I’ve said for MANY years, “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts will…”
@Bill, your version has the advantage of concision, in that the whole complement clause is replaced by that “will”. But it has the disadvantage of not being plausibly useful in the practical situation – rarely if ever would somebody need or want to substitute three left turns for one simple right turn — it would have to be when somehow the right turn is made more complicated by local or temporary circumstances. But with the other formulation, it is a commonplace that some left turns can be challenging (E.g. From a side street onto a multilane artery, where there are no traffic signals) and indeed it would be safer and less cognitively demanding to “go around the block” instead – clockwise, using three right turns. [Though come to think of it, the picture I just drew may call for a modified strategy…]
[And further, yes of course this depends on whether we are in a drive-on-right or a drive-on-left land.]
I find it curious that you have taken a joke and tried to apply it to a literal use. Should I therefore have said, “Two wrongs don’t make a left, but three rights will??”
Bill, no need to be upset. I wasn’t at all denigrating your point. But my context was “For many years I have said” … just as yours was … and I was recollecting that in fact I have often enough for it to be “a thing” done the three-right-turns thing and remarked “Well, maybe as the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right … but look, three rights do make a left!” .
UPS avoids left turns where possible. :-)
This being Boston there are quite a few places where the magic number isn’t three but two or four.
“Burnt Umber Bandicoot”. Pro: your pals can call you “BUB” without revealing your secret superness. Con: Every time someone calls you ‘bub’, you”ll worry about whether your cover has been blown.
Speaking of UPS, …what is the UPS delivery person’s favorite sport?
National Lampoon’s “Deteriorata” (parody of “Desiderata”) has the line about two wrongs don’t make a right but three lefts do.
Dollar Bill, I’d have to guess “Kickboxing – no no, I mean boxkicking!”
I was pleasantly surprised to see the Shirley and Son entry. I just recently began revisiting the comic from its start. Sadly, it is only a little over three years worth, due to the unfortunate demise of the author, Jerry Bittle, (probably more well known for Geech). It is well worth the revisit, and is, in my opinion, one of the great comics of all time.
Eyebeams: I hope that’s an eyeball on some sort of stalk in the upper right.
Andertoons: That made me laugh.
I don’t think I understand the Pardon My Planet one. No, wait, it’s stronger than that. I don’t understand it. Any help?
Stan, have you used a website that asks your age? The ones I’ve used sometimes offer separate blocks for month, day, and year. The choices are lists that you scroll through to find the appropriate answers. The website in the comic measures the scrolling to determine whether the visitor is too old for the listed items.
Stan, you are obviously a young whippersnapper. When you get to my age, it takes forever to scroll down to my birth year. In the case of PmP, if you’re that old, you shouldn’t be seen in yoga pants, or using a selfie stick, so early intervention.
Lost in A**2- Ahhhh, ok. I get it now. I misread it as you had to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage to get to the age thing, and if it took more than one scroll to get to that, certain items would be eliminated. It made no sense.
Thanks for the explanation. It is pretty funny.
@Brian: Eyebeam just had little doodles in it sometimes. They aren’t significant as far as I know.
Note to Vic Lee: people do buy gifts for those younger than themselves. As one gets older, this becomes more of a percentage.
I had the impression there was another cartoon in the last few days also using that joke about having to scroll down to your birth year. But I couldn’t find it for a comparison post. Maybe a Six Chix?
I still don’t understand why anyone would program a website to count scrolling activity, which would be incredibly difficult(†), in comparison to simply making the decision on the basis of the selected birth year.
P.S. (†) – Not to mention unreliable, given that it would be dependent on the screen resolution and dimensions.
P.P.S. A little bit late, but this is my favorite “burnt umber” comic pairing:
P.P.P.S. It’s only fair to mention that on our most recent trip to the D.C. area, I saw skin-tone Band-Aids in about six different shades, which I thought was going more than a bit overboard. They used to make ones with clear tape, which seemed (to me) to be a simpler solution, even if it didn’t hide the back of the bandage pad.
