Same as the previous series of Random Comments threads (which have each been closed to further commenting because they’ve gotten too long), this will be accessible from a link in the left sidebar (under “triple-line” icon 1st tab).
Please remember that this is intended for public comics-related (or comics semi-related) comments only: if you want to send the editors a CIDU, or a comic for some specific folder (Ewww, Oy, etc), or you want to inform us of a typo, please e-mail us at 
. “Comics-semi-related” may in practice include your observations on life and language… But not politics, puh-leese!
However, as an experiment starting in October 2020, we will be trying out a second, parallel open comments thread, for a specific area of topics: ideas for how to maintain or develop this site. Look for the link in the left sidebar (under “triple-line” icon 1st tab). The headnote for the first Site Comments is HERE.
Also: A list of the site’s most recent comments can be found in the left sidebar (under “folder” icon 2nd tab). A database of all the comments, compiled by larK, is here.
And the site’s FAQ is here.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It was getting unwieldy, so it’s been split between archives, this new thread and a ‘site comments’ thread where most currently happens as we’re discussing what we want to improve next.
Hey y’all – Kudos, and many thanks for your work. I am in awe and appreciative. Aaron – Blessings!
Say, any other Comics Kingdom users? Does it look to you that they are stuck at Friday, October 2nd, and not yet showing Saturday’s comics as of late evening Saturday?
Later – *Now Comics Kingdom has cleared up.
@ Mitch4 – The only King Features strip that I follow is “Rhymes with Orange“, but I gave up on the Comics Kingdom website a couple of months ago, after it jammed and stopped producing any RwO content. Instead, I switched to Arcamax, which seems to be a satisfactory source for anything that GoComics does not carry.
@ Mitch4 – The only King Features strip that I follow is “Rhymes with Orange“, but I gave up on the Comics Kingdom website a couple of months ago, after it jammed and stopped producing any RwO content. Instead, I switched to Arcamax.com, which seems to be a satisfactory source for anything that GoComics does not carry.
P.S. This is a repeat, because the version with embedded links was sent to Moderation.
Yeah, I only recently found ArcaMax, when GoComics dropped Reply All. (Not really one of my top faves, but I like it enough and didn’t like seeing it disappear without ceremony!)
I only read Sally Forth. Thanks for reminding me to check back in an Saturday’s strip.
Thank you all for continuing this site. So far, you’re doing a great job and it honors CIDU Bill.
I read the half dozen or so Comics Kingdom strips that I follow (and that my local deadtree paper does not carry) via the Seattle Post site. They get their CK strips from CK so when that’s down those strips are down for them also, but I like their clean interface much much better and also like the idea of at least symbolically keeping the verdammit CK at “arm’s length.”
https://www.seattlepi.com/comicskingdom/
There are a few Tribune strips that run on GoComics. The two I know of are Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley. I think they used to run on CK as well, but don’t anymore. They are on Seattle PI, listed under Comics Kingdom.
There have been a few occasions where the strips were late showing up on GC. However, yesterday those were on time even though CK was late.
(In the previous Random Comments thread,) Brian in STL said:
Wings are not devoid of meat. The meat to bone ratio is somewhat lower than other cuts. Then there is the great “flat versus drummette divide”.
For various reasons I won’t call “excuses” , I recently got a take-out order from the Wingstop that has been at my corner for about a month. I had ordered from them before, but at that time tried the “boneless” wings, which were a real disappointment. So this time I got some “classic (bone-in)” wings.
Not bad!
But what I was looking for, as a side note, was the nature of the pieces, as noted by Brian and a couple articles I read in conjunction. From wikipedia:
Wing: Often served as a light meal or bar food. Buffalo wings are a typical example. Comprises three segments:
the “drumette”, shaped like a small drumstick, this is white meat,
the middle “flat” segment, containing two bones, and
the tip, often discarded.
Also, from their Buffalo Wings article,
The chicken wings used for Buffalo wings are usually segmented into three parts: drumette, flat, and flapper or pointer, the last of which is usually discarded, although some restaurants serve them with this latter part still connected to the flat. Traditionally, the wings are deep-fried in oil, without breading or flour until they are well browned. Alternatively, they may be baked, grilled, or broiled.[37]
The order from Wingstop clearly had two kinds of pieces, which must be the (1) and (2). I didn’t know whether the “tips” were discarded or were attached to the flats, but they weren’t present as separate pieces. The number of pieces in the order as given on the menu was met by the number of pieces of either type present.
Brian refers to the “flat versus drummette divide”. Is there a debate out there? I thought the drumette pieces were more like an order of chicken, and the flats, while okay, were bordering on what Andréa remarked as “If it’s just a way to carry sauce to the mouth, I’d rather just spoon it up and forgo the chicken bones, senkuveddymuch.”.
@ Shrug – Thanks for the reminder about the Seattle PI. I used to read comics there occasionally (whenever I got fed up with the long load time and repetitive click-through requirements at GoComics), but alas, no longer: they’ve given up on the GDPR, and do not permit users from Europe to use their website.
I had thought that most people would be like me and prefer drummettes, but viewing some videos and web sites I found that a number of people prefer the flats.
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/best-chicken-wing-parts-drums-flats
PS: I recommend viewing that site in Reader View if your device supports it.
And then there are those “boneless chicken wings” that aren’t chicken wings at all, and are the subject of a big flap in Nebraska: https://www.today.com/food/nebraska-man-demands-name-change-boneless-chicken-wings-t190807
Has anybody heard from Meryl? Or have her eamil address?
She commented last tuesday, like every tuesday.
Oh good, thanks.
@ Chak & Olivier – What about “B. A.” (or “B.A.”, as the case may be)? Neither I nor larK’s comment harvester can find anything from her since September 14th. We could use a bit of her levity around here again.
P.S. Another person I would dearly like to hear from is “Elyrest”, but she hasn’t been seen here since before the server meltdown.
Why are the previous two comments still here?
Hi everyone. This is Robin, Bill’s wife. Not sure this is the best place to post this but I hope people see it.
I want to thank everyone who posted on the funeral home site. Seeing all the beautiful messages and how many lives he touched was very special to me.
Bill loved doing things for others. The last email he sent me on the day he died was asking me about a whisk he had seen on Amazon since mine had mysteriously gone missing.
In that spirit, I’d like to send anyone who would like one a Hanukah card once the season arrives These cards are created and designed by our youngest, the very talented graphic designer Zachary. I am putting this out early so I’ll have plenty of time to write out addresses neatly (Bill did all the card addressing since he claimed my handwriting could not be deciphered). Send it to my email with tag CIDU so I’ll know. My address is my first and last name, one word, all lower case at gmail.
He would often regale me with stories of that day’s thread drift which he always found amusing. And he was always impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge he found here. Thank you for being such good friends.
@ dana verdant – No need to apologize, there’s nothing wrong with placing random (off-topic) comments here, that’s exactly what this thread is supposed to be used for. It would be legitimate to discuss whether or not it’s a good idea to place the text as a Twitter link, but the subject matter is perfectly ok.
P.S. In the minute or two that it took me to write that comment, one of our astute editors was kind enough to convert the Twitter link to a blockquote. Just as distinctive, but less dangerous.
@Kilby 3:42 AM – Thanks for assuming the good, not the worse — but it is an optical illusion. Of the technology. When you refresh this page, Dana’s Twitter embedding shows up first, momentarily, as a blockquote/ Then it resolves into the stable Twitter design. Somehow Twitter is decorated as a special subtype of blockquote. And you can text-select their text from inside the Twitter box, it’s not like a screenshot. Very odd.
there’s nothing wrong with placing random (off-topic) comments here,
Really? The header says, as it always has, “Please remember that this is intended for public comics-related (or comics semi-related) comments only.”
How is this sexist comment above comic related? It’s not like it spawned from one either, this is out of the blue. I think it should be deleted. Or is Random going to be a political post friendly thread from here out?
Okay, let’s slow down.
We can use posting-moderation better, but let us not jump to deletion that easily.
I agree the tweet does not seem even tangentially comics-related.
But Brian, I’m not sure which polarity of sexism you see in it — really.
Brian in STL, I am not one of the editors, but I’d like to respond to your recent comments. If the editors wish to strike my comments, I’ll state in advance that I realize I might be invading their editorial prerogatives and will hold no ill-will for that act.
You are not complaining about Dana’s comments being off-topic, per se. If that were your only criterion, you’d have also complained about Mrs. Bickel’s offer of Chanukah cards. You’re complaining because you don’t like the content of her post. You saw it as sexist. I didn’t. To me, Dana was commenting on sexism, which is not the same thing as making a sexist comment.
You asked why the posts were still there, something I rather doubt you’d have asked if Bill were still running the site. This may no longer be Bill’s site, but neither is it yours or mine. It’s fine to have an opinion and to state that you don’t think Dana’s comments are apropos. But the way you stated it, you sound to me as though you believe that your opinion is of greater weight than other people’s opinions.
I never noticed arrogance in your previous posts. I hope you’re just having a temporary rough time and reacting badly because of that. Our loss of Bill on top of everything else this year could affect anyone badly.
And maybe I should have refreshed the post before making a long-thought-out comment. Sorry.
Really? The post is assuming that Nobel winners will be female, and males restricted to shared prizes. That doesn’t trouble you? Unless I’m somehow misinterpreting it. If so, perhaps someone could explain it to me. More importantly, what does it have to do with anything related to this site? When Bill was running it, it was his site and I generally deferred to his judgment. Now we’re supposed to be a communal effort, so I’m going to question decision that I think are taking us off-track. Like this.
Brian, thanks for the clarification. I’m glad I mentioned “:the polarity” of the perceived or attributed sexism. as I rather assumed your complaint was that it was a case of pretty-standard anti-female prejudice (‘ the women were getting prizes somewhat unearned but because the awards committees had decided this was the year of the woman’) — and that you might be surprised that one could also see it taken as anti-male. Then Surprise!, you articulated the latter as your concern!
I also read it roughly that way, but did not see it as malign. I took it as celebratory — saying it’s about time more women scientists were recognized, for actually major accomplishments. And that the committees could be seen to be keeping honest by including the male collaborators or precursors. (I mean, Penrose is never anybody’s token!)
But we can be more careful in reviewing the relevance and potential offense of future posts.
I don’t see anybody benefitting from an actual deletion at this point. Whatever the political intention, there is no patently offensive language, and nobody would take anything anybody says here as an agreed position of the site or other participants.
However, a private retraction has been communicated.
To clarify, I did not take the post to be anti-male. As it’s not there, I can’t review it.
