which had a slightly sweet crust, jam and I forget what else on the pizza. It was great, and I’ve never been able to find it again.
I used to get fruit pizzas for our office, with a sweet crust, a layer of cream cheese and kiwi fruit, strawberries, etc. That could be considered a dessert pizza. It was purchased at our WI grocery store deli.
Several years ago a German manufacturer introduced a chocolate pizza. We tried it once, and it was pretty good, but the next time I tried to buy one, I discovered that it had been discontinued.
Yes! That’s it. It was so good.
Maybe I should Google’fruit pizza’. Thx
I seem to remember that there’d only be a few available, in the morning, as I’m sure the fruit would get ‘funny’ after a few hours . . . check your grocery store’s deli department; that’s where I found mine. However, I’ve been retired for 15 years, so have not tried to find one for at least that long. This may have been a fad that no longer is a ‘thing’.
And doesn’t THIS look good??
“And how do you pronounce that? ‘Goose-berry’ or ‘gahz-berry'”.
“It’s ‘Kiwi’ .”
Looks so good it would be a shame to eat it. Well, for a minute anyway.
Imagine the labor in that and yes, the ones I bought at the grocery store deli looked very similar, very artistic. Tasted as good as they looked, too.
I wondered why today’s Far Side selections https://www.thefarside.com/ seemed to all be dog jokes. Turns out it’s National Dog Day!
I wondered, too, but then, EVERY day is National Dog Day in this house!
Also somewhat oddly, the site for National Dog Day .com doesn’t anywhere I can see say something like “And hey!, that’s today!” or “Annually on 26 August”. It’s fine that they want to convey “We do good stuff all year around” but still you’d expect something spacial for their day.
Or maybe the site is invisible other days? And simply by being online today it marks the day? no, that would be folly!
https://www.nationaldogday.com/
Oh okay, sorry, you had to click on About.
https://www.nationaldogday.com/about1
“National Dog Day is celebrated August 26th annually and was founded in 2004 by […] ”
“WHY AUGUST 26TH?
The date of August 26th is significant, as it’s the date that Colleen’s family adopted her first dog “Sheltie” from the local animal shelter, when Colleen was 10 years old.”
Melcher really doesn’t trust women rowing boats, does he?
Crimeweek doesn’t have a Random Comments section, so I hope it’s okay for me to post this here.
The next time I’m in the Netherlands, I’m totally going to steal this:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/thieves-purloin-frans-hals-painting-1904518
This sounds disturbingly like a Winkerbeanism
Chak: Looks so good it would be a shame to eat it.
That’s why we have cameras.
I just learned that Uli Stein passed away (last week, but it wasn’t announced in the German news until yesterday). He was a very prolific (and popular) cartoonist (here’s an example), despite living in a country virtually devoid of newspaper comics. R.I.P.:
Another pumpkin [pie] spice factoid a friend sent to me:
“Starbucks Pumpkin Spice latte (PSL)
At Starbucks, the PSL is the company’s top-selling seasonal drink. It’s made with milk, sugary syrup, pumpkin puree and spices, and clocks in at 380 calories and 50 grams (nearly 13 teaspoons) of sugar for a 16-ounce grande. In comparison, a four-piece Kit Kat bar has 210 calories and 22 grams (about 6 teaspoons) of sugar.”
(Keep in mind, tho, that PSL is consumed a few times a year; KitKats are consumed year round. Hubby is a KitKat fan, so I can attest to that.)
Aha! Thanks for the facts. at last!
The PSL conspiracy has been saying for years “No, there’s no pumpkin in it. It’s just a combination of spices that have been found to go well with pumpkin, so a drink with those spices will evoke the season and be reminiscent of carving and eating pumpkins, for the fans of those gourds. But there is none of the actual stuff in there!”
And now we see “pumpkin puree” right in the description!
I, too, was surprised and a little doubtful. I think I’ll backtrack and find out where this info came from (the friend who sent me this is in Australia, with many trips to England, her birthplace). Will report back . . .
