Month / July 2023

by EditorM

2. infected with measles, as an animal or its flesh.

There are some who object to shrimp scampi on the grounds that it is somewhat a translated-redundancy; based on

scampi

/ ˈskæm pi, ˈskɑm- /

noun,plural scam·pi.Italian Cooking.

  1. a large shrimp or prawn.

but then there is 2. a dish of shrimp or prawns grilled or sautéed in oil or butter and garlic, which is what we want shrimp scampi to mean.

by multipleciduers

Just a little fix

Sometimes the intent and joke are clear, but you have the feeling there is a tiny bit of disappointment over a detail that is wrong, or at any rate could be improved.

Don’t you want the first panel to say “take requests” instead of “play requests”?

All right, a good point to be making. But it takes too much work to confirm that the two structureless and unparseable series of terms differ only in the first position, where one has senior and the other junior. Why can’t the series be more varied? Say, throw in a deputy or associate or adjunct. Go ask the second second assistant director (actual title on some film crews).

This Wrong Hands doesn’t quite work for me (==mitch). But maybe that’s because I don’t have the same vowel in fraud and frog. Is it better for someone who does?

My complaint here is trivial but it doesn’t stop bothering me, and distracting from the joke. The Joker is ALWAYS wild. Many times he is not included in the game, sure, but that doesn’t make him non-wild.

I wanted to pair this with a Bizarro I saw making almost the same joke, and with almost the same problem. It had both a Joker and a 2, and seemed to again attribute the part-time wildness to the Joker; when there was the opportunity to instead use our knowledge that “Deuces wild” is one of those dealer’s-choice options that would serve to make the 2 sometimes wild and sometimes not! The trouble is, that Bizarro was the June 2023 page on an official Bizarro hanging calendar on my wall, hence not so easily downloadable.

Well y’know what? That’s not an insuperable problem …

And, seeing it again, I should retract the claim that this one gets it wrong too. Here the Joker sometimes doesn’t feel like being wild, but is condemned to wildness always; and he is envious of the therapist deuce, for whom wildness is a sometime thing.

by EditorM

Catch the reference — a twofer one deal

Here are two suggestions from Targuman, not very similar except that in both getting the joke depends on catching a cultural reference. Not entirely a geezerish enterprise, either — yes, both have roots in the sixties or before, but at least one is still in use in contemporary “intellectual properties”.

“Andy”?? How about Johnny and Henry? (Okay, yes, we know why. But strictly speaking it’s a mistake.)

So, some confusion between Nirvana and reincarnation / transmigration of souls?

by EditorM

Okay, so 1966 predates modern science!

Thanks to Usual John for suggesting this and providing useful discussion.

How does the mention of the dino’s penguin diet prompt that change of mind about imminent danger? Of extinction? I don’t understand.

Usual John adds “Incidentally, but presumably not germane to the joke, armored dinosaurs like this one were usually herbivorous. I’m not sure what kind it is supposed to be (Johnny Hart probably did not know either, but he likely was basing it on a picture or museum specimen he had seen). Maybe a stegoceras? Not the better-known stegosaurus, since there is no thagomizer.”

“Note that this would have been before the current understanding that birds are modern dinosaurs was widely accepted and also before it occurred to anyone that (non-avian) dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid.”

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, July 16th, 2023

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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by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – July 15th, 2023

Diamond Lil seems to do a pun every day. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t from time to time pick out some striking ones to recognize.

This OY-Ewww was suggested by Maggiethecartoonist, who points out that the apparent Ewww element is based on a misunderstanding of what happens in what the Romans termed a vomitorium.

Nice, the way the at-first-hidden generalized your makes the whole thing work.

We had marked “Unintended Arlo” but really now, how can that not be meant?