Now that the tweets have been retracted, Brian’s objection would now appear to refer to my two “outreach” comments about B.A. & Elyrest. In view the “gender” issue, I find the irony highly amusing.
@Kilby, I am contacting Brian privately. We can also remove the other comments in this dispute thread if he agrees, and this part will also I hope serve as checking with you.
@ Mitch4 – Anything you decide to do will be fine with me.
Just for the record, I highly dislike retroactively rewriting threads — what was said was said, you can’t alter history. Let it stand as a record, so at least we all know what was said.
I alluded in another thread that I didn’t like it when Bill did it, but a) he did it very rarely (as far as I know!), and b) this was his site, he could do what he wanted, whether or not it made me uncomfortable. I am much, much more uncomfortable entering this new era without Bill that we seem to be more intent on removing comments. I don’t want to live in some 1984ian discussion board, where we’ve always been at war with Oceania. Let the record reflect what actually happened, not some polite version of events we would prefer to believe about ourselves.
(Yes, I know obvious spam should be removed, and this is where the slippery slope starts; I wish to register my view that the bar should be very, very high on removal of posts — obvious spam only, and let’s err even there on the side of caution and let’s not set bad precedents, especially this early in the new era!)
Yes, I follow and generally agree.
In this instance I have already offered Brian the option of deletion, so feel it would be better not to go back on my word, if he wants that option. Otherwise, let history be history, agreed.
I disagree that removal of comments is Orwellian. The point of removing comments is not to rewrite history and pretend that the conflict never occurred. The point is that if the comments that triggered a strong conflict are still there, it will require unlikely amounts of self-control for the participants to refrain from continuing or escalating the conflict, or for other spectators to refrain from jumping in. Then the editors are left with either closing the thread to new comments (and leaving one of the participants with the last word), or continually monitoring the discussion to make a individual judgments over whether each comment is within bounds for civility. Without Bill’s mechanism of removing comments, I do not think this blog can maintain the civil atmosphere that we’ve come to expect. The course of the comments in this debate illustrates perfectly why Bill’s method worked: with the original triggering comment removed, Brian no longer had the comment to review, and the debate ended. We should view this as a feature, not a bug.
I fully understand and agree that the editors are not Bill, and that their decisions are not entitled to the deference that Bill received. However, I disagree with the idea that because the blog is a communal effort, we should feel free to have public debates about deletion of individual comments, and demand explanations from editors for individual moderation decisions. General moderation policy (e.g. as in larK’s comment) is a good topic for communal discussion, but decisions about individual comments are not. Part of this is my admittedly selfish desire to not be stuck with the work of not only moderating comments, but also ending up in protracted discussions explaining my decisions, many of which will involved difficult judgment calls and matters of interpretation. However, I believe I would hold the same view even if I were not an editor. The sort of protracted public debate that we had here about whether or not the original comments were offensive, exactly what they meant, and what the editors should be doing about them, is much, much more likely to damage the blog community and atmosphere than any individual comment.
I have a continuing ambiguity and trepidation about whether this site should even be continued after Bill’s passing. I was reluctant to comment early on, and continue mostly just to watch and see what develops. Bill called this site his virtual living room, and I think that was a very apropos and useful analogy: we were all invited guests, and it encouraged a certain level of decorum in us, our public manners, but in an environment that is friendly enough that we feel very at home — but we never forget that we are present at the pleasure and forbearance of our host, and he can at any time eject us from his home … but who would be gauche enough to misbehave in such a way that that should become necessary?
But what happens now that the host is no longer with us, but his very living room continues to be open to guests? Some of us have stepped up to take over the host role, but it is awkward at best. We all feel we have equal rights (whatever those may be) to the living room; only Bill has final say over the space, but he is no longer here. I know I certainly don’t want to be in charge — it’s not my living room, I’m just a guest here like everyone else; there are certain people who vex me more than others, and given the power, I know I would certainly feel tempted to make my will be felt — which is exactly why I don’t want that power. I find it boring to surround myself with only agreeable people. That’s why I liked coming to Bill’s living room: to see other points of view, and I’m not the host, so I don’t have to worry about it. Bill had a very deft hand at keeping things under control while leaving everyone feeling very at home, and I admired that enormously, which is why I kept coming back.
But now we are in the awkward place of simultaneously trying to craft something new while preserving something old, and it may ultimately turn out to be impossible. We all have different views of free speech and the inviolability thereof, and so we all have different ideas of how to implement it. Before, Bill’s views were the de facto standard, and I stuck around because for the most part his views seemed to align well with mine, or close enough anyway, because after all, this was his site. But now he is no longer here, and so do we try to form a consensus on what our new view going forward should be (and as the cartoon Kilby posted elsewhere, will probably leave no one happy), or do we try and maintain what Bill had, whatever that was, and spend our time instead fighting about what that was?
I have no answers.
I’m still watching to see what happens.
Yep. Technical department is easier than HR. Kudos for trying.
I get more confused. I haven’t complained about any other messages. I have been uncertain about some interpretations in other messages. I’ll reply to the email.
“But now we are in the awkward place of simultaneously trying to craft something new while preserving something old, and it may ultimately turn out to be impossible.”
I agree. But I’m going to stick around until it’s proven to be impossible. This was one of my favorite sites, with some of my favorite people. As long as we have volunteers to run it, I’ll be watching and commenting, unless it does turn into something not worthwhile. I’ll hope for the good while being aware that the bad is possible.
@ Danny Boy – If Andréa has not already heard about it, I think she would be very interested in seeing it. I know that she follows Knight’s work.
Oh, I know about it – been following its production since Day One (I’m a Patreon of his). Unfortunately, I don’t have HULU, so I’m not able to see it. I DO miss his comics, altho he sometimes sends one out – usually an editorial comic – and I’m reading his reruns on GoComics
(https://www.gocomics.com/theknightlife ).
QUESTION: Is Arlo & Janis going into reruns? Yesterday’s and today’s seem AWf’ly familiar. In fact, I think both of these were discussed here some time ago . . .
@ Andréa – If you look in the gutter between the third and fourth panels, you can see that both are copyrighted © 2017. The interesting part is that Johnson re-inscribed a new handwritten date for the re-run.
Your eyes are better/younger than mine! I didn’t see the gutter dates. Any idea why these are being repeated? Nothing was in the GoComics comments about it.
My local deadtree paper had the “[creator] is on vacation; these strips have previously run” note for ARLO AND JANIS, and also for PICKLES. Of course, they also have that note for GET FUZZY, and have had it thus for three or four years.
For daily DOONESBURY they have the note, but say “hiatus” rather than vacation. But PEANUTS reruns are aren’t noted as such; I guess they assume all of their readers know that Charles Schultz isn’t coming back….
SPIDER-MAN is of course also in reruns, but my deadtree doesn’t carry that one.
“My local deadtree paper had the “[creator] is on vacation; these strips have previously run” note for ARLO AND JANIS, . . . .”
Good to know – thanks!
@ Andréa – My eyes were not able to read the year un assisted, I had to open the image in a new tab and zoom in.
@Danny and @Andréa — The “Woke” series has made it back into the “K Chronicles”.
That reminds me that I haven’t checked in on Bob the Angry Flower in a while.
Hey, we didn’t try to guess the literary costume deal in Frazz this year!
Well, it wasn’t very clueful.
Here was the answer:
There were several days of lead-in, and I liked how it was tied into the VP debate. Didn’t see THAT coming!
Also in pop culture news:
Even more disturbing from a “comics” perspective is the retirement of Tom Toles, who besides working for decades as a political cartoonist in Buffalo and then in Washington, was also the author of two good, but limited run comic strips: “Curious Avenue“, and “Randolph Itch, 2 am“. I will miss Tom nearly as much as I already miss Bill.
Did you like the coverage in Mike Peterson’s column?
http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/10/31/csotd-nov-iii-a-new-beginning-you-wish/
Also this D.D. Degg column: http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/10/31/tom-toles-tales/
@ Mitch4 – I liked both of those links very much, but decided not to risk including them in my message, for fear of treading over CIDU’s “politics” boundary. That was also the reason that I linked his name to Wikipedia, rather than GoComics.
. . . which reminds me that I regret we aren’t posting ‘non-political election’ comics [altho I never saw the announcement that we weren’t doing so], as I’ve seen several that would, I believe, qualify for that theme.
Andréa, I don’t recall anything like a ban on comment comic inclusions on the topic. Just a retraction of a call for submissions to be editorial posts.
@ Andréa – For instance, today’s “Mutts” surprised the heck out of me when I first saw it this morning:
P.S. @ Danny Boy – I think the call retraction was a very wise decision. That “Mutts” was the only election-related comic I’ve seen that was safely non-partisan, although there was an old “Bloom County” strip that indulged in bi-partisan (equal-opportunity) abuse:
I would say I’ve seen at least five election-related but non-partisant comics in the past two weeks or so, but I didn’t send or save all of them.
The second one was supposed to be . . .
Lennie Peterson’s take (The Big Picture):
Even MUTTS got into the act today (and wouldn’t it be something if dogs and c*ts could vote?) . . .
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=TXV0dHMvMjAyMC8xMS9NdXR0cy4yMDIwMTEwM18xNTM2LmdpZg==
. . . and let us not forget FAMILY CIRCUS [I usually try to do so, but Comics Curmudgeon keeps bringing it to my attention] . . .
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=VGhlRmFtaWx5Q2lyY3VzLzIwMjAvMTEvRmFtaWx5X0NpcmN1cy4yMDIwMTEwM182NTcuZ2lm
XKCD had a great suggestion; I went thru my entire email address book and did what they suggested . . .
https://xkcd.com/2380/
PS: Unless they are requested, I won’t send any more of the non-partisan election comics I’m coming across as I’m going thru my feeds . . . I’ve already seen five others so far.
There’s one more that I think is worth including, just for the sake of history (and it won’t be found in any of Andréa’s feeds):
And how often do you see the word “woozy” anyhow?
@ Mitch4 – GoComics offers all sorts of “woozy” comics, including this classic “Calvin & Hobbes”:
Thanks, Kilby!
My comment was mostly prompted by the serendipity of it, of course, since I just happened upon that “Liberty Meadows” and noticed the word.
And of course Plastic Man’s old sidekick was named Woozy Winks, so I see the word multiple times whenever I read a PLASTIC MAN comic reprint. (Which I do, now and then.)