My dogs get a spoonful of canned pumpkin every a.m. I wonder if that’s what Starbucks uses. Good for fiber for one’s digestive system, which is why my dogs get it. it tastes horrible without the spices in it, BTW.
It came from Washington Post’s Coronavirus Update newsletter: Should be pretty reliable as a source, no?
I think it must be variable. I get PS flavor ground coffee, there’s no pumpkin in it.
We do, too. I suppose it’s dumped in with the sugar, etc.
They COULD also be using canned pumpkin pie MIX, which already has spices in it (and should NOT be used for your dog[s]). That would relieve the baristas from a step or two in prep.
Anyone on CIDU works/ed, or know some who works/ed, at a StarBucks?
I’m not a big fan of Perry Bible Fellowship, but I know some people here are. “To celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Perry Bible Fellowship, earlier this year, Dark Horse released a special comprehensive Almanack collection of Nicholas’s comics. It features every comic strip released between 2004 and 2007 and tons of exclusive comics and sketches that can’t be found online.” And they link to Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1506715885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?language=en_US&ie=UTF8&linkCode=gs2&linkId=3ae970bb4c71fd0df38ad2282ad1bc19&tag=borpan-21
The above is from http://www.successlifelounge.com/15-new-hilarious-comics-with-unexpectedly-dark-endings-by-perry-bible-fellowship/
I don’t remember the details, but some company which made “pumpkin spice” whatever came under scrutiny because there was no actual pumpkin in the product. Rather than defend themselves from idiots, they added pumpkin to the product.
You found a way to show the images… to most of us. I can’t see them in my favorite browser, and have to start up my #2 choice to see them. I know a lurker who has the same problem, but decided that, as good as your site it, it’s not worth it.
Of recent posts, the ones I *can* see the images on are
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/04/okay-looks-like-the-option-does-exist/
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/04/loose-death/
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/05/12354/
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/pardon-my-line/
But, nothing newer, and not the ones in between those:
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/04/loose-lips-2/
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/sunday-funnies-lol-september-6-2020/
I know Word Press put you to a lot of trouble to be able to show images at all. I don’t know if you want to make things friendlier to those of us with odd browser choices. But I listed the works/don’t work in case you do, so you can maybe see what the differences are.
Arthur, if you can see the images on one browser and not another, I probably wouldn’t know how to fix that even if you told me which browsers you’re talking about: It’s not as if I have any control over how your mysterious browsers interact with whatever changes WordPress made.
I appreciate your extraordinary over-estimation of my abilities, and I’m sorry I drove away your lurker friend, but I’m afraid the best solution is using your second-favorite browser. I have to do that with some sites myself, but I soldier on.
@ Arthur – Different results in different browsers probably indicate a cache effect. Try a forced page reload, or clear the browser’s history. I agree with Bill that he has no control over the information that WordPress produces, but you might try looking at the page source code (before and after), and see if the image URL shows up there.
OK, I just checked in Firefox, Chromium, Internet Explorer, and Edge, and the page works fine. Images show up. I am now very curious what the mystery browser is. I speculate it’s either very obsolete, or some sort of caching issue as @Kilby surmises.
When I logged in here a day or two ago, I could see the images etc. but could not read the comments (links grayed out). I got a popup saying that site didn’t have certificate-of-some-sort 1.3, which Firefox wanted, but that I could accept. to use certificate 1.2 (I think) for the site for now — but that at some point Firefox would no longer be letting me do that. So I accepted that option and then/now see everything as I normally did.
Foolishly, I didn’t make a note as to the exact wording, but I did assume that if I had that problem somebody else here would also have it, and the odds are 99.9%+ plus that any other person here would be more technologically savvy than I am and would have reported it and explained to Bill how to “fix” it at his end (if in fact it needed said fixing). But it looks like that hasn’t happened.
If I get the message again at some point I will of course report back with better detail.
