This time Junk Drawer is about a junk drawer!
BUT that doesn’t mean only the namesake can discuss the junk drawer!
Okay, okay, not really a LOL. And certainly not an Ewwww. Just more like …. an Awwww?
From Dave Berg, who sent it in as CIDU. There is potentially a fairly direct explanation, however (reserved for now — we’ll see if you’all agree). But it still leaves this a good, ironic, chuckle.
And a LOL-Eww as a fitting end:
This Mutts is from a series introducing “King”. Not the deepest of puns, but has its little charms.
Another not-so-deep Oy, but considering how much grousing and joking has attached to the Zoom software, there has been surprisingly little using this older generic sense.
From Andréa, who asks “How many even know what a CARE package was?”.
I’m familiar with inflation, and I’m familiar with the idiom of “two cents’ worth” but don’t see what they mean when you stick them together like this.
I can accept that they find Tiger Woods interesting (or more specifically, found him interesting in 2002). But why is that supposed to be funny?
From Andréa, who sent it in as both a Geezer and a CIDU, and asks “Why is the coroner referring to him at all if he’s still alive???”
Going fast makes them miss messages?
After seeing this cartoon for a few weeks now, this character is the one who most pointedly clarifies for us the intent of the title Adult Children.
And yielding to the impulse to be a language complainer, we are happy to note that here the writer has stuck to the traditional term and called this an invitation, not the ugly newer form an invite. Good on ya, Maritsa Patrinos!
And zbicyclist kicks off a little debate by saying: Since Bliss has many cartoons in the New Yorker, he’s probably frequently asked to explain OTHER obscure New Yorker cartoons — which would make the sitting, bearded guy some sort of stand-in for the cartoonist. But to our eyes, the standing guy with the red sweater looks like the figure who appears again and again in Bliss cartoons.
But then zbicyclist rebuts with this example of an apparent Bliss stand-in (or a comic artist at any rate) with a beard:
But we have to ask: OK, there’s a beard, but which of the guys in the upper cartoon does this guy most resemble, to you?
Back in last November, in this “OY collection” post, we discussed a Baldo strip and the matching Baldo en Español where an element of the joke doesn’t come thru in the Spanish version, and combined this observation with other instances, as well as “About” tab type info and external sources, to agree that the strip seems usually to have been first written in English, then translated for the Spanish version.
(In that November post, if you feel like scrolling back, there was also a fun digression stemming from a different comic, on a style of word-play puzzle called by some “Dingbats”, a sort of text-layout rebus.)
In March, Arnold Zwicky’s Blog discussed a related example, with the same conclusion, where the English Baldo was about English language spelling and pronunciation (just pointing out that tough, cough, and dough give different sounds to the -ough sequence of letters) and the Baldo en Español just used the Spanish translations of those words, which really don’t resemble each other in any special way, certainly not rhyming. Zwicky also brought up some possibilities on how the Spanish version could have been handled. (And yes, that’s me popping into the comments.)
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Now lookit what just showed up on GoComics!
All the Spanish that you really need to know here is that pecado indeed means sin, and pescado means fish (as food).
In the English version, Tía Carmen’s jest is to turn the saying “Hate the sin but love the sinner” into “… love the dinner”. In Spanish she says “… love the fish [we are eating]” which is basically the same idea, but manages to preserve the word-play element because of the resemblance of pecado and pescado.
From Andréa:
Not a CIDU, but the pun is left visual here so recovering the words may serve as a little puzzle for those who don’t see it right off:
Comics I Don't Understand 