They forgot the “Two Wrights make an airplane” part of the joke.
To say nothing of the racist “Two Wongs will make it white” laundry joke, which I first heard from a chinese friend…
The Shirley and son reminded me of when I was in elementary school – first grade. Mom (maybe also dad – but probably not as he often worked late) went to the parent’s night at school. The next day she sat me down and asked me her big question –
“All of the other parents were complaining to the teacher about how much homework she gives and that the children have trouble finishing it before it is time to go to bed. How come you never seem to have homework?”
“I do it in school before I come home.”
A decade plus later this same question came up – but it was my boyfriend, now husband, who asked me. “If you haven’t read the book – how are you are going to write a paper on it?” “I read the first chapter, last chapter and one in the middle.” (And he used to copy my homework for some classes.)
@ Meryl (24) – That last paragraph brought back horrible memories of the last semester in my high school (AP) English class. Our teacher assigned five monstrous tomes for us to read: Huckleberry Finn, Return of the Native, The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, and Moby Dick. Yikes!
I liked the first two books (I may have been the only one in the class who liked Return of the Native), disliked but suffered through Faulkner’s drivel and typesetting oddities, and gave up entirely on Dostoyevsky(†) after suffering through about 40% of it. I never had time to even start on Moby Dick, and survived that part of the test only with help from Cliff’s Notes.
P.S. (†) – One commentary that the teacher shared with us claimed that the English translation was less gray and depressing than the original Russian, because the monotone repetitive nature of the original was not entirely preserved in the translation. You could have fooled me. That book was awfully dry and painfully dull (not quite as bad as Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard”, but close to it, and the agony lasts much longer).
My 12th grade English class read Crime and Punishment ; and we had an open-book test on it, with multiple choice questions (maybe some fill-in-the-blanks). This worked because the point of the test was just to verify that you had read the book. So one question I recall was “What is a verst?”. I don’t recall the distractors, but the right choice would have been “A unit of distance” — which had never been defined for us but a reader would soon enough have figured out from remarks like “The next village was some twenty versts away”.
@ mitch (26) – The thing that bugs me is that I recognized “verst” as a unit of distance right away, before I got as far as your explanation, but I have absolutely no idea where I might have picked that up, and I highly doubt that it was from my very limited and rather ancient exposure to Dostoyevsky. I’d rather bet on my small library of pre-unification humor (both in English and in German); some of the anecdotes included old jokes from Yiddish sources.
Somewhere or other, on some web site or other, it was pointed out how many classics of literature there are in which the famous incident everyone thinks of comes very early in the book, in the first or second or third chapter. Because most people give up reading the book after two or three chapters. Everybody knows Gulliver went to Lilliput where all the people were six inches tall. Did you know that he also went to a place where all the people were seventy-two feet tall?
Re scrollling to get to your birth year–if the web designer hasn’t been “clever” you can just click in the box and type your age. It will scroll to the right place. Alas, this basic and standard paradigm is being subverted by those “clever” (ignorant) designers, mouse kids who aren’t quite sure why you need all those keys…
Yes, this makes me grumpy. On a daily basis.
@phsiiicidu: amen! Like, Like, Like! Upvote.
I hate when it asks for my credit card number and makes me scroll up from 1.
Near the end of my tenure at Megacorp, I was doing some fixes to our previous large project because most of the software people on that had gone off to other things. One feature of the GUI was a popup panel for entering numbers.
The original designer was one of our youngest developers. She had designed it so the keys were in “phone order”. The customer didn’t like that and wanted it in “calculator order”. I told the boss that likely the users would be young people (this was a foreign military project) who’d probably prefer her solution, but the people in charge wanted it changed.
While I’m sure you’re right, that’s a pecadillo on the face of most UIs nowadays, which seem to have been designed by crack-addicted mouse monkeys. My favorite (NOT) are all the pages that cleverly make links look like regular text, so the only way to do anything is to randomly move the mouse around until it lights up. Brilliant.