“Second best” evokes Will’s will, which left his wife the second best bed, and engendered continuing argument among historians and critics over whether that was a putdown or simply a designation of a valuable furnishing.
Speaking of different browsers, what do you guys see as my Gravatar? I noticed today on the phone it was my real photo in dark red sweater, gray hair and pointy mouth-beard. But back on desktop with Chrome, it’s Truffaut in hat and cape. (Not completely mystery, as both those and others I have set as icon at different times.)
@Mitch4, I see the hat and cape.
Thanks, Carl.
Now that we’ve entered description land, I wouldn’t know what to say about yours besides 3-D graphics with distorted perspective on telegraph pole and birds.
@ Mitch4 – Ditto, I see hat & cape, but this is the first time I’ve zoomed in on it: up to now I thought it was a captured icon from one of the Dr. Who stars.
I mentioned it at the time, but either no one saw it, or didn’t deem it was worth commenting on…
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/headlights/comment-page-1/#comment-54903
larK, thanks for the mention, I think I saw it then but had in fact just changed my Gravatar (and following discussion by other CIDUers of their troubles with the service) so “regeneration” was not a surprise. I was surprised today to notice the other picture, on my phone.
I think we discussed whether the browsers, and WordPress as server, (1) pull in the gravatars at download time, even for old posts, or (2) always pull them in, in principle, but are not in all contexts equally eager to refresh, or (3) sometimes store them [on Word Press server] along with the posts, so that an avatar might permanently remain the same on a particular post, even after changed at Gravatar service by the user and appearing in a new form on newer posts.
The appearance of an old one on phone today — but for a new post — is puzzling, but more likely (2) than (3).
Bill, he can see the images on his Netscape Navigator, but not his Netscape Communicator.
Kilby, I also thought it was Tom Baker.
It is definitely not (3) — I have observed, much to my annoyance — that past posts get the new gravitar upon update of the gravitar. This really annoys me, because it totally ruins my associative memory (I saw a post with a picture — the two are cross-indexed in my memory), and it really annoys me because this is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to achieve with the use of an icon! They are supposed to make things easier, not more difficult! (Are you LISTENING to me, all you UX designers?!!)
B.A., Netscape Communicator was last updated in 2002. Navigator in 2007.
WordPress quite properly feels no obligation to support software that obsolete.
Carlfink, you do know I was kidding, right?
Nope. That’s almost the only way you would be unable to see those images, unless you have some kind of rogue plugin or the equivalent.
It works on my very old Firefox (10.0.12). It doesn’t work on my very old Opera (12.02). It doesn’t work on the lurker’s Opera (12.18). It’s not a caching issue, as I delete the cache every time I shut down, and the problem is still there after a restart.
Bill, I was not overestimating your abilities. Nor was I *expecting* you to come up with a fix. I wanted to let you know in case you could remember doing something different for those that worked vs. those that didn’t *and* thought it was worth the trouble.
Today, those that didn’t work still don’t. Flesh https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/flesh/ does.
I’m willing to go the extra step of running Firefox. I wanted Bill to know about the problem because it’s very hard to tell when lurkers become ex-lurkers and why.
Of interest, perhaps . .
Watch the National Cartoonists Society convention live stream this Saturday (for free) and find out if Wayno wins for Bizarro!
Here’s how…
https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2020/9/10/congratulations?mc_cid=760526bf52&mc_eid=9c1d7f19f7
Wow. Just came across this article from the Smithsonian site of all places that really dishes on Garfield — no love for the fat feline there! A very catty article, if you’ll excuse the pun…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/its-not-just-you-garfield-is-not-meant-to-be-funny-6199556/
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Arlo thinks “pedantic” sounds like “pandemic”?
Would this make sense even if he did?
We need a “Works Much Better Read Than Spoken” tag
@ B.A. – It depends on what you mean by “these” days: that strip is dated 2007.
P.S. @ larK – I’ve recently discovered that articles that appear in the Smithsonian’s e-mail newsletter are not necessarily new material. That one about Garfield was written in 2013.