I am strongly in favor of keeping the left-side menus as simple as possible, but I think it would be useful to maintain a reference of all the “Random Comments” pages that have been provided since CIDU Bill re-launched the page at the beginning of 2018. The Editors are welcome to move this list (from Moderation) to a more appropriate location:
(1-Oct-2020) Random Comments, Late 2020 Edition
(This is the “current” edition of “Random Comments”, posted by “EditorM”.)
(undated) Jan-Oct 2020 Your Random Comments
(This post has no author listed, and no comments: it could [and should] be deleted.)
(30-Jan-2020) Random Comments, 2020 Edition
(CIDU Bill’s last “random comments” post: it contains many pages of discussion about how to continue CIDU after his passing on 16-Sep-2020.)
(6-Jun-2019) The All-New Random Comments Page for the Summer of 2019
(This post grew to 302 comments before Bill shelved it.)
(27-May-2019) The New Random Comments Page
(This meta post has 66 comments about the random comments page, plus a link to the entry below. Technically it is still accepting new comments: this should probably be fixed.)
(undated) Random Comments 2019
(no author listed: this was probably an abandoned transitional attempt [it contains a link to the “first” page, below]. Like the entry above, this page is still accepting new comments, and should be closed.)
(1-Jan-2018) The Page Formerly Known as Random Comments
(This was Bill’s first “Your Random Comments” page after the server meltdown at the end of 2017.)
@Kilby thanks for the idea and the long lists of links. I’ll tend to the “turning off comments on disused threads” right away — good catch!
It’ll take a little more time to dig out from under that avalanche and turn it into a page or something like that, which can be linked in the “hamburger” tab menu. Will it be clear which version you really intend? Are your descriptions (on at least one version) intended to be included in the published page, or are they submission annotations?
@ Mitch4 – I included the descriptions mostly to make it easier to distinguish between the entries. The second attempt (posted to site comments) is marginally “cleaner”, but a lot of the verbiage could be removed for a simpler list. (The “plain URLs” version was only a desperate attempt to sidestep the spam filter, and should be deleted).
In addition to disabling comments on all the older posts, the second entry should be deleted entirely. The second to last (undated) item on the list was sort of “orphaned”, and has only 17 comments. I have no idea how easy it is to shift comments between posts, but if it is easy, those 17 could be moved to the one above it (27-May-19), so that the undated post could be removed, leaving just five, instead of seven.
@Kilby, thanks again for your suggestions. A number of them mentioned here we had implemented already earlier today, shortly after your original messages.
Some of the differences you note between the various threads — such as whether an author is shown, or a date — seems to be due to whether they come from a Page or a Post. Bill went back and forth on which to use, and I don’t really have a clear idea either on which works better.
The essentially empty one, as you note, serves nothing, and indeed has been removed or something like that (I think “revert to Draft status” was the easiest).
Yes, that seemingly isolated short thread is puzzling. I think Bill was trying out ideas on how to switch over from one thread to another, and this was an abandoned first try. Nonetheless, people posted to it, and though there is nothing immortal in the comments, it’s no less real than the others, and probably should stay in the list. There may or may not be a way to transfer comments from one Page or Post to another, but I have no idea how that would be done.
Please be patient on expecting to see the list posted.
Thanks again for the careful survey of these things.
I keep forgetting this thread is over here, but it is the most appropriate for this comment. For all you Piraro fans (Bizarro) he has a new serial web comic called Peyote Cowboy at peyotecowboy.net. It is still fairly new, so you can catch up on all the episodes in short order. The story is interesting, so far, and the the artwork is up to his high standards. I suppose a plus is that there are no easter eggs, or whatever he calls those things.
I’ve been viewing it since its inception, and it’s well worth a looksee. The story is strange (or bizarre, appropriately enough) and the artwork is wonderful.
Today’s Bizarro takes place in an art museum, and two of the pictures are taken from The Peyote Cowboy . . .
https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2020-11-15
Guero and Andréa, thanks for prompting me to go ahead and get started on Peyote Cowboy. I read both Piraro’s and Wayno’s weekly blogs, and they’ve been promoting it for weeks and weeks now, but something has been holding me back. (I suppose because I’ve never been into the Old West mythos.) But you convinced me to go ahead, and I read all of Chapter 1 just now. Very appealing, very digestible. (And no Secret Symbols.)
The Bliss/Martin book is now officially published.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/steve-martins-cartoon-book-respite-171528821.html
I was lucky enough to hear most of the NPR interview with Martin & Bliss just now. I’m really glad the whole thing is available online.
The NPR interview includes some mention of the Sisyphus fact-checking cartoon we looked at a few days ago in https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/11/13/never-ending-job/
(Have we been recruited into their publicity machine? :-) )
Nope, image compare works in post but not in comment even as html copy
Check https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/image-compare/ password ShowMe
update: password not needed, post backdated so it doesn’t show up at top of site displacing actual most recent post
More at https://lamefrogapplause.blogspot.com/2020/11/design-flaws.html
@ Mitch4 – On all the pictures in that collection, the building with the offset windows was the only one that did not seem incredibly stupid. In fact, I think there is a (very small) amount of brilliance in making each apartment just a little bit different from all the others. We’re not talking about “Hundertwasser” quality here, but if all the windows had been in two simple columns, the building would have looked even more like a prison than it already does.
One of the pundits I watch on YouTube (‘Justice Matters’, with Glenn Kirschner, in case anyone is interested) has his law degrees, licenses, whatevers as his background. One was crooked and, OCD as I am about something like that, I kept being distracted. I mentioned it in his comment section and, two days later, it was straightened out and I could concentrate on what he was saying.
(One commenter replied with the usual non-helpful, ‘Get a life’, but obviously, I have one. It just has to have its edges straight, that’s all.)
So, I’d never be able to live in that apartment complex ’cause I’d be bothered every time I came home and looked at that façade.
Does anyone know more about GoComics eliminating comics on its site? I just read the comments on the MYTHTICKLE page and this is a concern . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/mythtickle/2020/11/18
One of the procedure rooms at my dentist’s office looks out on a part of the neighborhood which has had some high-concept rebuilding going on – notably from the “Studio Gang”. https://studiogang.com/people/jeanne-gang . One is pictured below. I’ve never been able to really manage reading material while waiting in the procedure chair, and nowadays it is forbidden. So I have enjoyed looking out at these buildings. You can’t quite tell from this picture, but this building has a subtle repeating pattern of the two kinds of open or closed juncture, requiring FIVE rows and I forget how many units across to get the tiling element.
But the one earlier, while it could be appreciated under the case you make for it, just looks like it is so wrong it needs to be knocked into line!
While I don’t quite agree with Kilby that the window design of the building is good, I do find it the “least bad” of the designs on that (very funny) page that mitch linked to.
@Andrea on Gocomics — I never did see an overall article or explanation, but noticed remarks here and there. Reply-All and Reply-All-Lite are gone, archives and all. Frog Applause, which I am very fond of, was going to be cancelled, but there was a fan outcry and it was saved. During that period when it looked to be ending, the artist put out several retrospectives and assemblages of “best of” though she wouldn’t call it that. Her other, very different, project “Shoecabbage” did get the axe. I’m uncertain about “Lay Lines” — archive seems to still be there, but there was not a weekly new one this Monday.
I wouldn’t want to live in the window building just in case it wasn’t intentional.
As for GoComics removing comics from its site, I wouldn’t blame them for removing MythTickle. Almost all the comics are repeats.
Another local building with staggered fenestration, I think also a Jeanne Gang:
That one looks more like well-designed staggering.The first one the staggering is so small that it makes it look like a mistake (whether or not it actually was).
The second one might have some structural benefits
@Andrea on Gocomics — on the GoComics purge, see
http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/09/27/gocomics-dropping-frog-applause-the-conjurers-others-connie-to-the-wonnie-drops-gocomics/
(as noted, they changed their mind on FROG APPLAUSE and are retaining it_
EDGE OF ADVENTURE also suddenly vanished; not clear if that was the creator’s decision (someone thought they’d heard these strips were done some time ago and just not previously released).
Whoops, forgot to also link to the earlier report to which the one I did link to was a followup:
http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/08/24/thinning-the-herd-at-gocomics/
Thanks for both of those article links, \_()_/ .
Of the cancellations mentioned, the only one I’ve bothered to chase down elsewhere is/are the Reply All pair.
Of course, had they not recanted about Frog Applause, I would have been among the outraged.
Thanks for the info and links.
. . . and I’ve added FA to my daily rss to check it out for a while . . . 1000s of fans can’t be wrong!
If GoComics is really interested in cleaning up their act, they should get rid of all those superfluous “classic” features (not the straight reruns like “Calvin & Hobbes”, but the ones that operate in parallel with a regular strip, such as for “Peanuts”). Ditching a good comic while still retaining that detritus is supremely insensitive. However, when it comes down to it, GoComics doesn’t care about readers, the only arguments they listen to are (primarily) financial.
P.S. I have to admit that I do not follow any of the comics listed in either of those two articles. Actually, to be honest, I had not even heard of any of them before “Frog Applause” was mentioned here at CIDU.
@Kilby, you didn’t read Reply All?!
Well, at least I’m not alone in never having heard of ANY of the comics mentioned in the two articles.
Kilby: “However, when it comes down to it, GoComics doesn’t care about readers, the only arguments they listen to are (primarily) financial.”
I agree with that, but isn’t that a little odd as a complaint? They’re a business, of course they’re in business to make money. I would assume they care about their readers to the extent that unhappy readers might leave and cause them to lose money, but in the end, I assume all for-profit businesses are primarily focused on financial arguments.
@ Mitch4 – I really had not even heard of neither “Reply All” nor “Frog Applause” before this issue arose. I went and sampled both features, but in both cases neither the artwork nor the captioning style appealed to me. I’m happy that people who like them can still read them (at Arcamax and GoComics, respectively), but I won’t be adding either one to my daily list. If an example shows up that is worth posting here, that will be enough for me.
@Kilby, sorry I didn’t mark that I intended “mock horror” when exclaiming at your not being a Reply All reader. I actually wouldn’t consider it as your cup of tea. It isn’t perfect for me, either, but as a counterpart to Stone Soup, Pyjama Diaries, Between Friends, and such, I think it similar but just enough less cloying, and with a better balance of office and home/family elements. Anyhow, it turned out I did miss it enough to seek it out elsewhere.
We’ve remarked on the Far Side site and its occasional presentation of New Stuff, that disappears after a while.
Anyway, there is now a carousel of about four New Stuff cartoons, dated Nov. 17, starting at https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/168/sherlock
I think the Bull and the Bears (numbers 1 and 2) are new, but the museum and Noah scolding the animals (3 and 4) are held over from a previous release group.
