(This was actually part of a linked series, but seeing the preceding strips wouldn’t make much difference, apart from explaining what might otherwise be a mysterious detail — she was hit in the head by a flying baseball, and is holding an ice bag to it for pain relief.)
And a second shot for Pardon My Planet. This one is a LOL-CIDU. It did take a couple minutes before we got it – but not hard enough to justify making it a separate CIDU post. Also (I confess) it shows the perils of holding on to a negative attitude about some comic strip — one reason I didn’t get it at first was dismissing some meaningful details as merely haphazard artwork.
LOL-synchro from an unlikely pair!
And a last minute Sunday Bizarro LOL.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Well yes, I am puzzled by the Pardon My Planet, the second one (parking lot accident). Is the joke just in the flimsiness of the driver’s excuse/protest/apology. She seems to be saying “I was being careful, despite the failure of one safety system on my car, I used the older standard system (mirrors).” But lady, you hit the guy anyway! Clearly you’re not as careful a driver as you’re trying to tell us.
Is that it?
Re the parking lot panel, the victim and his mate are apparently supposed to be vampires (hard to see in small panel, but there appear to be fangs on the victim and both are dressed in cliche vampire clothes), and since vampires supposedly do not reflect in mirrors, the driver backing up saw nothing.
I can’t help wishing I were a fly on Stephan Pastis’s wall when he saw the Liz Climo gag.
I can’t help wishing I were a fly on Stephan Pastis’s wall when he saw the Liz Climo gag.He may well have done something on this gag, but ya gotta hand it to Liz Climo for getting it across so simply and condensed.
I’m pretty sure I saw similar oxymoron library jokes in a different comic in my FB feed. It was formatted as a directory map. I don’t recall the who the artist of that one might have been.
“elementary calculus” is not an oxymoron. There’s nothing about “calculus” that should imply difficulty and advanced understanding.
So…. she’s a double amputee and he has three legs…. So?
I was a little thrown because the parking lot is shaded to appear as though this is the daytime. Wouldn’t the wording have been more to the point if she simply said “I didn’t see you in the rear-view mirrors”. The idea that the backup camera fritzes in and out just makes too much detail.
So… the joke is that because the are crash course dummies, the food is smashed into their faces?… Yeah, okay…..
Hmm, I don’t think she’s an amputee at all. It’s just an artefact of the coloring or shading that doesn’t convincingly show her right knee as bent, and the beginning of the lower segment of the leg descending in front of the chair.
The coloring in the parking lot is indeed puzzling, but I think we can take the orangey upper portion as indicating street lamps in the parking lot, and the dimmer shade of the ground as dusky darkness — early evening but not subjecting the vamps to actual sunlight. Also I agree it might have worked better to omit the backup camera bit, but I can see why he might have regarded it as useful: trying to forestall a wise-guy response like “Hey, she could use the rearview camera” if the dialog only brought up the mirrors. Also, just mentioning the mirrors might have felt too much on-the-nose.
“It’s just an artefact of the coloring or shading that doesn’t convincingly show her right knee as bent”
Ah, but compare that to “one reason I didn’t get it at first was dismissing some meaningful details as merely haphazard artwork”
So, I’m told to understand the joke I need to look at the artwork. So I do…. and I see she has no legs a LOT sooner than I notice he has three. So, I make a sarcastic comment about it.
Also, it’s not as common but many vampire literature claim vampires can’t be photographed so firtzing out the back-up camera seems worse than awkward. (We haven’t reach the stage yet were if we have a joke about rear-view mirrors we’d be earnestly confused that someone wasn’t relying on the back-up cameras, have we?)
The Nancy arc starts here; see whether “seeing the preceding strips wouldn’t make much difference”.
I do agree that the strip can stand alone in its message that a person should really should check in with their friend just in case the truth differs from the “reality” that the person’s thoughts are building.
Kevin, thanks but I don’t see the link.
Guessing that you pin the start of the arc to Wednesday the 18th, it would be here.
So another way to kill a vampire is “Low speed car hits their leg & produces no visible injury.” To the canon!
All I noticed on the pants joke was that she was wearing a skirt, not pants.
Potentially an issue, but maybe the accident didn’t kill him, just knocked him down. It’s still something she would feel the need to try to explain.
“Potentially an issue, but maybe the accident didn’t kill him, just knocked him down. It’s still something she would feel the need to try to explain.”
Not if he’s a vampire. Why doesn’t she just say “It was an accident but as you are a blood-sucking fiend who deserves to die I can’t in anyway claim I’m distressed by the outcome. Had I actually seen you I’d have been duty bound to try to kill you anyway”.
… as long as we are analyzing…..
Woozy, she doesn’t say anything like that because she doesn’t know or notice that he’s a vampire. As far as she’s concerned he’s just the guy she is panicked about hitting with her car.
The bumper was covered in garlic. Or crucifixes.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen an account of how cocktail umbrellas might actually be useful!
Hah! Do you think the bottom Bizarro is thinking of the recent musical context of W.A.P.?
I remember reading a story years ago which explained that vampires couldn’t be photographed because most cameras of the time had mirrors in the light path. Not true of automotive backing cameras, of course.
Danny Boy… she must know he’s a vampire because 1) she’s explaining why she had to use the backup mirrors as though it is understood doing so would explain why she never saw him and 2) because he’s a freaking vampire.
I don’t agree. If she had added, “so that’s why I didn’t see him”, then I’d agree. But this seems more along the lines of stating that she wasn’t backing up without looking.
