TBH, this was for me more a chuckle than a full LOL. But I was wondering if others also see an analogy between the point here and our thread about interpreting “The exception proves the rule” from early January.
For that matter, what sort of thing was a “buck” in that saying, by the time HST talked about it?
Thanks to Boise Ed for this Ewww-LOL!
Okay, okay, Reply All is an acquired taste I guess.
Is anyone ready to name a particular Raymond Chandler title being quoted? Or is Bliss just happily riffing on the voice?
Comics I Don't Understand 
I don’t see the analogy between Luann and last week’s thread. Maybe you can explain.
Parisi’s “unexpected item in bagging area”: I would have gone with the Great Pyramid of Giza or the English Crown Jewels or something, not an alien monster. Different personality, or is his idea funnier? (Or both, of course.)
Carl Fink, those suggestions might have been more difficult to convey something that obviously is an “unexpected item”.
“The buck stops here” came from the phrase “passing the buck”, as in giving someone else responsibility for a problem. This is supposed to have come from gambling in the 19th century, where the person who was responsible for dealing the cards had a marker in front of him called the buck.
TLA glossary, Sunday, February 13th edition:
TBH: To Be Honest
LOL: Laugh Out Loud
HST: Harry S Truman
TLA: Three Letter Acronym
@Powers – Mentioning some specifics casts a questioning light onto the potentials that did not get included.
I doubt that those lines are quoted from any specific Philip Marlowe story. I guess the joke is that Mommy doesn’t want her little girl exposed to that kind of violence.
I heard: “The buck stops here” came from the phrase “passing the buck”, as in giving someone else responsibility for a problem
Specifically counterfeit money, If I got a fake “buck”, I can either admit it (and lose the money), or “pass” it on to be someone else’s problem. and by extension, any issue that you could say “not my problem” about
.
Speaking of Philip Marlowe (unless that’s Sam Spade):
@deety – What “potentials” do you think were not included in Luann?
@Powers, sorry to be unclear with that. In the first panel, Brad reads off a list: “Sex, nudity, swearing, smoking…”. Then in panel 3, Shannon asks “What’s ‘smoking’?” . There were four things on the list, which potentially she might have mentioned. But the fact that she asks only about smoking could be taken to imply that she is already aware of what the other three “potential” topics are.
And in the CIDU link, the discussion of “exception that proves the rule” got into the interpretation that mentioning one circumstance that is explicitly covered by a rule may be taken to imply that other potential cases, though not mentioned, if more general, are implicitly covered too.
In a financial forum I read, there is a lot of discussion about tax-loss harvesting and wash sales. For TLDR reasons, I will explain those in a PS if you’re not familiar. Anyway, the IRS put out a ruling some years ago that wash sales can be caused by purchases in an IRA. So many people also assume that this includes 401k and similar accounts. This causes a lot of argument because the IRS never said that but it seems like an obvious conclusion to some.
PS:
When you sell capital assets, including securities, at a lower price than you paid, it is a capital loss. These losses can be used to offset capital gains or against ordinary income up to $3000/year. So when the opportunity presents, some people will deliberately sell mutual fund shares at a loss and buy some replacement.
The laws and regulations say that you can’t buy the identical or “substantially identical” replacements, or you have a wash sale (when the purchase is within 30 days before or after the sale) and the loss does not occur. Instead the price of the replacement is adjusted. There is also a lot of discussion of what constitutes “substantially identical” with index mutual funds. Anyway, The inclusion of tax-advantaged accounts complicates things, because capital gains and losses don’t occur in those accounts generally, so unlike a wash sale that took place in a taxable account, the loss is never realized.
I read the Luann as a comment that smoking has become so rare (or deprecated) that a child would be less likely to know what it was than sex, nudity, or swearing.