Month / August 2022

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 21st, 2022

This comic is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to websites living or dead is purely coincidental.

Thanks to DollarBill, who sends this in as a “chuckle on a variation.”

Hey, just thinking about it! Not actually enacting “Nature red in tooth and claw”!
Particularly appropriate because there’s no AC in Shakespeare’s day.

This submission comes with the comment “I thought the REAL name of the eighth dwarf was either “Horny” or “Stoned”.”
I’ve heard the 8th dwarf was Bloomberg. What other names have you heard?

by EditorM

Saturday Morning OYs – August 20th, 2022

Thanks to Targuman for this homonym-based OY. And for anyone who might not catch the almost-quotation, he offers these tips: See Mark 6:36 // Matt. 16:26.

The squirrel gives one popular musical association to this city. But some of us would go for “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again!”.

Hmmm …

Kilby sends this one in, with a panel by panel dissection.

Panel four is definitely an OY (and the raccoon agrees).

Panel three is misinformation:

cross-species transmission is widespread.

See, for instance, here:

> > https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/08/05/1114357154/how-many-animal-species-have-caught-covid-first-global-tracker-has-partial-answe

Panel two is borderline Op-Ed.

Panel one is just plain INSANE!

by EditorM

Because it’s afraid of her?

Why did the piano run away? (If that’s what happened.)

Thanks to Brian in STL for also sending this in, and also providing this other pianistic scene:

Brian’s remarks on this one were “I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, and there are no comments on the strip to help. Amos often serves as her page-turner, but seems to have flung the music book across the room. Did he have some sort of convulsion or horrible miscalculation?”

Hey, maybe the piano remembers this or similar scenes, and has fled once he sees who the approaching performer is…

POSTSCRIPT

Thursday’s strip looks like it might be intended as something of a follow-up.

Now that she’s caught up with it, she prepares to attack … and plays a single note, as quietly as possible — marked 5p and with the visual correlative of the miniaturized staff.

by EditorM

Green is for … gross?

OK, we see he has just sneezed, and the force of it has left her hair blown back, and evidently left stuck in that shape. And what’s the joke? Is it just that?

I for a few moments entertained the idea that it was meant to be super-Eww and the stripe in her hair represented the discharge of his sneeze! But co-editor phsiiicidu kindly set me straight, that it’s just the standard Bride-of-Frankenstein stripe; and he provided this reference image:

by EditorM

Not a natural language among them

I remember running into a well-meaning person who heard the linguistics lecturer use the term “natural language” and tried to object that no language or dialect is actually more natural — that is, “better” in some way, or more suited to learning — than any other. Which is something that audience would not disagree with, in general, among the set of languages they were discussing. (Which of course, were just those natural languages.)

But of course there are several ways some communication system or notation system can be called a language but is not a natural language. Roy’s list includes two major types, and misses a couple other categories. (But we don’t get to hear if he has command of other natural languages.)

Here’s an amusing talk I ran across recently, which may be fun for those with either practical programming experience in a few different computer languages or anyhow a reading/browsing acquaintance with them.

by EditorM

Saturday Morning OYs – August 13th, 2022

Thanks to Le Vieux Lapin for this one, which is some sort of word-play on language-related terms, so what is there not to oy?

For Argyle Sweater, one bad pun deserves another. The actual Pony Express is famous, but only existed for a short time, from from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861. Pricing didn’t help (The initial price was set at $5 per 1⁄2 ounce, then $2.50, and by July 1861 to $1. Normal mail service was $0.02 then.). The service continually lost money, and closed two days after the transcontinental telegraph connected Omaha with Sacramento.

Now we’ll segue into some that miss a bit. Kilby reminds us that Segway ceased production in June, 2020. One might ponder the various reasons why the Segway, introduced in 2001 to great fanfare, was a failure (and by the end, so out of mind it might have merited a geezer alert), while now e-bikes are flying off the shelves and electric scooters are commonly seen.

Well, there are some judgement calls here; let”s see if you agree. The “just ok” is enough to qualify it as a pun or Oy; but isn’t especially good, or enough to make it a funny Oy. However, the second shot, using the idea of “settling for [smthg]”, does make it work, and earns at least a chuckle. (No comment on the squirrel’s addition.)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screenshot-2022-08-02-175249.jpg

For those of us who’ve served as executor of someone’s estate that wasn’t tied up very well, this will bring back painful memories. Painful OYs here.

And just when we were making plans to officially retire the Synchronicity category, this pair comes along within a week of each other with the same double pun. One factor is that this one was already published here, in last week’s OY list:

But this one is fresh: