I noticed the backlog of Oy’s and Ewww’s has pretty much run dry (this tends to be cyclical), while the LOL queue runneth over — so for the month of June I’m going to post LOL’s on Saturdays as well as Sundays.
Submitted by B.A.
Submitted by Mitch
Submitted by Andréa
Submitted by some cool cat
Comics I Don't Understand 
Umm, what the heck is the idea of the woman on the grass?
Woozy, if you mean you don’t understand the comic, perhaps you’ve never tried to relax in he park and had to watch out for all the ball players, Frisbee players…
It’s the bowling ball that elevated this to LOL, of course.
Yeah.. but… it’s not funny. I mean, sure it’s annoying but the folks there playing ball have just as much right as anyone else and there are areas of parks where ball playing is not allowed.
But they don’t have the right to toss bowling balls. That’s the absurd part that I found funny. Like I said.
If you don’t find it funny, Woozy, there are three other comics you might like better.
At first, I thought the park was a post-lockdown comic with everyone doing everything at once, outdoors. It wasn’t until after reading B.A.’s comment that I saw the expression on the girl’s face. The rest of her body language suggested she was relaxing despite what was going on.
The bowling ball makes sense (there are garden versions of the game) but not the chess pieces.
@ Olivier – Public chess boards are a familiar feature in many American parks.
P.S. Squirrellish synchronicity – (about “calling the ticket off“): The German football (i.e. soccer) league just announced that because of the Corona crisis, it will be vacating all of the judgements currently pending against teams (such for fan misbehavior, including fireworks, forbidden banners, etc.). This is supposed to reduce the economic load on the teams involved.
Though I’m not really sure why chess pieces are flying through the air.
Have none of you ever accidentally on purpose kicked a ball or thrown a frisbee at a pretty girl as an excuse to go and talk to her? This is a very pretty girl so everyone is having a go.
My brain fixated on a different one, and wasted time trying to understand why the cop cares that the names on the registration and driver’s license match. There’s no reason Mr. Spud has to be the registered owner of a car he’s driving.
It’s not just the chess pieces and the bowling ball. There’s also a yo-yo and a hockey puck.
Even if Piraro‘s cavemen did not have the technology to play “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, they could have enjoyed a nice game of “Rock, Pie, Eyeball”.
This happens on the beach, too. One reason I quit going . . . the ball/frisbee players seem to think THEIR ‘right’ to play overrides (pun intended) anyone’s right to avoid being hit in the face with said ball/frisbee.
No volleyball, I notice; at least they have the decency to stay in their court. Not the badminton players, tho.
MY first thought (probably ’cause I’m a reader, not a player) was that the cartoonist was snidely showing all the things she COULD/SHOULD be doing instead of keeping her nose in a book. I took offense, ’til I read the comments and realized you all had a better ‘splanation than I did.
The Bizarro joke is a copy of a classic Far Side cartoon.
In line with Carl Fink’s comment, I for a moment thought this cartoon was going to be a political comment on the controversy over voter-registration purging and restrictions. Some of the issues there have involved requirements of exact name matching, and how it affected people with hyphenated names, etc.
“and wasted time trying to understand why the cop cares that the names on the registration and driver’s license match. ”
A rather nasty cop was gave me a ticket for driving without a license because my car was registered (under my name) in Oregon but my drivers license was a Californian one.
The only reason I didn’t get the lady in the park was because everything today seems to be covid related, so I was trying to think of a covid gag, but in reality, it’s true and funny, minus the covid part.
It’s been bugging me for years: I know it’s to make the song rhyme, but has anyone in any English-speaking country ever pronounced it “po-ta-to?” (To-mah-to I get.)
Kilby, maybe they were playing Rock, Pie, Eyeball. Since I would expect that Rock crushes Pie and Rock crushes Eyeball (although I don’t know which of Pie and Eyeball should beat the other), they would probably figure out that Rock is the best strategy.
I did notice that “shoe” beats “pie”.
Dysfunctional’s comment was the 50,000th since the reboot.
Sorry, there are no prizes.
@woozy, and then you ended his career, since that was blatantly illegal and an abuse of police power?
Answer the phone. It’s 1970 calling and it wants its landline phone back.
Why doesn’t the cat just take out his cell phone and answer it like everyone else who is sitting on the toilet when I call them?