Wow, I don’t think I got a single one of those. The last one at least I understand the setup, just don’t see the joke, but the others? (and I guess the third one is verboten to even discuss…)
Well, maybe you’re looking for a different brand of humor. Here’s the best I can do in explaining:
(1) Just a take on “bull in a china shop”. We have that expression, and can readily imagine what extensive damage it would be. Now this comic shows us a scene that appears to be exactly that. But Sherlock, or a Sherlock stand-in of some sort, thinks there has to be some more subtle explanation, and is preparing to solve it rather than accept the obvious.
(2) In the narration bubble, the bear had wandered into a cave with some early humans, sitting at a fire and under a wall-painting of some previous encounter with wildlife. One is alarmed about the bear, in wide-eyed exclamation. Then, in the present, the bear is telling the cubs about this encounter, and amusedly mimics the wide-eyed fear of the human.
(3) Yeah, pretty flat-out political commentary.
(4) From somewhere I remember a comedy routine (could it be Bob Newhart?) about all the actual practical problems Noah would have had on the ark. Among them, cleaning up and disposing the tonnes of dung daily. But in this drawing, there is one rather tiny and tidy pile of droppings. Yet there he is, pointing and demanding to know which creature in his care is responsible.
I’m confused by the first one. Is Sherlock right? Or being incredibly stupid? Is the bull dead because a policeman shot him? Or was he found at the scene like this?
Some level of ambiguity can be good and/or not matter, but here I find it distracting.
“(4) From somewhere I remember a comedy routine (could it be Bob Newhart?) . . .” Bill Cosby, early routine.
Thanks, Andréa!
Yeah, I too had problems with the story-level “decoding” of the first one. My issue was not yet the solution to the murder mystery (or if there is one!), but the identity of the characters. I started to ask if they are the real Holmes and Watson, which of course they could not be, but you know what I mean. Or the characters from some modern “updating” version. Or simply two local codgers going in for some cosplay or pranking. Or two delusional guys, who believe they are the real Holmes and Watson but are not.
I was disappointed that it was cut off before the ‘cleaning the ark’ part, altho I’m sure other YouTube videos carry it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Bob Newhart also did a similar routine . . . don’t know which of them was a standup comedian first.
Another off-kilter building in my neighborhood.
@ Mitch4 – For some reason that building seems to scream “university library”.
Well it is a University building, but not a library. The location is close to the somewhat controversial planned Obama Center.
I can’t find it right now, but I had a two-section paste of the main libraries of UChicago and our friends at the other end of town, Northwestern. The layout is different, but the materials and general style are identical. They were both done around 1967 by Walter Netsch at SOM.
For comparison, here is the “Geisel” library at UCSD (named after Dr. Seuss, and containing (among other things) a large collection of his writing and artwork):
Going back to weird windows, check the ‘cloud towers’ in Nanterre:
http://boiteaoutils.blogspot.com/2008/08/tours-aillaudnuages-in-nanterre.html
My parents used to joke about curved walls and the difficulty of fitting curtains to not-square windows.
I had in-law relatives years ago who lived in a – believe it or not – round house. Carpeting was very $$$, they said. I just found them on Google . . . https://journaltimes.com/news/local/glad-you-asked-whats-up-with-the-round-houses-in-racine/article_67cdbfa1-9363-557a-a60f-906f0735a9ec.html
Mitch,
Walter Netsch was the jerk who designed a couple of buildings at UIC. They look great from the air, but go inside and you’re almost guaranteed not to come out the same door. Staircases that narrow as you go up are fine if you’re walking alone, not so much if you’re with another person. EXTREMELY confusing layout. I went in once to a job interview, got so lost I was 20 minutes late, and when I told the interviewer that I’d been unable to find her office, she apologized to me. And when I left, she actually had to escort me to the exit. The wrong one, but I didn’t care.
Everybody tells me that those buildings have won architectural awards, and I tell them that architects love to give each other awards for buildings that real people can’t live or work in.
Okay, I’m climbing down off my soapbox now. I do hope that those libraries are better inside.
(BTW, as an Illinoisan you might be aware of him foremost as spouse of Dawn Clark Netsch.)
I have spent no more than one afternoon sitting in the Northwestern library, and can’t speak to the ease of finding your way around. But the Regenstein at UChicago is really quite nice inside. Well, the inside has been redone, but that still counts.
During my time as a consultant / contract worker for CPS, one school on my regular rounds was Carter G. Woodson (well, two schools: Woodson South Elementary and Woodson North Middle). Incredibly weird idea to design a public school around pentagonal and hexagonal areas and unpredictable angles. No matter how often I visited, I coulld not count on turning the right way to find the comparatively direct passage from the office (where you sign in) up to the computer lab. Or when leaving, the tech coordinator would helpfully send me to his preferred staircase, which “simply” takes you down to the back door of the cafeteria, which you walk thru at the right obtuse angle to get to the school entrance pod.
If you want to try Google’s street-view/360 of the school, it is here
Whilst on a ‘field trip’ for my library assistant degree, we went to a library that was just a tube (I thought it was Northwestern, but I see it wasn’t). We were told – and I wonder if this was apocryphal – that the library was sinking because THE WEIGHT OF THE BOOKS hadn’t been considered by the architects during the planning.
The most beautiful (inside) library I’ve ever been in was the new one in Yuma, AZ. One wouldn’t think a dinky city, 20 miles from the border, with over 33% unemployment, would have such a lovely and practical building, but it does. And I loved it, for the short time I was there.
Y’all are making me homesick for the Midwest (I lived just north of the IL/WI border for almost 60 years) and spent a lot of time in Chicago.
NU (not NWU, by the way) has several libraries – the one I posted is the main library, but your visit could have been a different one.
I’ve heard that “library sinking from weight of books” trope from lots of places – here is a quick check at Snopes
Well, I don’t pay much attention to what a library looks like, but I never forget its smell. Clemson University’s is the most memorable one for me.
Going back to weird windows, check the ‘cloud towers’ in Nanterre
Those with trypophobica are might not be fans.
Trypophobia
Editing error, sorry.
(Replying to my own comment in the GoComics thread, from 11/18) I’m uncertain about “Lay Lines” — archive seems to still be there, but there was not a weekly new one this Monday.
Well this week yes there is a new Lay Lines at GoComics — though black and white and very overtly partisan-political. https://www.gocomics.com/lay-lines/2020/11/23
Oddly, the comments there show that others also noticed the apparent skipped week. But Lo! Another comment pointed out some back-and-fill. Now there is one dated 11/16, the Monday that was missing. https://www.gocomics.com/lay-lines/2020/11/16
Oh you Europeans!
I just ordered something, and the notified shipping estimate date was (Etd.Delivery 01/12/2020). At first I didn’t see the year and thought, Why in the world would it take until well into January to deliver?
I’ve been watching a BBC-Wales courtroom program, and notice when a witness is asked to state their date of birth they say something like “fourth of the seventh, 1985” which must mean July 4th but reading it off left to right as 04/07/1985.
I actually agree it more sensible than the american convention, since it goes in order, from smallest units to middle to largest. So even better is the yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd systems, in reverse order — which if done properly (with padding of month and day digits) makes for great computer filenames, since the system sort order will match chronological order.
@ Andréa – The nine-story library at my college was built with a (close to) “floating” foundation, so that the entire building would be able to “ride out” any earthquakes. Five years after it was built, the first major earthquake occurred. The building survived it just fine, but the quake knocked over every single bookshelf in the building. I was told that it took nearly a year to clear out the wreckage, build new shelves, and restock all the books. When I was there (decades later), they had placed heavy steel I-beams across the top of all the shelves, so that they would be firmly attached to the walls. Walking into an aisle between two shelves felt like walking into a prison cell.
@ Olivier – For your olfactory edification:
“Far above Cayuga’s waters,
There is an awful smell.
Some say it’s Cayuga’s waters,
Others say: it’s Cornell.“
@ Mitch4 – Since I write to people in Germany, the US, and UK all the time, I never depend on the order when recording dates: I always use a three letter designation for the month (such as “27-Nov-2020“).
Apparently, Dethany has a last name:
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=T25UaGVGYXN0cmFjay8yMDIwLzExL0Zhc3RfVHJhY2suMjAyMDExMjdfMTUzNi5naWY=
Cool!
But now I’m wondering if it’s changed. What’s Guy’s last name?
@ Chak – The Wikipedia summary for “Fasttrack” mentions that she changed her first name (from “Bethany”), but says nothing about the surname.
P.S. There’s no “Guy” anywhere in the list, so he may be new.
I think Chak was asked about the last name of Dethany’s husband, Guy Wire. (i assume neither changed names after marrying.)
Sorry — correct spelling is Guy Wyre:
https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/tag/dick-tracy/
Why would you assume she’d give up her name, or that he wouldn’t take hers, or they’d not combine their names or make up a completely new one?
I thought I specifically said that I did NOT assume that.
My wife kept her last name. I know lots of couples where both kept their names; several who hyphenated; at least one who created a portmanteau new name from their old ones; and at least one where the husband took his wife’s last name.
None the less, it’s still common in American society (thought much less so than it used to be) for a woman to take her husband’s last name. (See above: my saying that it is common does not mean that I favor it, though I try to be not really into criticizing decisions other couples make, even if I’m bemused — that’s their choice. I try not to pontificate. “I am but an egg.”) So, because that IS still common, I thought it relevant to say that “I didn’t know.”
Again, I thought I was specifically saying that I did NOT assume, was just reporting. If that wasn’t clear; I apologize.
My sister still uses her original last name, but her daughters (my nieces) have their father’s last name. But she doesn’t mind using that family name when doing something in conjunction with one of the girls.
I seem to have stopped following the podcast “Filmspotting”, but when I first started listening to them an early episode had host Adam Kempenaar having trouble with co-host Sam Van Hallgren’s name, and kiddingly giving him a hard time over it, for some reason. It took a bit of streaming slightly older episodes to learn that he had up until recently been Sam Hallgren and had added the “Van” upon getting married — it was part of his wife’s surname and was the element from hers that they picked to create a combined name they would both use.
Also, Shrug, if your response about (not) making assumptions about married names was mostly addressed to Andréa, that may well have been mis-aimed, as her “Why would you assume” comment was entered as a response to Chak.
But we all should remember — when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of U and Mption!
As uncommon as Dethany is, I think the last thing she’d do is take Guy’s last name. And Dethany Wyre isn’t as ‘punny’ as Guy Wyre is.