A colleague refers to this as “FMs”, as in “****ing Millennials”. Imagine my horror when I discovered that an office building near my home is occupied by “FM Global”, clearly the HQ for the cult.
P.S. Yes, I meant to say “pecadillo on the face”.
P.P.S. However, I didn’t mean to misspell it twice.
Kilby (25) – I read “Huckleberry Finn” at some point in upper elementary school/early junior high on my own (and did not like it as much as Tom Sawyer) from my collection of books at home. I don’t think I have ever read the others – though of course I was probably suppose to.
Oddly after being a major and quick book reader for most of my life, I have reached a point where my reading has mostly become information, primarily magazines (such as BBC History, Time…) with the reading of books generally saved for the Jewish High Holy Days. Since I don’t belong to a synagogue I tend to treat these holidays as being time aside for reading of more, hmm, what is the word, I’ll go with thought invoking subject matter. (And watching religious services on TV.)
The rest of the year I had come to the conclusion that reading fiction with the limited time left in my life my time is better used for informative things and any books read during the year are generally history related (as generally also are the ones for the High Holy Days).
Makes no sense to husband – who is not Jewish, but it is my way of dealing with the holidays these years. Then again, during Covid, based on my idea of dealing with watching the religious services on TV as I could not attend, he started watching Christmas Eve and Easter Mass from a Church in Australia as he could not attend same in person locally.
One thing I learned with my desktop was a way to scroll for annoying situations like YouTube comments, where they only partially load. I can click with scroll wheel, and that puts a double direction arrow on screen. By moving the pointer above or below it starts scrolling up or down. Then I can go away for a bit and it will be done when I get back.
Here’s another with the scrolling. (Or did we already see this one? It seems to have the date of 2023-10-02.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
I’ve said for MANY years, “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts will…”
@Bill, your version has the advantage of concision, in that the whole complement clause is replaced by that “will”. But it has the disadvantage of not being plausibly useful in the practical situation – rarely if ever would somebody need or want to substitute three left turns for one simple right turn — it would have to be when somehow the right turn is made more complicated by local or temporary circumstances. But with the other formulation, it is a commonplace that some left turns can be challenging (E.g. From a side street onto a multilane artery, where there are no traffic signals) and indeed it would be safer and less cognitively demanding to “go around the block” instead – clockwise, using three right turns. [Though come to think of it, the picture I just drew may call for a modified strategy…]
[And further, yes of course this depends on whether we are in a drive-on-right or a drive-on-left land.]
I find it curious that you have taken a joke and tried to apply it to a literal use. Should I therefore have said, “Two wrongs don’t make a left, but three rights will??”
Bill, no need to be upset. I wasn’t at all denigrating your point. But my context was “For many years I have said” … just as yours was … and I was recollecting that in fact I have often enough for it to be “a thing” done the three-right-turns thing and remarked “Well, maybe as the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right … but look, three rights do make a left!” .
UPS avoids left turns where possible. :-)
This being Boston there are quite a few places where the magic number isn’t three but two or four.
“Burnt Umber Bandicoot”. Pro: your pals can call you “BUB” without revealing your secret superness. Con: Every time someone calls you ‘bub’, you”ll worry about whether your cover has been blown.
Speaking of UPS, …what is the UPS delivery person’s favorite sport?
National Lampoon’s “Deteriorata” (parody of “Desiderata”) has the line about two wrongs don’t make a right but three lefts do.
Dollar Bill, I’d have to guess “Kickboxing – no no, I mean boxkicking!”
I was pleasantly surprised to see the Shirley and Son entry. I just recently began revisiting the comic from its start. Sadly, it is only a little over three years worth, due to the unfortunate demise of the author, Jerry Bittle, (probably more well known for Geech). It is well worth the revisit, and is, in my opinion, one of the great comics of all time.
Eyebeams: I hope that’s an eyeball on some sort of stalk in the upper right.
Andertoons: That made me laugh.