Did you know that in the early to mid 60s Johnny Hart drew an ad campaign for Dr. Pepper? B.C. had been running for a few years. The characters look vaguely familiar.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eha0xc0XgAUyVMj?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
Well, maybe “sounds like” not meaning “could be mistaken for” but just “shares some features, like a Spoonerism”.
But I think Arlo is avoiding acknowledging hearing “pedantic” as he then would have to admit being pedantic (tho correct!)
Have I mentioned the trifecta morning when I was driving on the portion of W 55th Street in Chicago known as Garfield Blvd, and listening to NPR / WNYC program “On the Media” cohost Bob Garfield was interviewing Jim Davis, creator of the Garfield comic and marketing empire?
@Kilby: I wasn’t posting it as breaking news, the gossip in the article is mostly from the early 80s, anyway. As I said, *I* recently came across it, not that *it* was recent (or not — frankly I didn’t even bother to look at the publication date); what I found interesting was the sheer cattiness of the piece, and the fact that it was associated with Smithsonian.
@ larK – Only later did I notice that those articles are marked as “From the Archive” in the newsletter. I agree that the tone of the Garfield piece doesn’t conform to their usual standards. That probably belongs under the heading of “This is the opinion of the individual author(s), and does not represent the opinion of our organization“; similar to the standard boilerplate found on nearly every movie DVD with commentary in the bonus features.
The vast majority of “colds” are not caused by corona viruses. They are usually rhinoviruses, a different class.
That’s just an expression, Kilby: I also don’t think they’re actually kids.
Now that THAT’S settled, though, what the hell is Tia Carmen talking about?
I immediately associated what she said to the metaphor ‘do a cattleya’.
B.A. asks: Now that THAT’S settled, though, what the hell is Tia Carmen talking about?
I gotta ask more broadly, what the hell has been going on in Baldo the last couple weeks? There is this strange pickup romance going on between Tía Carmen and this stranger, Gregorio, who started up with her at the produce counter. Drawn in a more detailed, approaching realistic style than usual. And she has been telling him her story and the family history – how she came to be a mother-figure for Baldo and Gracie when their mother, Rosa, was killed in a car crash. With the two kids as passengers! (And which they survived, as we know – Gracie because she was in a child car seat, Baldo because he had his soccer ball along and it cushioned his impact.)
Whatever the symbolic import of the kumquats in this episode’s dialog, they have been part of this storyline from the outset. That’s how Carmen and Gregorio met, both reaching for the kumquats. [Looking again – no, they were both reaching for tomatoes, but after that he showed the bag of kumquats he had gotten.] And there was some suggestive banter about them previously. (“But enough about my kumquats, Carmen … Tell me about you.”) [BTW, still “usted”]
BTW, the word appearing in Baldo en Español is “naranjitas” which looks like a diminutive of “naranja” (“orange”). Google Translate gives English “kumquat” as Spanish “naranja china” (“Chinese orange”), and in reverse for Spanish “naranjita” gives English “Little Orange” which is apparently a name (?), while for Spanish “naranjitas” gives English “oranges”, not bothering to do anything about the diminutive.
I wasn’t familiar with the expression used by Olivier, “do a cattleya”, but was happy to fiind the first search result pointed to no less a figure than Proust.
https://flyingscribbler.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/proust-or-bust-have-you-done-a-cattleya
in the early part of ‘Swann in Love’ we learn that Swann (the womanizer) and Odette (naughty courtesan) like to ‘do a cattleya’ (‘faire cattleya‘ in the original). I profess, I had to look this one up as my botanical knowledge of tropical flowers is limited to the sorry specimen of a peace lily crying out for water in the living room. A cattleya is a species of orchid, and a rather blousy one it is too.
Odette wears them on her bodice and Swann takes to ‘rearranging’ them as part of his attempts at love-making. In time, ‘to do a cattleya’ becomes a euphemism for the general act of amorous fondling:”
Now that THAT’S settled, though, what the hell is Tia Carmen talking about?
