(I.e., the fourth batch of these.)
This Argyle Sweater is from BillR, who joined with your editors in debating what is going on in the absence of a typical Hilburn Oy.
Their name could suggest they are of Polish extraction. And the weather suggests a northerly climate. But that wouldn’t be enough for a map to show the home as “North Pole”. Is there anything beyond red herring to noting they are at a mailbox and there is a tradition about letters to Santa getting delivered to some place the USPS designates as North Pole? Or … what?
This was a quite good three-panel joke cartoon. And then …
Hard to put a finger on it, but something about the “deflation punch” in this Brevity seems off. Like offers advertised as “BOGO” and you wonder is that a hip way of calling something Bogus? If CONVO means conversation, and RECCO means reccomendation…
Comics I Don't Understand 
Mr. Jaworski is the northernmost Pole, ie, a person from Poland. (He used to be a noted scientist, now he’s just a fiend.)
And the map lists it, because it’s a town map of where various people live in the town. Mr and Dr Jarworski are one of, say, five Polish families in the town, and they live northernmost.
I feel like the first two should be full-fledged CIDUs. Thanks for explaining the first one.
The third one just substitutes “Buy one, get one free” (i.e., get two when you buy just one) with “Buy one, get one tree” (i.e., pay for a tree, get a tree; i.e., the standard transaction). The joke is that a minor alteration turns a good deal into not-a-deal-at-all.
The fourth panel is the manager, fed up with the clerk’s usual customer-maddening shenanigans.
@Max C. Webster, III: That’s what I was thinking. Should have stopped after the third panel.
Max C. Webster, III, and Phil Smith III, does either of you accept being addressed as “Trey”?
@Danny Boy: Nobody ever has done so, but I wouldn’t pick a fight if someone did. As a kid I was “Philip” at home and my dad was “Phil”, but when we’d visit my dad’s parents, we’d shift: there, grandfather was “Phil”, my dad was “Philip” and I was “P3” or just “P”. Confusing.
I’ve used
…phsiii
as my email sig for over 40 years (branding before I knew what that was!) and many folks in my corner of the computer world know me by that, tell me when they meet me, “Oh, so YOU’RE ‘Phizzy’!”
ObAnecdote: In the days before the Internet, there was BITNET. When the university where I worked got on BITNET, my email sig broke it because the universally used MTA (the Columbia Mailer) sent in-band internal commands starting with a dot. And it didn’t know what to do with two leading dots. Easily fixed, but I laughed when I found out.
P.S. Max — gotta ask — is that your actual name, or a tribute to the Southern Ontario band of old?
But Tabby does get a good one off, about the globe!
I wasn’t sure that guy in the 4th panel is the manager; but looked back a few days and you’re right, that’s him. This has something of a followup or commentary in today’s strip, with Tabby having a sort of conversation with recently-promoted Penny:
Pretty sure the first one is just “We’re not actually at the North Pole, because that’s not Santa’s workshop.”
My favorite $100 bill story: driving from the Orlando Airport I got on the tollway where the station had a sign that displays the toll due and your change. The car ahead of me paid the toll — all of $.75 — and got $99.25 change. Hey, Orlando!
The fourth panel is the manager, who is fed up with the fact that the clerk is fed up with idiot customers
There used to be a chain of stores around Boston, Building 19, that sold salvage goods, factory seconds, overstocks and all kinds of things like that. They were huge. I don’t think they ever did “Buy one, get one tree” but they had things like that in their ads and signs.
My favorite: “Just say charge it! We’ll say NO!” (It was cash-only, no credit cards.)
Also: “If you can find a better price somewhere else, buy it there!”
I thought the first one was just a guy finally figuring out his friend was bad at reading maps. Thanks for the explanations.
@ Powers : And it’s nowhere near as good a joke as the your clams vs my clams from BC, which I wish I could find online. Never mind p*nis shaped rockets, why don’t these plutocrats spend some of their dosh creating a searchable archive of every cartoon that ever was.
Apropos of nothing other than noting that we have two different “III”s here — my brother-in-law is called “Tony’, which is short for “George.” His great-grandfather was named George; his grandfather was named George Jr, and called Junior for his entire life; his father was George III, and called Sonny until the day he died, and, I guess, still is whenever we talk about him; he is George IV, and called Tony, because, well, ‘George”, “Junior’, and “Sonny” were taken.
My nephew is very much NOT named George. Apparently, the idea of keeping the tradition wasn’t even CONSIDERED by either my foster-sister OR brother-in-law. Absolutely no desire from either of them.
Neither and kinda. I was a radio announcer in the late 70s / early 80s, and my air name was Max Webster. I got it from the liner notes of a Rush album (probably Hemispheres). I didn’t know it was a band’s name at the time. The ‘C’ and the ‘III’ are just me fleshing out the name like it’s a real name.
Now I’m stuck trying to remember another commenter posting name that I thought I recognized as public well-known, and tried looking up. Yes, the name was that of a pretty famous Canadian, but probably that person’s age and other factors made them unlikely to be here in person.
So was the CIDUer that person despite the odds? Or a relative who actually bears the same name? Or a semi-random fan who adopts a pseudonym as gesture of admiration? I couldn’t tell!
Max: Given that Max Webster toured with Rush a lot, there may be a stronger connection than we know. Neat nym origin, thanks.
Wait wait, now I remember. Raymond Lévesque! And since the top search result is an obituary for the singer-songwriter of that name, that would be among the “other demographic factors” that would seem to preclude him being our contributor….
@ianosmond: When my wife was pregnant, we of course discussed whether a son would be PHS4 (sheesh, I had to retype that–fingers typed “PHS3” even though I meant “4”). Amniocentesis showed we were having a girl, so we didn’t have to decide. She was born on December 7, so I used to remind her that we could have named her Pearl Harbor Smith so she’d have my initials…
Thanks, guys, for not taking amiss some curiosity about your names! As a footnote, I forgot to ask about your apparent different stances as to the comma before the number….
@Danny Boy — Funny you should ask! I’ve never used the comma, for no apparent reason.
Just last week I noticed that someone whose email display name is “Fred Fuddpucker, Jr.” appears in Gmail a just “Jr.”, which made me laugh (and feel justified). The opposite problem is things like Zoom or WebEx (one or both, I forget) that show me as PI instead of PS; not sure if they’d handle it properly if I had a comma in there. Given that there are probably no languages in which a last name of Jr or III would be valid, all of these could handle either case correctly, if they put a wee bit of thought into it.
I think my dad was less rigorous about the comma–he could take it or leave it.
In the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox arranges a seance to contact the spirit of his great-grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox IV.
“Wait a minute. You are Zaphod Beeblebrox the first, and your great-grandfather was Zaphod Beeblebrox the fourth?”
Zaphod replies: “There was an accident involving a contraceptive and a time machine. I don’t have time to explain it now.”
Mark: Nice. Also read Heinlein, “All You Zombies”. Hey, it’s online:
Oh my. Did not realize it would copy the text in! Sorry.
It’s unexpected, but wordPress does some odd sorts of embedding for certain formats!
And just the other day we were discussing “All You Zombies” already!
Heinlein was wont to introduce his sexual beliefs into his stories.
@ Mike P – All the better to sell books to teenage males (unlike his habit of inserting his politics into his stories).