A pair from Maggiethecartoonist, who liked the recent Farcus and noted that it reminded her of the older Far Side.
… And Maggie asked the question which also reminded the editors of at least the title of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), a film which made quite a splash in its time but isn’t much mentioned these days.
Speaking of Farcus, Targuman sent in this one, and asks “do you think he has written in the dust on the windshields or used a paint pen?”
Names given in first panel are maybe necessary, since we won’t see a face.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
I did not understand† the Farcus at all until I read the Far Side below it, then it became painfully obvious.
P.S. @ Targuman – The standard writing implement for windshields is a bar of Ivory soap. Perfectly legible, but extremely easy to wash off.
P.P.S. † – The names of most of those “Poor Almanac” cookies are fairly obvious, but I had to scurrry down a short rabbit hole to figure out the source of the “Bandarlogs“.
I think he’s written in the dust on the windscreens.
As well as Wash Me, a one-time favourite thing for people to write in the dusty dirt on the back of vans and lorries round here is
Britain needs Lerts.
I looked at the movie..(They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) It has absolutely nothing to do with horses.
Maggie, sorry the discussion didn’t make that clear! I forget whether the title phrase comes up as literally a line someone says in the movie, but whether implicit or explicit the application is clear: They might as well shoot people like us too, to put us out of our misery. Rather bleak vision. (And apparently marathon dance contests were an actual thing, for a while.)
The number 555-2121 seems well-chosen, under what had been a long-term convention observed by the many local phone companies, that numbers with the 555- exchange prefix would not be assigned to any actual subscriber — hence could be used in fiction and movies without danger of landing on someone’s number, and thus without necessity of advance clearance.
furthermore, it is very close to 555-1212, which was for quite a while the 7-digit number to call in a long distance area code for directory assistance of that area code. Thus for example if you wanted to get Information for 212, you would call 212-555-1212 and speak to an Information operator (sorry, Directory Assistance).
@Danny Boy — indeed; per the NANPA Wikipedia page:
“Despite the widespread use of fictional telephone numbers of the form NXX 555-XXXX, only the block of line numbers from 0100 through 0199 are specifically reserved for this purpose, leaving the rest available for assignment.”
Note also that 555 is the same as “KLondike 5”, per the VERY old convention of using a word to indicate the first two digits. Which reminds me of one of my favorite obsolete jokes:
Phone rings, young boy answers. “Is your daddy there?” “No.” “OK, do you know how to write? Can you take a message for me?” “OK.” “Please tell him to call Mr. Jones back at CApital 5-1234.”
Long pause. Finally the kid says sorrowfully, “I don’t know how to make a capital five!”
(This is an “obsolete joke” because it makes no sense in modern society: kid home along answering phone; no answering machine/voicemail; and of course the CApital 5 business. I collect these jokes, though I don’t have many of them.)
I never knew that was a real thing!
Movies usually have bizarre titles.
Since we have the Cat Self-help Books in the post above, let’s look at the Dog Self-help Books from today’s feed.
Ah, back when 9CWL was good (or at least readable), and had occasional stealth crossovers with Rose Is Rose.
@ Danny & Phil (5 & 6) – Using a “2” (or any other number) as the first digit after the “555-” is not wrong, it is merely outdated. The regulation limiting the “ficticious” numbers to the “555-01xx” block is new, and is still not widely known. Originally, the entire 555-exchange was reserved (in all area codes). I don’t remember exactly when the phone companies started offering 555-numbers for “real” use, but I do know that when it happened, it was unusual enough that it made it into the news.
P.S. @ D.V.D. – What do you have against continual soft core comic p0rn? ;-)
Bandarlogs — aren’t those the diaries kept by the Phantom?
In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, I believe the title phrase does indeed come from dialog as the dance marathon drags on.
Danny Boy (5): I once had the office phone xxx-2121 and the circulation department was xxx-2121. I got a lot of their calls, often when I was right up to deadline time.
Thank you!
One problem we have here is that the metro area extends across two states. Back when I was still a productive member of society, we had a software development lab with a number of phones. One was the same base number as a golf course in Illinois. We’d constantly get calls from people wanting to reserve tee times. It was often difficult to even explain to people, they just would get it. “You have the wrong number, the golf course is in Illinois.” “Yeah, but I’m in Missouri.”
We had to disconnect that one.
Since we’re swapping phone stories:
In the mid-80s, I worked at a small software vendor in Virginia. We had our own (tiny!) data center, and the only hard-wired phone in the place was at the back of this room, connected to a Radio Shack “robot”. This was a (for the time) smart answering machine that monitored various things in the room and, if it detected something out of range, would call a series of numbers until someone answered and entered a magic sequence to say “OK, I’ll deal with this”.
So you’d get a call at home and when you answered, a synthesized voice would say, “This is telephone number 7 0 3 6 2 5 0 5 2 5. The temperature is 82 degrees” (a significant problem, since the mainframe we had would run until it melted) or “the power is off” or–probably most common–“the sound level is high; listen to the sound for 15 seconds”, at which point it would turn on a microphone and you’d (usually) hear someone saying “****, we tripped the robot” and then yelling “Never mind! We had the top open on the printer!”
That phone would ring several times a day. This being before the age of spam calls, that was odd. Usually we wouldn’t get to it in time, but when we did, either people would just hang up or say “Wrong number” and hang up.
This continued for a couple of years, until one night I was driving home around 2AM, listening to the radio, and heard an ad for a suicide hotline, which ended with “…call 301-625-0525”. I almost drove off the road: here’s some poor soul finally managing to call the number, and instead they get the robot–which, if YOU called IT, would tell you:
“This is telephone number 7 0 3 6 2 5 0 5 2 5. The power is ON. The temperature is 72 degrees. The sound level is OK…”
Shortly thereafter, we moved the office, and since we had no investment in that phone number, it changed.