He has a bag of kumquats. You can read some flirtiness into that if you like. A few of the commenters on GoComics hate the artwork and/or story. If will end tomorrow though.
As I recall, this sequence (a repeat from a few years ago) was intended to show — in telenovela (soap opera) style — Carmen’s romance. Then she suddenly told Gregorio she wanted to grab his kumquats, he thought ¡Oh Dios, es una loca! and he was never seen again.
Thanks for pulling my comment out f moderation, and replying with the term I was forgetting – yes the style (or story) seem to be cast as telenovela.
But the byplay about his kumquats is made inescapable by his expression in this current strip.
REMEMBER, TODAY – 12 SEPTEMBER 2020 – The Reuben Awards and NCS Fest go Virtual
Today, starting at 10 AM, the National Cartoonists Society will present the second annual NCS Fest and the 74th annual Reuben Awards. This virtual event is free and open to the public.
https://ncsfest.com/schedule/
Has anyone else’s GoComics rss feed been stuck on 9/09?
Mine is fine.
OK – thanks – now I can try to find out why mine’s ‘stuck’. Last time this happened, we got notification that GoComics was doing something to scr*w up the rss.
Oh, wait, you’re using RSS? I just visit the site daily.
Thanks for the NCS Fest reminder, Andréa. I tuned in just a bit ago and have been watching a “panel” on books, with authors who are familiar names from daily syndication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JAmsmnNsVY
YES, that was my original question.
Mark Tatulli looks like Lío!
Saturday’s Baldo, with the very strange transition of drawing styles between panels 2 and 3.
Aha, I hadn’t really picked up on the original style transition showing between panels at the beginning of this storyline (on 8/31)
I have to be honest: I’m taking a break from Lio until there’s a vaccine.
Can she really not understand what difference it makes?
“Can she really not understand what [a] difference it makes?”
I’ve clothes-shopped with girlfriends; I’ve clothes-shopped with Hubby; I’ve clothes-shopped with stepdaughter from her age of 18 months to 14 years. Not ONCE has the question ‘for you?’ or ‘on you?’ been uttered. Something is either ‘cute’ or it isn’t. In this case, context doesn’t matter.
@ Mitch4 – (“naranjita“) – It’s never safe to trust a Google translation without independent confirmation. Looking on the Spanish version of “Wikipedia” reveals that “naranjita china” is a possible alternative name for “kumquat”, but it is not widespread at all: there is no “citrus” reference listed for just the word “naranjita”. If you look at the artwork, it’s pretty clear that the original intent was “little oranges”, the fruit is clearly too big to actually be kumquats. I guess the authors decided that “little oranges” was too awkward for the English version, and went for a simpler linguistic alternative.
P.S. @ “the symbolic import of the kumquats” – Even though it would clearly be far too suggestive for “Baldo”, my initial fear was that “naranjita” might be a slang expression for what are normally called “cojones” (“nuts”). As I suspected, they “han provocado una creación de sinnúmero de palabras” (“have provoked the creation of innumerable words”), including “bolas, cojones, cocos, huevos, entrepierna, [&] pelotas“, but (thankfully) not “naranjitas” (the feminine ending should have been enough of a tipoff).
@ B.A. – You know, burying a discussable comic at the very end of one of these pages is a good way to make sure that nobody sees it. Send them via e-mail to Bill, and then they get a thread of their very own.
P.S. @ Mitch4 – In the meantime, while my investigative reply about “naranjitas” languishes in moderatorial purgatory (I cannot predict whether it will show up here or on the previous page when it is released): here’s a bit of kumquat sillyness to pass the time:
Interesting WP technicality question there. But in any case I’m relieved somebody else took on the task of investigating naranjitas — I did feel guilty about looking no further than Google Translate.
¡Naranjas! = Nothing doing! = Nuts! = Arlo?
