by multipleciduers

M’aidez with some Not-Quites and Oopsies

Peculiar but not quite an intriguing CIDU, wry but not quite a LOL, pun-adjacent but not quite an OY, or just based in a factual mistake …

Here in a current two-day sequence for Reply All, is there room to agree “Neither one is actually funny at all”?

Thanks to Mike Pollock, who says “You don’t often see graphical captions with typographical errors. Is Curly Bracket [ } ] there intentionally?”

Okay, maybe this is just quibbling, but we all know a real Etch-A-Sketch doesn’t erase that way. You need to turn it face-down and shake. Or maybe it can marginally work to keep it face-up and shake vertically as well as side-to-side — but the shake lines here don’t suggest that enough.

Well, no. Frank does have multiple sources, multiple origins — so the Ancestry.com jokes work well. But there’s nothing about his special situation that puts him here, and here, and here too.

And the squirrel trying to justify it accomplishes nothing much. The map notations say “You are here” not “You have been here” – just as real building directories do.

This says “WANTED — [strikeout]ALIVE[/strikeout] OR DEAD”.

But, but … which party is supposed to be pictured on the poster, the hunter or hunted?

Sorry to pick on Whamond, but while we all know about cartoon physics I have some doubt about cartoon math. That’s the plain number three, he’s not in any respect irrational or in danger of turning irrational. He could slide up to pi nearby and be not only irrational but transcendental — but there is no indication of that happening. He’s just three, the natural number, not irrational and not even negative.

30 Comments

  2. Unknown's avatar

    I think the 3’s complaint is perfectly valid: he’s simply wishing to be represented as something like “6/2“, but nobody ever does that, because we were always taught in elementary school to reduce all fractions to their simplest form. (The terms “irrational” and “negative” are not meant to be taken literally; they are intentional puns.) That’s about as much humor as one can expect in a squirrel-ridden feature.

    That “curly bracket” (or “brace”) is an impressive typo, demonstrating that the WSJ has fired just as many copy editors as all the other newspapers have (in other words: all of them).

    Most of the the italics in TMCM scan perfectly well, except for the fourth panel, which should have been composed in pure, unadulterated Roman.

    What IDU about “Reply All” is why the simplistic cut&paste artwork seems so annoying to me. I never had that sort of problem with “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” or “Jesus & Mo“.

    The “Lab Directory” sort of parallels Saturday’s “You are her” map.

    Ham’s “Wanted” poster reminds me of a scene in Dreamworks’ latest “Puss in Boots” movie, in which Death asks Puss to sign just such a poster, tapping on the word “Dead” to show him where to sign.

  4. Unknown's avatar

    Thanks for the Dilbert callback with Etch-a-Sketch! BTW it reinforces the point that the erase function requires turning the pad over, not just shaking.

  5. Unknown's avatar

    Okay, Targuman, but are you telling us you succeeded in erasing the screen with just shaking, no turning upside down?

  6. Unknown's avatar

    It will work if the shaking is energetic enough. As anyone who has ever managed to break an Etch-a-Sketch already knows, that aluminum powder is extremely dry and light, and it will fly anywhere and everywhere if given the slightest provocation.

    P.S. As a kid, I don’t think we were told to invert the things, either: we just figured out that it worked faster that way.

  8. Unknown's avatar

    Well, I’m very proud of myself. I managed to read AAAGH without consulting a Spanish dictionary.
    Also, I don’t think anybody ever held an Etch-A-Sketch upside down. It was only when we discovered that the back of it had tiny, raised instructions on it that we learned you were supposed to shake the thing upside down. Before we had always wondered how you were supposed to erase all of it. By just shaking, you got some, but never all, of the drawing off.

  9. Unknown's avatar

    To the best of my now nearly 50 year old memory, yes. I was never terribly good at drawing with them so it may be that I never really had high expectations of a “clean screen.”

  10. Unknown's avatar

    BTW, Etymonline seems to agree that the distress call “mayday” probably comes from “an Englished spelling” of a French phrase — though they hold out “possibly a random coinage with coincidental resemblance”.

    Also, they give the French as “French m’aider, shortening of venez m’aider ‘come help me!'”. However, a citation they give, for “The Wireless Age,” June 1923, uses the imperative aidez (rather than the infinitive aider), as we did in this post’s title. “This was thought particularly fitting since it sounds very much like the French m’aidez, which means ‘help me.’ “

  11. Unknown's avatar

    When I had an Etch A Sketch, I discovered the secret to satisfactory drawing with it: limit your subject matter to urban architectural landscapes, with skyscrapers and smaller buildings. They can have somewhat fancy staircase entrances, but please no ramps!

  12. Unknown's avatar

    @ Targuman – I would like to emphasize that the embedded strip wasn’t meant as a reply to your comment @1: I had composed all of that material as a single, extra long comment about all seven strips, but your comment had not yet appeared. At the last minute I decided to split the Etch-a-Sketch strip into a second comment (fearing the moderation gremlin), and submitted both of them in fairly short order. I did not see your comment @1 until mine showed up as @2 & @3, and then I thought “Ooops, I hope Targuman doesn’t misinterpret that as a refutation.“

  14. Unknown's avatar

    3=3/1, so what’s the problem?

    I thought the first one was a LOL – I’ve run into so many guys who thought the way to get to know me was to be a jerk.

    And the Whamond would have been funnier IMO if the name of the company was Ancestry.com.

    And last but not least, when I was a kid we always knew to hold it upside down and shake it. Didn’t there used to be a joke about that? Okay, I found this one: https://jokes.one/joke/etch-a-sketch

  15. Unknown's avatar

    I once knew someone who would reduce his fractions when he wrote a check. You know how you write both “$250.20” and “Two hundred fifty and 20/100”? He would write “Two hundred fifty and 1/5.”

  18. Unknown's avatar

    Reply All didn’t work at all for me, partly because of the art … especially the coloring. The palettes are so different, I perceive them as being in different universes.

  19. Unknown's avatar

    I actually liked the final panel of Reply All. It certainly has an element of truth. So many things I knew in college I no longer know. If you gave me an exam for Physics 111, I could maybe scratch out a B. Maybe not.

  20. Unknown's avatar

    @ Brian – Recalling that old students’ ditty:

    “The more you study, the more you know,
    The more you know, the more you forget,
    The more you forget, the less you know,
    The less you know, the less you forget,
    The less you forget, the more you know;
    …
    Why study?!?    “

  21. Unknown's avatar

    And here’s another take on Ham’s buscado poster:

    Asado by itself is “roasted” per Google Translate; but there is a fixed expression carne asado (where carne by itself is “meat”) amounting to “roast beef”. So it’s still stemming from the basic “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster trope, though wandering off a little distance…

  28. Unknown's avatar

    @ maggie – Ham seems to produce several different, but related treatments of the same idea, and sometimes publishes multiple versions (as we saw in the in the “wardrobe” panels in early March). Once you get one of them, the rest fall into place like dominoes. In addition, some of his “Aaggghhh” material gets translated into English for the “Life on Earth” feature at GoComics. He uses a computer font, so it’s hard to say whether he does the translations himself.

    P.S. To save everyone the trouble of following the link, here’s the “zombie” panel:

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