Boise Ed notes: “Seriously CIDU. We have a man on the shore, watching a diving whale and what looks like a giant, flying Covid virus. Some commenters thought the latter was a mine, slapped by the whale who somehow avoided being blown up.”
Or a small Death Star? High-tech whale watching (or hunting)?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The whale is returning a mine to the shore? How it avoided blowing the mine when it slapped it with its tail is an open question (does it blow up immediately? Or might it be like a grenade?). That’s how I read it when I saw it in the paper. And…I swear I remember a caption (though not what the caption said, exactly) that supported that view.
Sea mines are not generally pressure-detonated. The whale is not metallic, it wouldn’t trigger a magnetic mine (for instance).
Carl Fink has it @2. If you zoom in on the original image at Comics Kingdom, it’s clear that the artist has done a careful rendition of a stereotypical sea mine (he even put a few rivet marks below the equatorial seam).
P.S. Although it is customary to think of a bomb (or mine) fuze as a simple “contact” switch, the reality is much more insidious. Military engineers go to extreme lengths to make sure that a explosive device does not detonate until it has a chance of doing real damage to a prospective (and intended) target. In addition to magnetic fuzes, there are also ones with minimum force limits, and time delay versions (of either kind). If a fuze were to react immediately to a simple touch, then the mine would be more likely to destroy random sea life (or debris) than an enemy ship.
P.P.S. The real problem with this strip is not “Why didn’t the mine blow up?“, but rather “How did the whale detach the mine from its anchor?” Sea mines are built to float (otherwise they would sink to the ocean floor, where they can only harm fish), and are attached to an anchor by a very sturdy chain, so that they are held in the right place at the correct depth.
P.P.P.S. @ jjmcgaffey (1) – The original strip does not have a caption (see the link @3), so if there was one, it must have been added by your newspaper.
I forgot to mention that all bombs (and mines) also have a safety interlock that prevents the fuze from triggering until the device has actually been deployed (for instance, by free fall or spinning in the air). This prevents a bomb from exploding if it is accidentally dropped on the ground (or carrier deck) while it is being loaded onto the aircraft (which happens more often than one might think).
P.S. My first job when I moved to Germany was doing computer work for a munitions disposal company northeast of Berlin. A lot of the stuff that weapons engineers came up with during WWII was really scary.
Scary undeed1
@ Boise Ed (6) – There were (and probably still are) nefarious booby trap mechanisms on some fuzes to make them harder (if not impossible) to extract them from various bombs, but I think the nastiest things I ever ran into from WWII were the chemical time delay fuzes employed by British and American bombers over Berlin. These bombs were designed to blow up anywhere from one to three days after they were dropped. The idea was to kill additional people (especially military defuzing experts) after everyone came out from the shelters and were starting to clear away the rubble.
In theory, this just meant that the bombed-out area would remain “no-man’s land” for an additional week after the bombing. In reality, the problem was that the engineers did not consider what happens when a heavy bomb is dropped into the sandy soil found in and all around Berlin: the impact instantly loosens everything, and the bomb “swims” through the sand, often coming to rest with its nose pointing up. In that position, the chemical solution is not in contact with the fuze mechanism, so the bomb remains in limbo for decades deep underground, until it is discovered or disturbed by accident.
Munitions experts working in East Germany did not have access to the Allied photographic archives until after German Unification; since then, nearly 200 such bombs have been discovered just in one heavily bombarded suburb north of Berlin. I know of one case from the early 1990s in which one blew up spontaneously in someone’s back yard, leaving a 25-foot crater (and two injured residents), and in a recent case, one detonated while it was being defuzed, killing the three experts who were working on it.
This is minor “retail” horror in comparison to the massive wholesale horror of the Holocaust, but as an engineer, I found it very disturbing to review the intricate design plans, and to see how much elegant and in some cases brilliant work had been invested to produce a device with such awful consequences, both on purpose as well as the unintentional side-effects.
That’s downright frightening, Kilby. I, too, can appreciate the engineering excellence while despising the awful results. I hate to think what Ukraine is going to be like when all that is over and done with.
@Kilby: You are no doubt familiar with these lines from Bertolt Brecht:
Wir brauchen keine Hurrikan.
Wir brauchen keinen Taifun.
Denn was er an Schrecken tun kann
Das konnen wir selber
Das konnen wir selber
Das konnen wir selber tun.
@ MiB (9) – Actually no. Although the quote† does sound appropriate, I never studied German in school or college, so I was never forced to rub my nose in any of its more dreadful “literary” eruptions. Every time I have happened to look closer at anything Brecht produced, I have been thankful that I did not have to read it, nor sit through it. As tedious and depressing as “Mahagonny” sounds, Weill did write “The Alabama Song” for it (better known as “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar” by The Doors), so perhaps it wasn’t entirely awful.
P.S. † – In English:
“ We don’t need a hurricane,
We don’t need a typhoon,
For the horrors that they produce,
We can create alone… ”
@ Kilby (10): Brecht and Weill also wrote “Mack the Knife”. This murder ballad, about a robber who stabbed his victims to death with a pocket knife, was also used with the title “Mac Tonight” by McDonald’s to advertise their hamburgers.
On the off chance any CIDU readers are not familiar with it, here’s Lotte Lenya singing Mackie Messer (source for Mack the Knife)
MiB (#11), that ad seems to be in pretty poor taste.
Heh. Royal Caribbean had a TV ad with the music and a few very select lines from Iggy Pop’s song “Lust for Life”.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/iggypop/lustforlife.html
And this series of commercials is the place where I first encountered the Iggy Pop “Lust for Life” (not having been able to watch “Trainspotting” all the way thru); and as a result took the impression it was about good natured family-friendly fun.
Boise Ed (#13): Yes, I would say it’s in poor taste. The Louis Armstrong version is so cheerful and upbeat even as he sings “When the shark bites with his teeth, dear, scarlet billows start to spread. Fancy gloves though, wears MacHeath, dear, so there’s not a trace of red.”
But at least they didn’t use the KanonenSong from the same show. “And if the population should treat us with indignation, we chop ’em to bits because we like our hamburgers raw!”
And this series of commercials is the place where I first encountered the Iggy Pop “Lust for Life”
Same here. I looked it up after seeing the commercial, and thought, “Well, that’s different than I thought it would be!”
The play “Three Penny Opera” is taken from/based on an 18th century play “The Beggar’s Opera”.
Have the seen “The Beggars’ Opera” performed at Colonial Williamsburg and there is also a movie or TV version of it which we have seen (on Beta/VHS/DVD – not sure which – and possibly on PBS TV). More or less follows the same story line as Three Penney has taken.
We have the iconic poster from the 1970s version of the play with Raul Julia as Mack and a long list of other (now) well know actors/actresses in it. We did see the play back then.