Thanks, Kilby, but they weren’t CIDUs or LOLs or anything, just… random comments.
Thanks, Kilby, but they weren’t CIDUs or LOLs or anything, just… random comments.
@ B.A. – When Bill has a detail that he would like to thrash out (like the “flesh” colored crayons), he marks it “(Not a CIDU)” and posts it for open discussion. I’m sure he would do the same for you.
Oh, Kilby, I see you somewhat have a good point as regards the awkward pagination of Random Comments, but to go beyond that you should see that you appear on the verge of berating B.A. for something like queue-jumping.
Along with changes of host and then changes of WP edition,etc, some things have grown harder. But this capacity for posting included images in comments has gotten easier. And mostly I think it is something to encourage. If Bill got really irritated by it he would say so, or in the event could shut it down.
I do sometimes feel regret if I rush to post something by image embedding n a comment, and it turns out to be part of the top level queue a bit later. But apart from that, there’s nothing to regret or disapprove about seeing something and wanting to share it right then and there before the enthusiasm (or outrage!) cools too much.
Although they are drawn a bit large, they are being eaten with the skin on like kumquats.
I’m always happy to see another comic, but I don’t think they get the same amount of exposure (or participation) when they are tucked away here, no matter whether it’s at the top of a new page, or the bottom of the last one. Besides the fact that the concept doesn’t apply here, it would be incredibly hypocritical for me to complain about “thread drift”: it’s simply that as long as it is a fresh comic (and subject), I think it would serve better to maintain the size of the queue. On the other hand, for all we know, Bill may have enough comics queued up to last until the end of the Covid era.
@ Andréa (12-Sep, 10:59am) – The “Comics RSS” feed is still down (since last week). I’ve sent an e-mail to the author; we can only hope that GoComics has not found a way to shut him down for good.
“. . . the end of the Covid era”
I like that phrase. I for one think it’ll be a long one, at least for those of us who want to live thru it.
. . . which means Lio’s ‘jokes’ will get lamer and lamer . . .
Kilby: At least the previous time this happened, there was a notification of sorts; thanks for letting me know it wasn’t me, it was the rss feed itself. It just means – as with WP – a few extra clicks to bring up each day’s comic, AND it’s impossible (for me, anyway) to get JUST the comic to post on CIDU.
CLAYTOONZ has the same complaints about WP, but when there is a monopoly, where do you go?
B.A. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
I swear to god I almost sent comic that in as an Arlo suggestion.
I thought about nominating it for an Arlo Award, but it’s my understanding that this is for comics that have no plausible innocent explanation. And this one CAN be taken at face value, though it’s very, very odd.
As of yesterday, the “RSS feed service” that Andréa mentioned has recovered and is delivering current comics again.
P.S. Sorry, I broke the tag, here’s a corrected link to the RSS comics feed.
Aha! At last the need was felt for the “comments are closed” management feature!
Does the RSS feed from GoComics just have the strips, or do comments come along?
JUST the strips, usually one week’s worth. Fast-loading, and as I don’t usually read the comments, very convenient. IF I want to read the comments, I just click on the date and that takes you right to the GoComics page, with comments and all the concomitant extras that make GC pages such a PITA.
Somewhat similar to the email version I get as a premium. In that case, each strip is a link to the particular comic’s page.
How much do you pay for that?
Like a lot of things, it creeps up. It’s about $15/year now. Besides the email strips you don’t get any ads.
@ Brian in StL – The best part about that RSS page is that you can copy the RSS links to a reader. It didn’t work for me with Firefox, but by editing them to replace “http://” with “feed://”, I was able to get my whole collection to open all at once in Safari.
Maybe it was discussed before I ever knew about CIDU, BUT I just learned today (in a roundabout way, as usual) that Piraro’s ‘Secret Symbols’ aren’t that original. Caricaturist Al Hershfeld, who put his daughter’s name (NINA) within his line drawings, also put the number of the inclusions to the right of his signature (unless there was only one, or the line drawing was from before her birth).