I don’t think I understand the Pardon My Planet one. No, wait, it’s stronger than that. I don’t understand it. Any help?
Stan, have you used a website that asks your age? The ones I’ve used sometimes offer separate blocks for month, day, and year. The choices are lists that you scroll through to find the appropriate answers. The website in the comic measures the scrolling to determine whether the visitor is too old for the listed items.
Stan, you are obviously a young whippersnapper. When you get to my age, it takes forever to scroll down to my birth year. In the case of PmP, if you’re that old, you shouldn’t be seen in yoga pants, or using a selfie stick, so early intervention.
Lost in A**2- Ahhhh, ok. I get it now. I misread it as you had to scroll down to the bottom of the webpage to get to the age thing, and if it took more than one scroll to get to that, certain items would be eliminated. It made no sense.
Thanks for the explanation. It is pretty funny.
@Brian: Eyebeam just had little doodles in it sometimes. They aren’t significant as far as I know.
Note to Vic Lee: people do buy gifts for those younger than themselves. As one gets older, this becomes more of a percentage.
I had the impression there was another cartoon in the last few days also using that joke about having to scroll down to your birth year. But I couldn’t find it for a comparison post. Maybe a Six Chix?
I still don’t understand why anyone would program a website to count scrolling activity, which would be incredibly difficult(†), in comparison to simply making the decision on the basis of the selected birth year.
P.S. (†) – Not to mention unreliable, given that it would be dependent on the screen resolution and dimensions.
P.P.S. A little bit late, but this is my favorite “burnt umber” comic pairing:
P.P.P.S. It’s only fair to mention that on our most recent trip to the D.C. area, I saw skin-tone Band-Aids in about six different shades, which I thought was going more than a bit overboard. They used to make ones with clear tape, which seemed (to me) to be a simpler solution, even if it didn’t hide the back of the bandage pad.
They forgot the “Two Wrights make an airplane” part of the joke.
To say nothing of the racist “Two Wongs will make it white” laundry joke, which I first heard from a chinese friend…
The Shirley and son reminded me of when I was in elementary school – first grade. Mom (maybe also dad – but probably not as he often worked late) went to the parent’s night at school. The next day she sat me down and asked me her big question –
“All of the other parents were complaining to the teacher about how much homework she gives and that the children have trouble finishing it before it is time to go to bed. How come you never seem to have homework?”
“I do it in school before I come home.”
A decade plus later this same question came up – but it was my boyfriend, now husband, who asked me. “If you haven’t read the book – how are you are going to write a paper on it?” “I read the first chapter, last chapter and one in the middle.” (And he used to copy my homework for some classes.)
@ Meryl (24) – That last paragraph brought back horrible memories of the last semester in my high school (AP) English class. Our teacher assigned five monstrous tomes for us to read: Huckleberry Finn, Return of the Native, The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, and Moby Dick. Yikes!
I liked the first two books (I may have been the only one in the class who liked Return of the Native), disliked but suffered through Faulkner’s drivel and typesetting oddities, and gave up entirely on Dostoyevsky(†) after suffering through about 40% of it. I never had time to even start on Moby Dick, and survived that part of the test only with help from Cliff’s Notes.
P.S. (†) – One commentary that the teacher shared with us claimed that the English translation was less gray and depressing than the original Russian, because the monotone repetitive nature of the original was not entirely preserved in the translation. You could have fooled me. That book was awfully dry and painfully dull (not quite as bad as Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard”, but close to it, and the agony lasts much longer).
My 12th grade English class read Crime and Punishment ; and we had an open-book test on it, with multiple choice questions (maybe some fill-in-the-blanks). This worked because the point of the test was just to verify that you had read the book. So one question I recall was “What is a verst?”. I don’t recall the distractors, but the right choice would have been “A unit of distance” — which had never been defined for us but a reader would soon enough have figured out from remarks like “The next village was some twenty versts away”.