Once upon a time (1972) in a land far, far away (Wisconsin), I did NOT take my husband’s name (shock and awe!). I did, however, need to change the address on my driver’s license.
The gentleman at the counter INSISTED that I also had to change my last name. I INSISTED that I didn’t have to. One of the counter ladies excitedly brought out the ‘DMV rule book’ and, sure enough, the law was changed [which I knew] and the rule book had that change in an addendum. She was thrilled that SOMEone had finally done it; he was disappointed that I was right and he was wrong.
German law does not say who has to take whose last name (although “wife takes husband’s” is overwhelmingly more common here), but the rules do specify that the family has to settle on a single, uniform name, except that the partner who takes the new name can hyphenate it onto the old one if desired.
FWIW, I wasn’t assuming it would change, just wondering
And another alternative solution pattern, from those confusing kids at Pardon My Planet:
Also comics-related is Zach Weinersmith nee Weiner.
And when Weinersmith leaves comics, apparently he will get a job as a teacher?
Nope, you got the wrong guy! The kid in the cartoon is mentioning a Wienersmith, obviously could never be mistaken for Weinersmith.
(On the goComics “purge” thread)
Today this notice was up in the Joe Vanilla space:
Well, I have to agree with much of this grump.
But it’s not like marketing or even the UI “experts” do a great job either.
I watched a movie on The Criterion Channel yesterday (which I had not done in a while), and when I paused it I was amazed that, after no more than about one second during which the progress bar and associated numbers flashed on screen, the paused screen was cleared from miscellaneous junk and was at the same brightness and picture quality as when the movie was playing. (sure, a screen saver would come along in a couple minutes — that’s probably necessary and not what I complain about.)
I was pausing just to get up and do something else for a minute, not to freeze frame and look closely at something that had flashed by or was in a long text that takes a minute of active reading etc. (I know, some of those things aren’t meant to be read — but aren’t you curious?)
But if I had been going for the freeze frame to study what’s on screen, I think there is no other streaming service I use (on my TV via Roku) that would clear the screen so cleanly and keep the original brightness. Yes, I appreciate seeing there are 20 minutes done and 10 minutes to go, but does that have to stay up there the whole pause? Yes, I appreciate the OPTION of seeing the actors’ thumbnail pictures and a chance to click and read some oddly selected IMDB material — but can’t it be an option that goes away, or that I can make to go away?
Call for theme comics! Beethoven!
Hey, “classical” music fans!
We might have a bonus themed posting for Beethoven’s big birthday. Please send comics (of any category, LOL, OY, etc) or other material of interest, to the usual submissions address, and mention [Beethoven] in the Subject.
(For that matter, Arlo’s cat, or other Ludwigs, if there is more than the name to make a connection.)
I know Beethoven isn’t a core topic for CIDU, but we do mark various public occasions and this is going to be a widely-celebrated event due to the round number of the anniversary (250).
Thanks!
“Let me buz you with a thought, chum.”
So buz could be a verb then, with this sense of “clue you in”?
Could that have anything to do with his nickname??
“buzZ you in” is used for unlocking the door (which gives a BUZZ sound) of an apartment. But ‘clue you in’ would make more sense here.
A new cartoon has been added at the front of the “New Stuff” rotation at the Far Side site.
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/167/croc-christmas
(The others in the rotation we discussed in this thread, from 11/19. such as, Bull in the china shop / Sherlock.)
Very apt, as I have alligators in the pond across the street. Don’t think I’ll hang any stockings for them on my fireplace, tho. They stay by their pond, and I leave ’em alone.
I’m happy that Larson is enjoying drawing again (with his newfangled digital tools), but of all the new comics, this artwork was the least convincing. Some of the others (with clear black outlines) are better; I still don’t think that color is necessary to get any of the jokes, and in this case it was a hindrance, the hacked off legs are just a little too gruesome in color, and would have been (in my opionion) better in a monochrome line drawing.
I agree it was rather disappointing.
No, not a synchronicity! Since the creators are the same for the two strips…
Let’s just say “economy” and not get mean with “laziness”.
Oh oh oh … or CROSSOVER!
These could be the very same event, just seen from the two different perspectives.
In comments at goComics, the artists mention that even though “Maria’s Day” is just reruns, every once in a while they throw in a new one!
Notice the little purple mask on Maria’s bed, confirmation this is new.
Yeah, I would go with “crossover.” Seems more like “this would be fun,” rather than “let’s save the work of writing two separate dialogues.”
Right, I was leaving room in principle for a cynic who would want to say they were cutting corners, but I wasn’t opining that way myself. In fact (noting that Maria is not normally updating) they are going out of their way to give us something of an extra treat!
Still looking for Beethoven material!
(NOT any more Peanuts though)
Does not need to be related to birthday. Just a good comic and has something to do with Beethoven.
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
WFMT.com (and 98.7 FM) is of course doing a mostly-Beethoven day. But the Morning Program (usually featuring short excerpts or single movements) , which last hour did the finale of the 7th Symphony, is not going to make us wait for the Ode to Joy until the 8 PM full Ninth. They are playing it right now!
I went right over there (internet, as I no longer live by Chicago), but it wouldn’t play for me. I’ll have to find it on my house music system . . . thanks for the heads up, tho.
TIL in Internet abbreviations, ETA does not mean Estimated Time of Arrival as it does IRL, but instead can be Edited To Add.
(Limited) Call for Comics
Cartoons with themes from The Twelve Days song
Only one of each kind can be used.
Doesn’t have to have the associated number, or clearly allude to the song, though that could be a plus. That is, a cartoon about drummers might work even without having them drumming or saying that there are twelve of them; but those specifics could be helpful.
Please mail to usual address
What we do or do not still need:
Partridge NOT NEEDED
Turtle doves
French hens
Calling birds or colley birds
Gold rings or golden rings
Geese, maybe laying
Swans, maybe swimming
Milk-maids
Ladies, probably dancing
Lords NOT NEEDED
Pipers, or fifers
Drummers, maybe drumming
Thanks!
== Eds.
Twelve Days:
Update on What we do or do not still need:
Partridge NOT NEEDED
Turtle doves NOT NEEDED
French hens
Calling birds or colley birds NOT NEEDED
Gold rings or golden rings
Geese, maybe laying
Swans, maybe swimming
Milk-maids
Ladies, probably dancing
Lords NOT NEEDED
Pipers, or fifers
Drummers, maybe drumming
Also if you know of strips which in some year have done a full or almost full sequence of jokes for the twelve days in turn, and they are in some selectable archive, let us have a link to the first or a key point, so we can consider mentioning it in notes. We are already aware of this for “Mother Goose and Grimm”.
Thanks!
== Eds.
I’m maybe six months or so behind on reading my paper issues of The New Yorker, but maybe when this one arrives I will rescue it from that pushdown stack!
P.S. I’m pretty consistent about using FIFO queues for most recurring things in my life now, but a few unaccountably turn into pushdown stacks.
For instance when I go to the dishrack by the sink and take a plate from there to the cupboard, I will slip it to the bottom of a pile of plates of that size/type. And when I need one to serve food on, I take it from the top. Socks in their dresser drawer are not a strict one-at-a-time ordered queue, but I do put the rolled pairs back from the laundry in the back area of the drawer, and that pushes others forward, so that there is a generalized migration and a quasi-FIFO.
But I can’t manage that with a stack of magazines already practically toppling.
Did anyone receive a Holiday card from the Bickel family, as was discussed some time ago? I just realized I never did.
Andrea, yes, a couple of us noted it in comments from the post in which Robin’s offer was repeated. https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/hanukah-cards-from-robin-bickel/
New Yorker 2020 Caption Contest Comedian Showdown
The Cartoon Issue instead of the usual caption contest for readers, turned it over to professional comedians. They were asked to provide captions for this cartoon drawing:
For more explanation, and a carousel of the captions, see The New Yorker page for this.
In case people are running into paywall issues with the NYer, we are working on getting an image with all the captions presented on one page.
Sometimes paywalls fall before the might of Reader View, but not this time. However, I was able to go through all of them anyway. I only recognized three of the comedians, two (Melissa Villasenor and Kyle Mooney) because they’re on SNL. And Nick Offerman of course.
Well, FWIW here’s that all-captions page image.
It seems to me that this group does better captions than those pros
Well, FWIW here’s that all-captions page image.
Yikes. I’m glad I was able to read it off the page, because the small type in italics is a tough go for these old eyes.
I really enjoy Bizarro much of the time; but am not at all an enthusiast for the “Secret Symbols” and rarely watch the number and count them up.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to follow the creators’ build up and now announcement of a new symbol to the system; and may also be for the readers here who like the comics and may or may not go for the symbols. Anyway, they have announced the new one, and give some background, both on Dan Piraro’s blog and on Wayno’s blog.
Spoiler: For those not even motivated to go take a look: It’s a Magritte pipe. Or not-pipe.
Help me find
Yesterday I saw but did not save or make note of the comic panel described below. Today I saw one I did save, from The Flying McCoys, making a joke that depends on two different meanings of the word “service” — not a really good joke, but I wanted to put it together with the one described below, that depends on a different ambiguity in “service”. But now can’t find that earlier one.
In the drawing we are looking from one end of a tennis court. The player in front of us is a shirtless man, also shoeless, who has just tossed up the tennis ball to serve it and is starting to swing the racket. His partner or opponent is waiting for it in the opposite court. But there is an umpire or judge or interfering bystander gesturing to stop the player, and pointing to a sign on the wall: “No shirt, no shoes, no service”.
Anybody recognize that?
Here’s today’s Hi and Lois, with the iconic senior-moment question:
Boise Ed points out that the comments thread for this at Comics Kingdom has someone raising the question of what other recent comic they could have seen (they thought “Pluggers” but that isn’t turning up answers) that says, At least when you find yourself in the bathroom you know what you went in there to do.
Anybody know what it was.
And BTW I have to disagree. I go in to the bathroom all day for all sorts of reasons, from brushing my teeth to cleaning the cat box.
I saw it recently, too, but don’t remember where. I read too many comics daily to remember each and every one, just the general idea when mentioned.
It was the December 20 Dustin.
Thanks, ADB!
“♫buffalo girls, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight…!♫”
“Well I’m sorry…hey!”
Has that now become more of a New Year’s movie watch than a Christmas movie watch?
For those already following, or interested in starting, Bizarro founder Dan Piraro’s graphic novel project Peyote Cowboy, his newsletter today announced a new chapter / new episode. You can start at the beginning here or pick up with the new episode here .