@ Andréa – Wikipedia has a nice description of the “Hirschfeld Nina” topic.
Yep, that’s what i was reading ’cause Ann Telnaes had a political cartoon today in his style.
@ Andréa – I managed to find it, but it was a lot harder than I expected. However, given the current reminder(s) about staying within the boundaries of the CIDU FAQ, I would not dream of posting the image or even a link to it from here.
The email page that GC sends has links and such. So you click on the image and it opens the GC page for the strip. You can also do that with the comic lists you make, although I’m not sure that’s a premium feature, I think it’s for any registered member.
As long as we are all waiting for a new post to appear, I have a parallel question for those who follow “Bug Martini“: The page title still says “Random nonsense three times a week“, but I think the frenquency has dropped (a lot) in the past few months. Unfortunately, there’s a bug (either in Adam’s website, or in my browser), so that I don’t see anything new at all unless I force a manual refresh. Still, even when I do that, I don’t think I’m seeing three strips a week.
Here’s a LOL to enjoy from “Wrong Hands”.
I have the same problem with having to force a refresh. And the former Monday strip seems to be the new premium Sunday strip.
“Unfortunately, there’s a bug” in Bug Martini…
Heh-heh, heh, heh, heh!
@ Chak – Thanks for confirming that the problem is not just with my system. I guess if you count the “patreon” strips then the title is still an accurate description of the overall frequency. I just wish he would stick to a fixed schedule. I never know when it’s worth another attempt to find a new strip.
P.S. @ larK – That’s still better than a worm in your tequila.
שנה טובה
מזלטוב
Reported in a couple of other threads:
chipchristian
September 18, 2020 at 2:55 pm
Bill suddenly passed away on Wednesday.
https://normandean.com/tribute/details/10477/William-Bickel/obituary.html
This is terrible, but thank you for posting it, Brian.
Oh no! This is so sad!
Wow. Bill will be missed dearly.
Oh, damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.
Was he ill? Or . . . ?
There is now a video of the graveside service:
https://normandean.com/tribute/details/10477/William-Bickel/obituary.html
You can tell a lot about a person by his friends. Even if I hadn’t had some direct e-mail with him, I could look at the people he gathered here and know he was a wonderful person.
Bill’s passion kept this one of the best places on the Internet. It can never be the same without him. But the site and the community it created may be able to continue for a while.
Until the site stops working, we can communicate non-CIDUs on this Random Comments page. We can post new CIDUs on any other page, and get comments on them there.
But we have to be more careful to be polite and on topic because we won’t have Bill to gently (or not-so-gently) nudge us. We have to realize that there will be no one to pull posts out of moderation. That also means that no new people can join our community. And we may lose people because the Moderation Monster occasionally takes a dislike to someone and, for a while, throws all of their posts into moderation.
After a suitable time to allow for grieving, if someone here has the ability, temperament, and time to dedicate, that someone could contact his family and ask about taking over and continuing this site as Bill’s legacy.
I will miss Bill, and his comments, jokes, insights, and occasionally off-topic but always interesting posts. But I’d feel a bit better if I didn’t have to lose all of you, too.
And, in case you’re wondering, I have neither the ability nor the temperament to run a site like this. At least not in a way that would keep it worthy of the community that built around it.
Hard to say how much time there’ll be. We could put together and email list or something.
Yahoo Groups no longer runs new lists; I don’t know of any other place that does . . . my own list of politics/funnies just goes thru me; it’s about 15 members strong.
If anyone would like an address (PO BOX) to send a sympathy card, please email me:
adenning2@tampabay.rr.com (even tho it’s a PO BOX, I don’t want to put it out on the web).
Well, I knew it would happen – whilst reading today’s comics, I thought, “There’s one to send to . . . oh, I can’t anymore, never mind.” I’ll NEVER be able to read comics without thinking of CIDU Bill, and CIDUers.