Carl Fink – I was thinking the same thing, but with SLRs, the mirror is only used to reflect the light upwards through the prism into the viewfinder, and moves out of the way for a direct display onto what used to be the film, (I’m not sure about how the digital models work.) Thus, the photographer would not be able to see the vampire in the viewfinder, but the camera could photograph it.
Traditional black and white film involves silver, and thus doesn’t work on vampires. Or at least, sometimes, depending on who’s writing. (Though this doesn’t entirely make sense; the point of silver bullets and whatnot is that silver does work. But then, expecting vampire fiction to make sense is folly…)
I always took the lack of reflection and inability to be photographed to be so similar as to not requiring two explanations. For one reason or another a lack of a soul prevent them having indirect images. (I assume you can look at them through binoculars as that is a direct image.) I find explanations of silver backing of mirrors and use in film amusing but isn’t it illogical to attempt a logical explanation? I mean light is light and whatever rule explains their bodies lack of reflection wouldn’t apply to their clothing.
The Long Story Short would make more sense to me if either there were an actual variety of apple called the “William Tell” or if “Honeycrisp” were a persons name. I’m not saying its not a legitimate joke but the connection between apples in a store and apples associated with a story seems to me to be just a bit too tenuous to be all that amusing.
At one point Apple had a product edition designated GS. I don’t recall if it was Apple GS or Mac GS or something else, but like that. Presumably there was something the letters stood for, maybe to do with Graphics Something, but it was not public and official. The popular jape was that it was for Granny Smith.
Possibly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS
Thanks, Brian, that was it! “Graphics and Sound” according to the article, but Granny Smith to many. Which is why it wouldn’t have been in the Mac series but the Apple II.
“Crisis management” isn’t an oxymoron. If anything needs to be managed, a crisis does. Of course if it is really well managed, then it’s no longer a crisis, but that doesn’t make it a contradiction. After all, “fire suppression” isn’t considered an oxymoron. Nor is “pest control.”
Lots of those aren’t what I would call oxymorons, as the first word is a modifier. Some don’t make any sense, like “young adult”. Does the cartoonist think that no adults are young? It’s not like it said “child adult”.
I’m okay with the so-called oxymorons although…. I wouldn’t say any of them are true oxymorons. Is there a word for what they actually are? Phrases whose words have diametrically opposed cognemes? As such, I think they are all (except for elementary calculus) are fairly clever and “cute”. (But none of them actually oxymorons.)
Yeah, I thought the oxymorons list was counting on a pretty loose fit throughout.
Most standard examples of oxymorons have a first word that’s a modifier also (e.g. “bright darkness”, “deafening silence”)… I agree that many of these are strained but that’s not why. 😐
But these aren’t actual contradictions. (Criminal: adjective describing crime; law: body of knowledge of …erm, law are not contradictions and the law concerning criminality is an obvious topic of concern). But they have cognemes (is that a word?), emphasis and the gyst of meaning that are opposites. In a way, this makes them more interesting because they are quite meaningful and sensible. Is there a term for this, I wonder.
Looking at the three-legged pants, Pardon My Planet could qualify as a LOL-CIDU-Arlo.
Many of them are if you take a somewhat shallow and dogmatic view of things; e.g. “novels are written text, so a ‘graphic novel’ is a contradiction, ha ha”, or “drafts are unfinished by definition, so they can’t be final”, or “fiction is stuff that’s not true, and science/history is stuff that is true, so ‘science fiction’ or ‘historical fiction’ are obviously contradictions”.
I see the point you’re making, but I think it’s over the author’s head. (And no, I don’t know of a term.)
Oxymorons have a use in poetry; for instance “darkness visible” in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — presumably it was so dark that you could see the darkness. There is something related that you hear in witty banter, for instance “he wants that painting so bad he can taste it.” Or even sometimes in serious writing: “If you just listen to your horse, he’ll tell you what he needs.” It’s kind of a misapplication of words; if “book” is something written that you read using your sense of sight, and “tell” means to verbalize for the sense of hearing, then “audiobook” is like “your horse will tell you.” In the days of radio, a reporter would sometimes give you a “word picture” of a scene. Maybe nobody ever came up with a better term.
Here’s another one: “Tone poem.” I think it was Franz Liszt who started it. Never mind that music is to sound as poetry is to language, so a piece of music that tells a story is already the counterpart of a poem. Also never mind that we already had a word for a piece of instrumental music that tells a story: “Ballade” as used by Chopin and Brahms. Liszt also invented the term “piano recital” and boy was that ever considered an oxymoron. “How does one RECITE at the piano?” asked a critic.
MiB, some of those, like he wants that painting so bad he can taste it, strike me more as synaesthesia.
@Mitch4 “Kevin, thanks but I don’t see the link.”
Wow, thanks for filling it in for me; I’m glad I returned today.
I’m pretty sure I know why that was missing; I had written a long but but very-light diatribe and then, knowing that that’s no help, I reframed the suggestion. I had pasted the URL several times and I was completely focused on making sure I felt no niggles after reading the new text; I guess my heart brain doesn’t look for absent URLs.
It would be cool if WordPress were like Outlook. Outlook notices when the writer (e.g. me) has referred to an attachment and asks something like “are you missing an attachment?” before it will send the email message.
https://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2021/08/18
Update for anyone who might care, I found the comic I was thinking of, and oddly enough, it’s by the same artist as above. It is a map of a building, but its the Oxymoron Museum, and so has rooms labelled as “recent past” and “current history”, ect.
I visit the Oxymoron Museum once a month. They always have some new antiques.