@ mitch (26) – The thing that bugs me is that I recognized “verst” as a unit of distance right away, before I got as far as your explanation, but I have absolutely no idea where I might have picked that up, and I highly doubt that it was from my very limited and rather ancient exposure to Dostoyevsky. I’d rather bet on my small library of pre-unification humor (both in English and in German); some of the anecdotes included old jokes from Yiddish sources.
Somewhere or other, on some web site or other, it was pointed out how many classics of literature there are in which the famous incident everyone thinks of comes very early in the book, in the first or second or third chapter. Because most people give up reading the book after two or three chapters. Everybody knows Gulliver went to Lilliput where all the people were six inches tall. Did you know that he also went to a place where all the people were seventy-two feet tall?
Re scrollling to get to your birth year–if the web designer hasn’t been “clever” you can just click in the box and type your age. It will scroll to the right place. Alas, this basic and standard paradigm is being subverted by those “clever” (ignorant) designers, mouse kids who aren’t quite sure why you need all those keys…
Yes, this makes me grumpy. On a daily basis.
@phsiiicidu: amen! Like, Like, Like! Upvote.
I hate when it asks for my credit card number and makes me scroll up from 1.
Mark in Boston et al:
https://qz.com/679782/programmers-imagine-the-most-ridiculous-ways-to-input-a-phone-number
Near the end of my tenure at Megacorp, I was doing some fixes to our previous large project because most of the software people on that had gone off to other things. One feature of the GUI was a popup panel for entering numbers.
The original designer was one of our youngest developers. She had designed it so the keys were in “phone order”. The customer didn’t like that and wanted it in “calculator order”. I told the boss that likely the users would be young people (this was a foreign military project) who’d probably prefer her solution, but the people in charge wanted it changed.
While I’m sure you’re right, that’s a pecadillo on the face of most UIs nowadays, which seem to have been designed by crack-addicted mouse monkeys. My favorite (NOT) are all the pages that cleverly make links look like regular text, so the only way to do anything is to randomly move the mouse around until it lights up. Brilliant.
A colleague refers to this as “FMs”, as in “****ing Millennials”. Imagine my horror when I discovered that an office building near my home is occupied by “FM Global”, clearly the HQ for the cult.
P.S. Yes, I meant to say “pecadillo on the face”.
P.P.S. However, I didn’t mean to misspell it twice.
Kilby (25) – I read “Huckleberry Finn” at some point in upper elementary school/early junior high on my own (and did not like it as much as Tom Sawyer) from my collection of books at home. I don’t think I have ever read the others – though of course I was probably suppose to.
Oddly after being a major and quick book reader for most of my life, I have reached a point where my reading has mostly become information, primarily magazines (such as BBC History, Time…) with the reading of books generally saved for the Jewish High Holy Days. Since I don’t belong to a synagogue I tend to treat these holidays as being time aside for reading of more, hmm, what is the word, I’ll go with thought invoking subject matter. (And watching religious services on TV.)
The rest of the year I had come to the conclusion that reading fiction with the limited time left in my life my time is better used for informative things and any books read during the year are generally history related (as generally also are the ones for the High Holy Days).
Makes no sense to husband – who is not Jewish, but it is my way of dealing with the holidays these years. Then again, during Covid, based on my idea of dealing with watching the religious services on TV as I could not attend, he started watching Christmas Eve and Easter Mass from a Church in Australia as he could not attend same in person locally.
@ mitch (18) – Here’s a new take on scrolling from Moderately Confused:
One thing I learned with my desktop was a way to scroll for annoying situations like YouTube comments, where they only partially load. I can click with scroll wheel, and that puts a double direction arrow on screen. By moving the pointer above or below it starts scrolling up or down. Then I can go away for a bit and it will be done when I get back.
Here’s another with the scrolling. (Or did we already see this one? It seems to have the date of 2023-10-02.)
[…] finally we get the correct form of this joke! (Compare the Eyebeam discussed at https://cidu.info/2023/09/10/sunday-funnies-lols-september-10th-2023 […]