In thread “As far as I know, he wins” ( https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/as-far-as-i-know-he-wins/comment-page-1 ) I posted:
Brian in STLsaid: “After the news settles in, we’ll need to discuss the future, if there is to be one. Maybe a central point for that.”
This thread is as good as any. Maybe “Random Comments” is more general and neutral in a sense, but it has the down side of awkward page structure. Also, the discussion has already started here. We can cross-post of course.
I actually learned about Bill’s passing ahead of Justice RBG’s; it was a terrible day.
Andrea noted: “Yahoo Groups no longer runs new lists; I don’t know of any other place that does”
A number of former Yahoo groups migrated over to groups.io
https://groups.io/static/about
My experience with the one such group to which I belong is that the experience on io is at least as good as it was with Yahoo, and probably better. (I’m a techno-illiterate so can’t speak to how complicated our transition was for the members who handled it for the group.)
On another thread, Andrea also asked how many of us are also members of Comics Curmudgeon. I am (as “Shrug” there also).
I read and enjoy Comics Curmudgeon, but not the comments there and the structure of the commenting.
Well, maybe my earlier comment was misplaced, and Random Comments would be the better place for us to congregate and discuss the future, after all, rather than on a thread from a particular comic posting. I’m still bothered by needing to click thru “Newer comments” link all the time, but that may not override the natural appeal of sticking to Random as the community center by the park and traffic circle.
So here’s the longish think piece I posted on “As far as I know, he wins” —
—–
Yes, eventually someone should be delegated to contact the family and see if they have any plans for continuing this or a successor site as Bill’s legacy, or info as to what he may have expressed.
From active fans but outsiders in that sense, we might think about 4 areas to discuss / arrange / implement eventually.
1. Top-level policy & administration. — Family contact, decisions like “continue here or establish a successor site”, even passwords and email. (Though that last may also be under “Technical”)
Also, without Bill, would we want the site to continue to be on a basis of “email submissions to an editor” [with generous post-within-comments policy] as up to now, or go for a typical forum or blog structure where established commenting users may also start new-post threads. Like google Groups as somebody remarked.
Actually, that is just one example of early decisions that the interested fan base may want to decide along with the family.
2. Financial support — I’m surely not the only one who will say “I’m ready to contribute a share to paying for hosting, transfers if that’s how we go, and incidental expenses.” Also the family-contact people could inquire if there is any help required for expenses outstanding.
3. Tech group. The fan group definitely has the tech talent to do whatever is decided upon, and after that to keep it running.
4. Editorial, day-to-day administration, moderation. I see this as separate from the early and high-level what-to-do decisions in (1). This is also the hardest to contemplate, as this was the role where we mostly felt Bill’s presence and even-tempered judgement. But somebody, or some team, needs to do some filtering and commenting/moderation on a day-to-day.
I also read the Comics Curmudgeon, but have only commented once and generally don’t read the comments.
Re Mitch4’s post: I’d be happy to chip in some money to continue this. I can’t be regular enough to do anything personally. I do like the idea of continuing in some form.
Has anyone found out what happened? I haven’t had time to look on any other thread, and just found out this terrible news. It’s just too devastating, RGB and CIDU Bill. No more words….
One of the people in the Dick Tracy comments created a forum using a free service:
https://thedicktracycrimestoppers.createaforum.com
createaforum.com
Sorry:
https://createaforum.com/
That would seem to work better than an email group; I think the main issue is that comments need to be with the comic(s) commented upon, rather than just a straight back and forth. I still manage a yahoo! group of about 100, BUT we don’t have anywhere the style or amount of graphics and comments thereon as CIDU has, and I think that is integral. As are patience, humour and TIME in the owner/moderator. I, for one, don’t have ’em.
The software is the easy part. Blogs at WordPress or Blogger are free. It’s someone having the time and dedication to actually run it.
Perhaps a committee?
Keeping the old system, where a central point of contact gets submissions, evaluates them, makes and tags posts, etc, is a burden on one person. The other solution is to have a forum where participants take on most of that.