@woozy: “A rather nasty cop was gave me a ticket…”
I’m the only person I know ever given a ticket by a copy for failing to stop at a stop sign while riding a bicycle. This was in Tucson, AZ around 1968. It was a single-speed bike, so it wasn’t a speed demon thing at best, and so far as I knew then or remember I did in fact stop, perhaps too briefly. And a couple of friends had laughed their heads off a few weeks earlier when they realized I obeyed traffic laws on a bicycle “at all” and claimed they’d never known of such a wimpy thing.
But I had long hair then, so that probably explained it.
(Had a choice of paying a ten dollar fine, or showing up to contest. I showed up — downtown — a couple of days later and had the fine lowered to five dollars. The judge seemed amused.)
You’ll get my landline back when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
My wife’s cellphone stopped working yesterday, and I’ve had no luck trying to figure out why or fix it. And I asked another cellphone user this afternoon and he had no idea. My landline has worked without a problem for forty or so years. (And it doesn’t tell Big Brother where I as driving around today either.)
I read it the same as Nathan deGargoyle.
I didn’t read it the same as Nathan, but I like his interpretation better than mine.
I grew up with a sister; sadly, Phil and Nathan’s interpretation is true, whether or not it is the intended one for this strip. Being sensitive to how annoying it is to be constantly approached by unwanted guys, it made it very hard for me to ever approach a girl, and I very much resented the asshole types who think they are god’s gift to women, and even more so their successes with that approach…
>@woozy, and then you ended his career, since that was blatantly illegal and an abuse of police power?
Right, cause we all know how rare abuse of police power it is and how frequently it ends a career.
That was 30 years ago so I barely remember. I could be he gave me a ticket for driving an unregistered vehicle instead. He was somehow claiming the drivers license of the person had to be the same state as the car registered to the person. I think it may have been he ticketed me for driving an unregister vehicle which was absurd. If you needed a license to register a car the Oregon DMV wouldn’t have allowed me register it.
As I was moving in a few months anyway I just paid the fine for going five miles over the limit but refused to pay the other fine. I figured they would not be able to do anything. My friends wondered why I bothered to pay the speeding fine but I think I was just being my stubborn making a statement self.
…..
On a side note: The experience was a weird fugue state because: I had just read David Brin’s the Postman a few weeks earlier which was a post- apocalyptic novel set in Oregon in the area I was living in. In the novel the hero had a nasty experience in Oakridge and found to be one of the more unfriendly enclaves. Some detail was given about a fenced barricade built in what had been a public park and the redneck mayor who had found the hero’s stash of pharmaceuticals and was going to try to have a party to get how rather than to store as medical supplies for his people. So here I was driving through Oakridge apparently about a little under a decade before the events of a novel were to take place and I was thinking about what a bleak fictional future this town would have and wondered at the park I rode through if that was where they’d build the barricade manned by petty toughs overcompensating with petty authority…. and then the jerk of a cop seemed to step right out of the novel.
It was really really a weird feeling.
Shrug – One good thing about the current crisis is that Verizon stopped their program to change everyone to fiber optic from their old telephone lines whether the subscriber wants to change or not.
When we first received the notice I called to try to argue to keep our phone lines. After all, the phone lines/service go down (around here at least) almost never, while the electric lines – well we had them go down this past summer twice in the same week for no reason either time – okay, the same transformer blew both times – but it blows rather often in clear weather both days.
I was told by the woman I spoke with that I cannot stop this process. When I told her that our service would down too often due to the electricity she told me that since they are making us switch they will include – for free – a battery back up. I asked her how many days the battery is good for (not unusual to get 4 -5 day electric outages in summer in bad weather – you know, when you need your phone to call for help). Three hours – THREE HOURS – what the heck good is that? Plus since it has to be kept plugged in – we have to pay for the electricity to keep the battery charged.
So now our problem has been postponed – if we will switch to their fiber optic, the cable company’s fiber optic (which has a terrible echo) or go with Magic Jack (which we have for an extra phone number for Robert for work and has been known to lose the call – often) or another VOIP company. For now our landline works.
As to the first strip I did not put together her being in a park either. My thoughts were of elementary and junior high schools and sitting a reading a book during the time after lunch during lunch period and having all the other kids throwing balls and playing games around me.