Every now and then, I get a email that someone “liked your comment on [some CIDU topic].” How does one indicate such liking? I don’t see any “like” buttons on the email or the godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie page.
Ed, it’s from some people who are viewing the site thru the WordPress “Reader mode” instead of the usual web interface. Reader Mode presents posts and comments from various WP based blogs you have clicked to follow, and uses the Reader Mode layout and style sheet in place of the themes from the different blogs or sites. As part of that , it uses indented comment threading, and has stars for Likes that you can mark a post or comment with.
(Also in the admin interface, in the comments area I see stars to click for Likes also.)
It’s interesting that you get notifications for that. I didn’t know it would be sending them if you are not using the Reader mode yourself.
One reason to check out Reader mode is the stylesheet override. Tomorrow I am posting a big HTML table , which is supposed to have visible border lines, but does not in the stylesheet for CIDU’s theme. I hope it will show correctly in Reader mode.
“It’s interesting that you get notifications for that. I didn’t know it would be sending them if you are not using the Reader mode yourself.”
I read CIDU thru the web, and receive notifications of ‘likes’ . . .
Replying to Andréa – Ed forwarded me one of the notices he got, and in identifying me as the one who had liked a comment of his it also said “Maybe check out what Mitch4 has been blogging” and put in links to posts on my WP testbed site “Random Demos”.
This clarifies for me how some posts there have gotten likes and comments from people I recognize from CIDU (such as you, Andréa). I had thought it might be from when I used “Random Demos” as a place to upload downloaded images and provide a url for putting a link to embed an image in a comment at CIDU.
How sweet that they each favor a namesake from the other’s species! (Or is that not the right way to read the balloon and pointers?)
Yes, that is rather sweet!
I’ve gathered that the dog in his cartoons is pretty much based on his actual dog.
Okay, here is a picture Harry Bliss tweeted, of his real-life dog, Penny:
Looks like our little fuzzball. My wife is his alpha, through and through.
More on cat / dog relations from Bliss / Martin
I’ll never forget the morning
That Grandpa ate the awning
To impress a pretty lady
Who went for men that were shady
Hello, Dali!
Today’s Zit’s comic reminded me of Bill. He never did understand cats. I can’t seem to paste the image, so here’s the link. https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/zits/s-2471001
Here
I’d add that perhaps Connie’s remark is meant with some irony, or anyway we are meant to take it ironically. Jeremy may consider himself not a cat person, but one of the hallmarks of a cat person is calmly accepting (and maybe actively enjoying) having a kitten sit on your head.
Speaking of being reminded of Bill . . . I remember he did NOT like this book . . .
And more cats-on-your-head stuff . . .
. . . I like to think Bill would’ve found these amusing.
WELL, that didn’t work out . . . here’s the first of the cats-on-your-head Pooch Café:
I don’t know if “three-dog night” was really an expression before it was the name of a band, but since then it has become a fine template for similar remarks.
If I go to rest briefly with a small bit of sleep during the day, I can measure the seriousness of the cat-nap by how many cats I get to help me!
Hubby used to have five-dog-nights, even tho the dogs are, ostensibly, mine (we had seven at the time). Now he has only-two-dog nights, and one sleeps in my room in her own bed.
I was surprised when the Pooch Cafe strips became a sequence. I would have guessed that yesterday’s would be a one-off. Comments on today included someone wondering why the woman was dressed as a bellhop.
Still sittin’ on his head . . .
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=Wml0cy8yMDIxLzAxL1ppdHMuMjAyMTAxMjhfMTUzNi5naWY=
Looks like Wrong Hands is leaving GoComics . . .
Yes, I noticed that too and wondered. i’ll miss not getting more literary fish schools and artistic birds. :-(
Here he is – https://wronghands1.com/
The New Adventures of Queen Victoria is apparently also working its way around to a departure from GoComics.
The Wrong Hands rss feed is https://wronghands1.com/feed/ in case anyone is interested.
Jimmy Johnson’s “Arlo an Janis” blog went down last week. He put up a replacement, but the “click here” link is to that replacement. The mailto link generated an “unknown user” rejection. Anyone know how to reach him?
@Lost – This has been under discussion at his Facebook fan group. I was among the well-intentioned but misinformed fans who were insisting for a while that it must be just a DNS-propagation delay, and his tech people should just publish the numerical IP address and we could use that. But apparently not!
Aha! It has changed as of today! There is now a sort of “under construction” message:
And when I checked again, the “real” site was back.
Thank you for the uodate, Mitch.
I just now tried arloandjanis.com (in Mac Chrome) and still see the “if you’re still coming here” note and the link to itself.
Can somebody point me to how to ‘like’ a post or comment? I know you have to go through the ‘Reader’ section, and I managed to find how to do it once, but now I can’t.
Alternatively, has anybody downloaded the WordPress app? Does it make things any easier?
Until I figure this out, please consider all your comments ‘liked’.
And what if we don’t WANT to be “liked”? What if we are here only to spread discord and strife and terrific terror (™ ChickenMan) in the hearts of decent folk everywhere? Mwah-ha-ha-ha and all that? (Exits stage left, twirling mustache.)
“Bwak Bwak Bwak Bwaaaak!” There’s a geezer reference, and I think a very localized one. The series is on YT somewhere – I had it once, but don’t know where it is now. Fun to listen to, tho.
NOT as localized as I thought it was, altho it DID begin in Chicago, WCFL, to which I listened when WLS wasn’t playing a song I liked.
Well, Shrug, some things in life you just have to endure. So I’m going to like you and there isn’t a dang thing you can do about it.
NOW who’s twirling her mustache? Uh, well, anyhoo…
Chicken Man was, indeed, everywhere. But I’d like to find Colonel Thermal Updraft, which I think was local to Philly.
larK, the scrape archive looks to be broken this morning :-(
It was out for a few days there, but seems to be back now.
Yes, I see it now too. Thanks,
I didn’t even know there was a YouTube version — only knew it as a radio show, which I was delighted to catch back when it first ran, and which I bought on cd from the creator ten years or so ago and happily played. (The “return of” late/environmentalist-themed stories aren’t nearly as good as the originals, at least past the first couple, but I’m enough of a completist to be glad I’ve got them all.)
I’ve always been more of a radio guy than a TV/movies guy; BOB AND RAY; FIRESIGN MYSTERY THEATER; STAN FREEBERG; lots of British stuff like THE GOON SHOW and ROUND THE HORNE and I’M SORRY I’LL READ THAT AGAIN can still delight me when heard for the umpteenth time — in visual media, only MONTY PYTHON and SCTV strike me as averaging as on as high a degree of funny. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, since I’m somewhat hard of hearing, so “should” be more receptive to visual than oral humor (but nah, I find Groucho much funnier than Harpo; there are days when I think I may even find Zeppo funnier than Harpo.)
O.K., FIRESIGN THEATER and STAN FREBURG. Sorry. Just proves my point that I seem to be oriented more to sound than to visual cues (even though I did once briefly work as a proofreader, or possibly a profroader.)
FREEBURG, two “e”s. Yowzah.
I never saw this animated version, either; must be relatively newish. I, too, prefer the radio version, as with B & R and Firesign Theatre, etc. Makes us geezers, I guess.
Huh, I only looked on the OTHER random comments thread, and thought no one had noticed the downtime. I’m only now catching up. Yes, we were down for a couple days: we decided to go with the open source ColdFusion replacement Lucee instead of paying Adobe for a new ColdFusion license, so things went all higgledy-piggledy for a while there as we rebuilt everything and swapped out the underlying server. I’m still catching up, but I think everything CIDU related should be up and working now.
It seems to be working fine. Thanks for the effort.
Cat stuff, from Crumb.
Here’s two bits of backstory, then today’s. I’m figuring the ferals in that alley have been ear-tipped. But the comments seem to think it is from battles.
‘Top Cat’ is a real geezer alert. I remember it as one cartoon I was allowed to watch (only ’cause my Dad liked it). I found it on YT and it’s not really funny now.
SFPC can get very sharp pointed!
I felt sure there must be a thread where somebody was ragging on the i-before-e mnemonic, but I can’t find it. and so will just drop this fine set of counterexamples into Random.
Note, these provide counterexamples to both parts — the i-before-e itself and the except-after-c.
A sweet twist with animals, from Liz Climo
I’m mildly embarrassed (but mostly ecstatic) to discover that you folks have assumed the mantle of CIDU. I was bereft (as was everyone else) when Bill died last year and never thought to look to see if there was any continuation. Then this morning I emailed a blogger I look at daily (https://folioolio.blogspot.com/) because I didn’t understand a cartoon he’d posted, lamenting that I missed CIDU, explaining what a gold mine it had been for so long. He replied, suggesting that I take it up, and so I googled it and omg here you all are! Thank you to all the folks who have taken on this task of love. Blessings on you all.
BillR, we hope you’ll make yourself at home here once again!
BillR, great to have you back!
SOMEwhere and SOMEtime, we discussed Vlad the Impaler and puns thereof . . . I can’t find that thread, so I’ll just toss this in here . . .
https://www.comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2021-03-20
Andréa, here is one such: https://comicsidontunderstand.com/2020/02/18/because-the-hot-dog-is-impaled/
Yep, that’s the thread I was thinking of . . . thanks!
Teresa is sometimes quite serious:
This made me think of one where there was a pun on “shower caddy” but based on a golfing caddy, where this is a Cadillac car:
I was thinking the shower-caddy/golf-caddy one got discussed here, but can’t find it.
Luke Kruger-Howard has a new comic book. 110 pages. Free, but donations encouraged.
Luke is most famous as the father of my grandson, but has a few other accomplishments:
Luke Kruger-Howard (He/Him) is an Ignatz nominated cartoonist living in New Hampshire where he takes care of a toddler full-time. A graduate and former teacher at The Center for Cartoon Studies, Luke’s work has popped up in numerous places – stuff like The New Yorker, The Nib, Slate, Best American Comics, the AV Club, Buzzfeed, Google and the like. Some of his comics include Talk Dirty To Me (AdHouse Books), Our Mother (Retrofit/Big Planet Comics), Trevor (self-published and Ignatz nominated), The Big Mystery Case (Self published), and a handful more. He has been spending a lot of time recently dreaming about ways artists might be able to better separate their art practices from capitalism. GOES BOOKS is an experiment in that vein.
For more info about this project AND TO GET YOUR COPY: https://sites.google.com/view/goesbooks/home
Congratulations!
The pay-it-forward is a nice way to do things.
“I had to hold my breath on that one.”