As some wag put it at the time, “Well, at least it wasn’t Nike headquarters…”
Oops. Typo. Mine was xxx-1212.
@ Brian (14) – My sister had exactly the same problem with an area code boundary (before the introduction of 10-digit dialing). She was managing a sub shop in the Washington suburbs, which happened to have exactly the same name as a strip joint downtown. The problem was that when people gave that name to information, they would get the number for the “local” establishment, and if they didn’t use the area code when calling, they would never know that they had called the wrong place. I have no idea what the strip joint did when they received orders for a pastrami on rye, but after a while my sister gave up trying to explain the phone system to those horny idiots, and just made up random information: “Oh, Alice? She’s doing a pole dance at 7 pm.“
P.S. @ Phil (15) – Back when my mom had a beach house on the Eastern Shore, it had a very similar warning system for the furance and pump system. It gave exactly the same temperature report, and then there was a code you could type to get details or change settings. The problem was that when she went to the house to stay for a week or two, she had to remember to disconnect the system, otherwise there was no way for anyone to call her at the house (unless you were really interested in having a conversation with the furnace).
P.P.S. I don’t understand the Nike punchline.
Kilby, you get points for not having a cruel streak! Nike’s tagline is “Just Do It”…
@ Phil (19) – Actually, my preliminary ideas were much worse: I had feared that there might have been a mass shooting at Nike headquarters (I know people who live not far away from there), or even worse, that Nike employees might have gotten a reputation for “going Postal”.
“just Do It!”… that’s terrible!
My thought had been it had something to do with Nike missiles and NORAD getting the calls — not that that made any sense, except maybe the adumbration of all of humanity committing suicide… “This telephone number is 3 0 3 G O T N U K E. The temperature is 52˚. DEFCOM is at level two…
“Would you like to play a game?”
@ larK – (re: gallows humor) Back in college I remember listening in on a semi-serious discussion about the (comparative) morality of working for a company making nuclear missiles (at that time it was the MX), in comparison with (for example) a company that makes conventional weapons (such as the cluster bombs that are currently in the news).
One person (whose identity I cannot recall) argued that nukes were less amoral, in that cluster munitions were already (and still are) actively killing and maiming innocent civilians all over the globe, whereas if an MX missile were ever launched, we would not be able to measure the morality of the weapon, because we would all be dead, just like in Dr. Strangelove.
I remember a cartoon from the 1970’s or 1980’s. Possibly National Lampoon? Maybe one of this “Cartoons Even We Wouldn’t Dare Print”? Anyway, a person at a desk is saying into the telephone, “Suicide Hotline, thank you for holding. … Hello? … Hello?”
Re: Cookies –
(From one of the Addams Family films)
And then I was reminded of the Monty Python “Crunchy Frog” sketch.
Re: Snooze –
So the guy just invented something that already exists, an ordinary alarm clock?
Re: Cat Books –
I think those book titles are based on stereotypes. :-)
Re: Obsolete Joke –
There’s an XKCD comic discussing Capital Numbers (#2206).
Re: Telephones –
My father worked for The Telephone Company (corporate name changed more than once over the years) and back in the ’80s or so he got many late-night calls trying to fix things regarding some major project or other. Later projects included the Area Code changes here in Mass.
@ Grawlix – I think the dog books may be based on stereotypes, too. :-)
P.S. I had never seen that Capital Numbers comic before; they are superbly rendered, and well worth embedding here:
When I was a kid we had the same problem, except with exchanges — for some reason already lost in the mists of time, substantial chunks of the town were numbered in adjacent towns’ exchanges, but not quite enough apparently for the message to get through to the thick. So people would remember, or write down, only the last four digits and then call the wrong person. For a good chunk of time this led us to get an infinite succession of calls for people looking for Pam. Then she finished high school and we started getting calls for her sister…
We always have our answering machine answering our house phone line. We have had it for over 40 years. Our answering machine always answers it – we will pick up if it is a “real person”. Also – our answering machine has an ad for our craft business as part of the message.
At first we were getting calls for a TV repair place. Over the years this number was taken over by a internist’s office. We tend to be polite with those trying to reach the doctor – whether patients or hospitals and will pick up and tell them – would hate for someone to die due to same. Now someone else new has the number and we don’t seem to get calls for same or no one leaves a message.
Robert was at a business related meeting one day and noticed our phone number on someone’s eyeglass class. There is a chain optician on the edge of the next county which has a similar phone number to ours and that was the actual number on the case. At one point we were getting so many calls for them, that I called them and spoke to their office manager explaining and suggesting that if they had recently had a new order of eyeglass cases, business cards, etc. they check the information on the items was correct – instead of saying “thank you” or “I’m sorry” or even “Yes, I will check” she was rather nasty. So we did NOT tell her clients that they had a wrong number – just let them leave a message which never got answered.
But best of all – one day I noticed our phone number on a bus bench – when I looked again it was our number – but in the prefix the middle number was a 3 not an 8 – otherwise the same number. Apparently lots of people make this same mistake and the number on the bench was for Domino’s pizza (back when there was no Internet to order through). Are Domino’s really open at 3 am? When my dad ill and dying a call at any time – but especially at that time of morning had me up and listening to the message in fear that he had died. Superbowl – call ringing constantly and we would take handset off. (We used to joke to each other – “Can’t order from Domino’s whenever we call it is busy – as if we actually had the same number.) More recently less calls for them – guess people are ordering online.
And I have learned in our current age of electronic communications – good news comes by text message, bad news come by telephone – my mom is 94, so anytime the phone rings I am always concerned. The calls are still almost always spam, but one might be bad news about mom.