Nerd alert
Lucky for me, I figured out that I don’t have to lick my cats, I can just lick my thumbs then wipe across their faces.
But then again, some do tongue-bathe:
Here’s a bit more Bliss, with likely the same characters in a different setting.
Sunday Funnies – LOLs, February 26th, 2023
Comics I Don't Understand 
Regarding the Cul de Sac strip:
Some time in the 1960s, the Dick Van Dyke Show had an episode in which Laura Petrie was helping out at her husband Rob’s office where Rob and his colleague were writing a comedy script. One of them had just come up with a line something like, “And why do you want to go to the center of the Earth?” Laura’s immediate follow-up: “To find out if it’s chewy or chocolate cream.”
Besides the plethora of tiresome Easter eggs‡, one thing that really bothers me about the first Bizarro is that the allegedly “all-natural” groomer is licking that car in the wrong direction. In real life, that cat would twist around and take her eyes out.
P.S. ‡ – They become so prevalent that Piraro has started to offer an answer key to show all the locations.
P.P.S. Make that “cat”, not “car”. Thanks, wordpress.
I’m not much of a fan of the “secret symbols” mystique in general. But this time I’m looking forward to the Piraro blog and the answer key for this one. I’m not about to track them down and try to count to 11 (if that is even the actual number shown — the CIDU image is blurry around the number), but I’m curious about the large picture on the wall, above the groomer and the cat, that resembles the character Olive Oyl from Popeye. I’m wondering if that replaces for today a printed “O2”, since “O2” is one of the “secret symbols” but stands for “Olive Oyl” which in turn is Piraro’s nickname for his wife.
The museum worker has really managed to articulate his feelings.
The “OK Just As You Are” book: https://www.amazon.com/Im-OK-Youre-OK-Thomas-Harris/dp/0060724277/
“I’m OK, You’re OK.” Geezers will remember.
@ MiB – According to his own biography, Harley Schwadron, is easily old enough to qualify as a geezer (at least 75, probably 80+).
deety, i am not yet tired of the Piraro symbols, so I believe I can identify all 11 of them, though not by name. Fish in light fixture, K2 on milk carton in picture (I don’t think the distorted dog and the bird on it are secrets), little saucer by door, eye and pie in fruit bowl, crown in lawn, inverted bird in truck, three rabbits and Olive Oyl on background wall (I agree Olive = O2),
Incidentally, can anyone make out what book that woman’s reading?
I looked at the Bizzarro on Comics Kingdom: “Peyote Cowboy.”
@ Treesong – Thanks very much for the accurate count. I kept getting to ten, and was wondering whether the hatted (but not inverted) bird in the painting was supposed to count. I think I missed the K2; the resolution that wordpress provides makes it very hard to see. Comics Kingdom uses an odd URL that can’t be embedded here, so here’s a link to the original image.
P.S. The title of the book is “Peyote Cowboy”.
One of the comics today had a woman licking a cat. In the driveway was a van labeled something like “Mobile Cat Grooming.”
@ Boise Ed – No fair! A comment like that (with not even a hint of the strip’s name) is likely to send countless CIDU readers on a wild goose chase, especially when you consider that while GoComics does index the dialog on some strips, their track record for indexing text contained only in background images is extremely poor. All I was able to find was a running gag in “Drabble” featuring a “mobile cat groomer“, but most of those strips were dated 2009:
Late P.S. @ deety – The Bizarro website provides a complete list of all the “secret” symbols (which makes me wonder why in the world anyone could consider them to be “secret”). The list is full of unreadable pschological mumbo-jumbo, but it does provide graphic examples of each one, and it does confirm “Olive Oyl” is an official synonym for “O2”.
P.P.S. @ Boise Ed – Or were you simply referring to Sunday’s Bizarro, having missed that it was posted above?
Kilby, I thought it was perfectly clear that Ed meant “in today’s CIDU comics” — so if anyone was missing that the Bizarro in that post was the one… it might have been just you! But congrats on somehow finding a different one witn a mobile cat groomer!
@ Mitch – That explanation would make sense if the comic had appeared in an alternate CIDU post, but I couldn’t see why it was necessary to point out the existence of a comic that we were discussing directly in the post in which both the comic and the discussion were located.
P.S. @ “somehow” – It’s not that hard: since “Drabble” is a strip for which GoComics has a dialog index, all you need to do is put “mobile cat groom” into the GoComics search field, and click on the “more like this” button to see them all.
I meant congratulations on good luck, more than cleverness of search. I wouldn’t have guessed that there had ever been any other “mobile cat grooming” cartoons!
Aha, thanks for clarifying that book title! Peyote Cowboy is a graphic novel by Dan Piraro being published as a work in progress with chapters being added on and off at https://peyotecowboy.net/ I think he has stated the writing has been completed, and he is still working on the artwork. AFAIK there is not yet actually a physical book.
@ Mitch – The only reason that I thought that Drabble might be the answer to Boise Ed’s comment was that there were five strips. (And thanks for fixing my busted italic token as well.)
Yesterday’s CSotD post offered a bit of undated synchronicity with “Frank & Ernest”:
P.S. Ooops. I didn’t notice the faded copyright until the image popped up here. Clearly, Byrnes has precedent.
There was some other comic, yesterday I think, with that same punch line. I can’t remember which comic, though.
I remember the Tom Lehrer song:
The girl my money’s spent for …
the girl my back is bent for …
the girl I owe the rent for …
the girl I gave up Lent for …
@ Boise Ed – That’s not much to go on. I tried searching GoComics and a wide-open Internet search, but I was not able to find any such comics for March 1st (a plethora of demotivational plaques don’t count). Is it possible that you were thinking of the Frank & Ernest strip a week earlier?
P.S. Today’s Macanudo is worth reviving an old thread (or two):
P.P.S. Of the two CIDU posts that mentioned “Fibonacci”, I decided (a moment too late) that I liked this one better.