For those who enjoy Facebook groups, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1586609701398462/about [The Batavia Funny (and Not So Funny) Pages] is a place where the host posts old-timey newspaper comic strips.
I may have learned about it from someone on CIDU. Thanks, and I’m sorry I don’t remember well enough to h/t you.
Over on Gasoline Alley’s GoComics site, people were posting vintage strips. One hundred years ago, 80, etc. And some other strips like Brenda Starr and Rick O’Shea. Some commenters disliked that and began flagging comments leading to some being deleted and one person put in suspension. The latter particularly weird at GC, because they don’t tell you that nor does it prevent you from commenting. It’s just that no one else will see the comments.
As a Premium member, I have been giving the moderators and regular contact an email-full about that, especially where some of mine were deleted. Recently there have been no deletions that I have noticed.
The guy that got suspended (Stu) had been posting the strips to Twitter. He alse created a Facebook group to post and discuss the old strips. However, it’s a private group, which means that you can’t even read the posts, unlike the one referenced above. I’m not FB, and I’m not going to join just for that. I have been linking the Twitter feed for that, but supposedly he will stop posting them there 5/1.
The latter particularly weird at GC, because they don’t tell you that nor does it prevent you from commenting. It’s just that no one else will see the comments.I’ve only recently heard of this sort of coventry, under the term shadow banning, mostly with regard to Twitter.
Attila’s wife, calling out from the back room of the tent, when he gets back in the evening: “Is that you, Hun?”
CALL FOR COMICS
You know, we always can use more reader-submitted LOLs, OYs, and mainline CIDUs. Please just send to the sidebar-posted address: cidu dot submissions at gmail dot com.
(And easier if kept fairly narrow, rather than mixed in multi-comix mails with Ewwws, synchros, etc.)
It will be easier to track correspondence if you could mention that category in the email Subject line (along with some indication of the comic title or creator or whatever — just so there are not indistinguishable batches all called just “CIDU”).
Thanks!
And here I’ve been restraining myself . . . ‘-)
I sent in a batch of 4 a month or two ago, they were all comics (I didn’t understand) from one day about half a year ago. After I spent my time formatting the message, I forgot to include a subject line. None of the four I sent in ever showed up here.
So, was it the fact that the comics were “stale”, being over 6 months old?
Was it the fact that I omitted a subject line?
Are they in fact cued up and awaiting deployment on some special future day?
Or am I due a Snoopy rejection letter that I please stop submitting?
larK, the latest I see from you (on this return address) were 5 January. The Beetle Bailey in there was published 15 January, https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/oxygen/
I did notice some unexpected spam-holds on some email submissions (and started checking those regularly), but I don’t think anything from you was among them.
I have indistinct memory of another batch from you that may be what you describe. But address search is not finding it. Maybe when WW connects he will find something. Meanwhile, if you have them in a Sent folder or something like that, would it be difficult to resend? Thanks!
I resent it, this time with a subject. I’d originally sent it March 3rd.
Thanks, larK, got it this time. (Don’t see anything from March 3rd.)
(OT)
If you are interested in academic (philosophy + lit) discussion of “Black Intellectuals and the Literary Canon” , a webcast discussion is about to begin (6 pm central wednesday 28 april) at
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/black-intellectuals-and
I don’t think I’m seeing this consistently: What are the correct diacritics (if any) to use in the name Lio for the cartoon and its character?
Liō. I don’t know for sure what the pronunciation is. I internalize it as “Leo”,
Just FYI, in case anyone’s been following Mother Goose & Grimm (which I was planning to delete from my daily read anyway) . . . it’s ending, according to Comics Curmudgeon. It’s been unfunny for quite some time, so it was obvious the artist had lost interest.
Thanks, Brian. I was putting an acute accent on the í but Lío looked wrong. I just knew there was supposed to be some diacritic. I may not bother with finding o with a macron, though.
And I agree with thinking of it pronounced just like “Leo” though I have no more source for that.
When I saw This:
I was momentarily excited to think he was referring to This:
I just ran across a remark (in a blog collection of today’s notable births, deaths, premieres, and “designated days”) that today is ” No Pants Day” in the U.S. and Canada; with a link to one of those Days sites.
And that forestalled a feeling of coincidence or synchronicity that I was seeing several comics involving “no pants”, such as Hi and Lois https://www.comicskingdom.com/hi-and-lois/2021-05-07 and Zippy https://www.comicskingdom.com/zippy-the-pinhead/2021-05-07
A Meta from Andertoons:
I assume the underlying cartoon we see under the notice box is a real one they have done; but so far don’t see it among their recent posts at GoComics.
Marginal caption deciphering suggestions in the goComics comments:
“And this is my yes face. I’m Immitating a platypus.”
“And this is why you never ever invest in a platypus.”
Breaking Cat News had a week-long run-up to No Pants Day. Sally Forth seemed to mention it. Dick Tracy had a character with no (US) pants, but didn’t mention the day specifically. It’s not clear if Lennie Peterson chose this particular rerun of the Big Picture with that in mind or not. He hasn’t replied in comments.
https://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news/2021/05/7
https://www.comicskingdom.com/sally-forth/2021-05-07
https://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2021/05/7
https://www.gocomics.com/thebigpicture/2021/05/07
Brian in Not Seattle says
Breaking Cat News had a week-long run-up to No Pants DayYes, and it pretty much baffled me all along, since the cats are indeed depicted with clothing on but it still seemed odd to mention this one cat (was it Lupin?) was unclothed when he disappeared , when that is irl the normal state for cats. I liked the speculation that his white fur was camouflaging him on some white towels or linens. I sometimes can’t find my ginger boy when he is curled up in a similarly colored cat bed.
Yes, Lupin. Georgia mentioned that he’s particularly hard to find at a times because he’s deaf, so they can’t even call him.
For the “Would It Have Worked Better If …?” Department,
In both cases, the appellation “Don” is a marker of respect, like a title, and not like a given name. Would it have worked better if the mistake-Don was a guy with that name?
zbicyclist said:
Luke Kruger-Howard has a new comic book. 110 pages. Free, but donations encouraged.Also:
For more info about this project AND TO GET YOUR COPY: https://sites.google.com/view/goesbooks/homeBringing that back to remark I have received my copy, and will be looking forward to reading it soon!
Nice pay-it-forward model. My order was free; but my donation went to supporting a free copy for somebody else.
Sometime in the distant past, we were discussing CVS receipts and the length thereof . . .
A new comics-centric entry at Arnold Zwicky’s blog, https://arnoldzwicky.org/2021/05/13/one-more-time-magritte-and-schrodinger/ , including a couple of panels we’ve featured here.
Nice obit in the NYTimes for Kathleen Andrews (of Andrews – McNeill)
Thanks for that article / obit link!
Brian: “… nor does it prevent you from commenting. It’s just that no one else will see the comments.” That does seem exceptionally weird, and reminiscent of the way lawyers and doctors are sometimes disciplined. I mean, if a lawyer or doctor has done something reprehensible, why not let potential clients or patients have that information?
Andréa: I find Mother Goose and Grimm, like many comics, sometimes dull and other times hilarious. If I had to pare my list, MGaG would be among neither the first to go or the last to keep.
And if you don’t see the connection to today’s comics-reading options, the Andrews McMeel syndicate runs GoComics.com
I agree – just about the time I prepare to delete MG&G from my list, a really funny one comes up, and so it will live to annoy me for another day.
I’m BAAAAACK!
Just got my laptop back from the shop, after about 30 days.
Some observations:
I can now use the space bar
Once e month is enough to keep up with Mary Worth
Daily comics had a backlog of 30 days, and varying posting rates also varied the backlog. The fewest new comics in that month? Bug Martini, with two.
And I missed you all!
“space bar” har dee har har! :)
Some random finds on YouTube…
It was a few years ago that I scored a triple-Garfield.
I was driving on Chicago’s West 55th Street, in a section where it is named Garfield Boulevard. On the NPR radio, I was listening to Bob Garfield. And he was interviewing Jim Davis, creator of Garfield comic strip.
In the backstory related in this clip, was Garfield really the first to use a cat rather than dog? How about Heathcliff?
I recall a Zen moment sixty or so years ago when I was watching baseball on TV: Dave Philley was playing for the Philadelphia Phillies, and the broadcast featured commericals for Philly cigars.
To really technical, Heathcliff is a panel, not a strip. But yes, Wikipedia sez it predates Garfield.
Kliban’s cats may have slightly predated Garfield as well, but they weren’t really a regular strip either
Anyone else having issues with Go comics?
Major outages this a.m. . . .
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1269921
Thanks, Andrea! (Sorry, I’m not sure how to add the accent)
Da nada/ I had no issues w/GC, but that’s not to say others haven’t; maybe it depends on timing or location.
Morning outages won’t bother me.
PS: Easiest way to get the accent is to just copy it from Andréa’s comment.
There was some kind of problem with a company that’s a server for large sites or something and there many outages this morning. Might have been related.
I use this site a lot to copy (and subsequently paste) accent marks and such:
http://www.philsp.com/docs/fm_trigraphs.html
Speaking of our fave cartoon ‘c*t’ . . .
https://scontent.ftpa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65/196468877_343072210513638_9022451162096762544_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=8024bb&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_ohc=ANP-UjiOn_oAX-Orfdt&tn=s77zj2DF9DWvse2M&_nc_ht=scontent.ftpa1-1.fna&tp=14&oh=e911c015d8f712876e94183ea25a0b27&oe=60E6A156
I don’t think I’ve seen H Bliss in a video in this style before.
Here the difference between “cartoon physics” and “real-world physics” can be isolated as one big thing: somehow he has FTL communication from close to the sun, which tells him it has exploded.
Is anyone else having problems with the Comics Kingdom site? It’s there for me, but most links, including the home, throw up a “Page not found” error. The CK comics at Seattle PI are fine.
A Tewsday surprise! Wrong Hands seems to be back, at gocomics!
mitch4 (from July 13th): it is possible to find out that a supernova has occurred from neutrino emissions, before the light of the supernova reaches you.
https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2018/11/supernova-signals
BRUTAL!
Shrug offered a site for “accent marks and such.” On a Mac, if you hold down certain keys (vowels, c, and probably others), you get a popup showing that letter with the diacritical marks appropriate to it. Then you just pick the right one. For example: č
Glad to see Wrong Hands back. It was on a website during the hiatus, but it’s easier to read comics in only a few places. Thanks for the heads up!
On Windows you can make an ‘é’ by the simple and intuitive process of holding down the alt key and typing “130” on the number pad.
On Windows you can also enable the “English US International” keyboard, switchable on medium short order back and forth with plain “English US”. With the EN INTL switched in, some keys become special — the apostrophe or single quote, the double quote, the backquote, and the tilde. When you type one of those, NOTHING appears on screen. If the immediately following keypress is for a letter that can take a diacritic, they will combine and show the accented character. If the second keypress is a character that does not take diacritics, then both characters from the two keypresses will appear in order.
So for example, ~ plus n gives ñ (and that’s the only special follower for tilde), apostrophe plus e is é , double quote plus u is ü, and ‘ plus c is ç (you might think it should be comma plus c, but that would throw comma into the bunch of keys you have to be careful about). I can’t recall if there is a way under this scheme to do a Spanish inverted question or exclam.
When I said something about “the bunch of keys you have to be careful about” that reflects a very annoying down side to this system. When you want the triggering punctuation mark for itself, you have to think about what your next character will be. If it’s something that will turn into an accented letter, you need to do something to block that fusion, like typing a space after. So if you have left INTL on and forgot about it, you may get oddly mangled quotations, for instance.
“How are you today?” asked Sam.
Ï’m fine” replied Pam.
Öh that’s good to hear” he replied.
This should certainly be considered an érror’ if anything is!
that’s the only special follower for tilde I said, incorrectly. The tilde can appear as diacritic over some others: ã ~e ~i õ ~u
Also up-caret (called “hat” in some maths contexts) or circumflex:
â ê î ô û ^y
I have a Spanish keyboard layout in Windows, but Alt+130, while unintuitive, is less keystrokes than switching to the Spanish keyboard, typing a character with an accent mark, and then switching the keyboard back. :)
WW, thanks for reminding about the additional group of options involving switching to another national or language keyboard. The downside is as you describe, but the EN-US INTL is not as severe, since you might not want to switch back immediately. The things you have to work around or avoid when typing mostly-diacritic-free US English text are not as many with the INTL as with Spanish.
(Even worse on the inconvenience score is a sometimes-recommended option we haven’t mentioned, opening the virtual keyboard-accessory.)
BUT my dislike of the Alt+130 is not the Alt, it’s the 130, both in the minor way that it is getting to be quite a few keystrokes for one little é in your text, and also because that’s not the only one you’ll want, and you won’t want have a way to associate those meaningless numbers to the desired characters, so you will need to keep a list around.
After the earlier group of postings on this topic, I did a lookup, and at https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/windows/codeint/#foreign (which seems to be part of a help system for users at Penn State provided by a proactive tech staff!) there are additional characters available to the INTL keyboard layout, using the … wait for it … ALT key. But with short extended codes, meant to be memorable more than the numbers are. So this includes some that I said I was sad were missing from the INTL layout, such as ¡ and ¿ .
All in all, there are various methods, but on a real computer with a real keyboard (to stress the positive!) it is generally a bother. Much easier is the system used with the virtual keyboards of many kinds of phone or tablet, where holding most “keys” beyond a certain timed pause will display the alternate characters available from that “key”, for you to slide into and select. This is much like Boise Ed was describing early in the current discussion, tho I read him as talking about physical keys after all.
Interesting to know. The main downside of adding en-US INTL keyboard is probably the extra keystrokes to cycle through keyboards when I don’t want en-US INTL.
“BUT my dislike of the Alt+130 is not the Alt, it’s the 130, . . . because that’s not the only one you’ll want, and you won’t want have a way to associate those meaningless numbers to the desired characters,”
Alt+130 is the only one I have well-memorized. Because of Andréa. :)
Today in The Comics Curmudgeon there was a bit about a Garfield strip with a coloring mismatch. When I went to GoComics to see what the commenters had to say, they did indeed complain. BUT a some point after many of those the coloring was fixed! That’s not common.
https://joshreads.com/2021/08/back-to-school-2/
https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/2021/08/30
Ha, Brian, I noticed the wrong color, but didn’t understand Uncle Lumpy’s comment about Heathcliff!
Maybe we need a “Curmudgeon I Don’t Understand” post.
What’s with Comics Kingdom? A total paywall, now?
Oh, well, it’ll cut down on my morning computer time, for sure.
But there’s no ransom demand — er, paywall — that I’ve seen. Their whole side has has problems since last night. I got to The Phantom there, just past noon PDT today, but now (two hours later) it’s unreachable again.
Make that “Their whole site.”
It was just not loading content this morning, nor letting me sign in to paid account. I just got back in from running errands, but I took a minute to check and it looks more or less okay.
Yesterday, I don’t think anything worked, Page Not Found for anything. Today it serves strip up through Sunday’s, but not today’s. For those I get 504 Bad Gateway.
no, gotta retract that ‘looks okay now’ report. Getting 504 Gateway time-out
Comics Kingdom has been going in and out for a couple of days. When it’s in, there can be long delays. I wonder if it’s the victim of a DDoS.
FYI, there have been some discussion of Comics Kingdom in the Random Comments thread here
This morning (PDT), some CK sites gave me the Microsoft 504 error and other just said “Page not found.” Just after noon, I got it to work. Two hours later, it was off again, then later it was on again.
DDoS is possible, of course, but why would any hackers target them? Maybe they’re just too cheap to allow for enough access points. (Meanwhile, I still wish this page didn’t make me log in every freakin’ time.)
I was able to get Monday’s Sally Forth when I checked after Midnight CDT, which is when I check Dick Tracy so I can get early comments in as needed.
Tuesday morning, I am getting nothing from Comics Kingdom.
I posted
In reply to Arthur.FYI, there have been some discussion of Comics Kingdom in the Random Comments thread here
Sorry, I was getting groggy or something, and thought Arthur’s comment about CK appeared in the current regular comics thread, and thought it made sense for me to reply in that same thread and mention Random Comments. Which is where we both were already, though that somehow escaped my notice!
Today’s Sally Forth displayed fine about 30 minutes ago.
And on Wednesday morning CK seems to be back to normal. (Which ofc includes annoying “features”.)
And, after a week or so, CK seems to be having trouble again.
Yep, no Sunday strips either on the main site or Seattle PI.
There’s an interesting article about the New Yorker cartoon editor at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/05/emma-allen-new-yorker-cartoon-editor/. She took over four years ago, at age 29.Comics Kingdom (CK) has been down again since sometime last night (Thursday). That’s about the third time in three weeks. What is their problem?
I didn’t happen to be trying to access during the outage period this time. Huzzah.
I’m having trouble with Barney & Clyde. As near as I can tell, there were no strips on Friday & Saturday (10/22 & 10/23), at least via Gocomics. Sunday’s was fine. does anyone know anything about this or have links to the missing two strips?
Hmm, the archive on GoComics does seem to flip neatly from 10/21 to 10/24. And not struggling to resolve a display, just not there.
In the comments for 10/24 people ask and one person said
The missing strips show up on the WaPo site: https://www.washingtonpost.com/syndication/comics/barney-clyde/?name=barney_clyde
So, presumably just a glitch here.
But I don’t have the right kind of credentials to use the archive there. I did check on ArcaMax and it jumps from the 21st to the 24th.
Okay maybe these
Thank you Mitch4. I’ll likely never find out the why, but at least I now have seen the strips.
must kvetch: there is nothing illogical about disliking different things for different reasons, even if they are opposites of each other: I dislike extreme cold, because it makes my joints ache, and I dislike extreme heat, because it dehydrates me; I can also dislike opposites for the the exact same reason: I dislike extreme heat and extreme cold, because both will kill me.
I guess I should read all comments first, as I had just found the Post site and was going to mention it.
Anybody else enjoying Peyote Cowboy from Dan Piraro?
https://peyotecowboy.net/
IDU, was Scarlett Johansson known for a particular role as detective, or burglar, or spy?
Given that she’s done 56 movies in 28 years, it’s quite likely that there will be an appropriate reference somewhere in the list, but I have no interest in hunting for it.
but I have no interest in hunting for it.Who did you think was asking you to?
We don’t have the date of this Lila reprint, but I take it that at the time, the cartoonists were expecting movie or tv fans among their readership to make a quick and easy association that would explain (and extract a chuckle from) Lila’s pal’s remark.
So in turn I figure the poster here was expecting not research either, but just that the movie and tv fans here could cast their minds back and say what they remember that prominently fits the association?
Hey, could it be Match Point?
How confusing … I joined a Facebook group called “The Art of McEldowney” (at https://www.facebook.com/groups/568106617786980/about ) and then found out the admin is called “Mark Mitchell”, just about my names reversed.
Here’s an old page of puns and other jokes I just came upon. http://internet.ocii.com/~cmeek/puns_v1d.htm
In case anyone else got confused, Baby Blues has moved from King Features to GoComics.
Unrelated to Phantom, but I wish I knew a way to search for vintage comic strips by text. I’ve tried Google, without success. I found http://www.comicstriparchive.com/Tumbleweeds/, but it’s only organized by date. I’m looking for a Tumbleweeds in which Bucolic Buffalo picks up Limpid Lizard (I think), says “Not like-um little man. Fow-um away,” then tosses him over his shoulder.
@ Boise Ed – You can’t find comics with a text search unless someone has already entered the dialog into the archive’s database. Two strips at GoComics that have an excellent text database are “Calvin & Hobbes” and “Peanuts“. In each case, somebody has taken the trouble to type in all of the words in every strip, which makes searching the archive incredibly easy. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for every strip at GoComics: searching for a particular “Bloom County” strip is an exercise in futility, because the text information just isn’t available.
Sometimes you can dig up the date of a strip by performing an open search in the Internet, to find a pirated copy of the strip somewhere else. Once you have the date, you can go back to GoComics to get a pristine copy of the original.
Of course, with “Tumbleweeds” (or any other King Features strip), the task is incredibly more difficult. The King Features archive is stashed behind a paywall, which means that there are far fewer illicit copies of strips available (making it harder to get date information), and of course you can’t get a copy of the original unless you are willing to subscribe to King Features.
The external archive you quoted is mostly reruns (Tumbleweeds ceased publication in 2007), so it’s quite likely that the strip you are looking for may not exist there at all. I can’t check this myself, since that website (or the Houston Chronicle source page) does not allow access to readers here in Germany.
It is conceivable to use character recognition, and I’ve read that Google somehow does picture searching (though I’ve never tried to use it). The site I mentioned does list Tumbleweeds specifically, but clicking on any date just gives me a “not found” message.
HAH! I found you – you can’t escape me!
I’ve been trying the two old URLs daily, but tonight it occurred to me to just google ‘comics i don’t understand’. Voila!