Thanks to Mark H. for sending this, and calling for a Geezer Alert.
Oh, why not!
This one deserves to be flagged.
BONUS CIDU-OY!
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42 Comments
Even though typing just “Edna S…” was enough to reveal the relevant reference, I am neither familiar enough with Millay’s work, nor interested enough to derive all the parallels that would justify the humor in the strip.
“To pass, however, candidates also had to interpret a piece of literature. Kaufman received negative grades on her reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Euclid Alone,” and failed the test again. This time she fought back, sending the Board of Examiners affidavits from her professors testifying to her literary skills, as well as a letter from Edna St. Vincent Millay herself, to whom she had sent a copy of her analysis of the poem. Millay wrote to the examiners that Kaufman’s interpretation was extraordinarily perceptive. Yet…the examiners voted her down once again. The following year, perhaps because they had had enough of her, Kaufman passed the orals and received her teaching license.”
In another version of the story, the examiners reacted by changing the exam to exclude living authors. And eventually dropped the whole thing because they were running short of teachers.
She has such a rhythmic name! (Unless “St. Vincent” is pronounced in some tricky abbreviated way- Like “Sinjin” for “St. John” when it’s part of a modern name.)
There is a contemporary musician who performs under the name St. Vincent. In this clip from SNL, she is introduced and the pronunciation is “Saint Vincent” in full. Which doesn’t tell us about Millay with any certainty.
Great song, with a nice dose of Lili Von Shtupp.
I am a fan of Annie Clark, AKA “St. Vincent”. I’ve seen her on various late-night shows over the years, and it’s always pronounced as spelled.
Glinda, to Dorothy: Just Edna St. Vincent Millay!
First Munchkin: Edna St. Vincent Millay!
Second Munchkin: Edna St. Vincent Millay!
All: Edna St. Vincent Millay! Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Vincent Millay!
“St. Vincent”. I’ve seen her on various late-night shows over the years, and it’s always pronounced as spelled.
So “stvihn-sent”?
I guess I should have said, “as usual”.
Can someone please explain Luann?
@lolainpa = The dad is listing old band names. He wanted to be a member of one of those groups as a dream job. The kids don’t understand the references, think he might be losing his mind.
They then find his abbreviated shopping list which was made when they were out of the room and they have no prior knowledge of. As it forms a nonsensical but grammatically accurate sentence, they panic. Stroke, maybe? Call 911.
This is the first Luanne I have laughed at in a very, very long time.
The mysterious “message” in the last panel was really just the abbreviations Dad jotted for the items Mom said to put on the shopping list.
For me the Luann entry was so-so. Dad’s dream job(s) should not have been a mystery to anyone who hadn’t spent their whole life, or at least the last sixty years, under a rock. The Stones are booked for a 2024 tour, as are the Eagles – albeit their last, at least until they change their minds.
OTOH, Dad’s shopping list would be puzzling unless one had heard Mom’s orders.
Although the map is a clever visual contruction, it turns out that there are at least a half-dozen theories about the origin of the country’s name, but none of them have anything to do with the name of the spicy peppers, which are called “chili” only in Mexico and Central America. In South American Spanish, they are called “ají”:
P.S. I really don’t think we should be giving CIDU “tag” credits to individual Twitter and Facebook users, just because they were the last link in the chain before a random item got passed along.
Danny Boy (4): Yes, those two dactyls do have that pleasant effect.
Kilby (15): Thanks for that knowledge. We forget that Spanish dialects vary as much as English ones.
Because “ají” is what you say when you bite into one?
Thanks for the LuAnn clarification. You know how most of the time, if a joke has to be explained then it isn’t funny. This was the exception.
@ Lola in PA (18) – “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you learn a lot, but the subject dies in the process.”†
P.S. (†) – Multiple versions attributed to E.B. White, Mark Twain, etc.; figuring out who really said it first is not worth the effort.
Kilby (15) the issue is just not leaving the appearance of “meme theft”, no matter the distance from the actual creator of something.
I would probably write a shopping list that – a lot of abbreviations. Worked well when I was younger – and I shopped alone. Nowadays we would be in the supermarket and I would be trying to figure out what I meant by that abbreviation while Robert starts worrying about my forgetting things lately – again.
I record things, food or otherwise, we need to buy in a note in my phone so I always have it with me. If we are doing a major food shopping trip I transfer my list for same into a saved Excel sheet in my computer and we go through the list of items by a list of what we normally buy and add in anything else we need as we run through the list – it then gets printed out to bring with us.
Meryl(21): An online friend put me onto a free iPhone app called AnyList, which makes it easy to keep shopping list(s). I don’t know if it’s on other platforms. After I make and use a list, I just tap on each item as I put it in my cart, and it’s parked with a red line. I can either delete it or, if it’s a regular item for me, leave it red-marked until I want it again, then tap it to remove the red line. It saves me some time and helps deal with failing memory. I think they have a “pro” version, for a fee, but I don’t need that.
@ Boise Ed (22) – Thanks very much for suggesting shopping list apps. I wish I had thought to get one years ago.
I first downloaded “AnyList”, but deleted it very quickly, because the app refused to work without an Internet connection. However, a quick search in the App Store produced hordes of other options. I collected about a dozen of the best looking ones, and then tested each for usability. Many of the apps were far too intricate, expecting the user to enter specific quantities and even prices, which I found ridiculous. (How am I supposed to know what things cost, unless I’m already in the store?)
P.S. I currently have two or three viable candidates, but the clear frontrunner is “ThatShoppingList” (by Markus Liebschner).
iOS (and macOS) have a built-in app called Reminders. You can add any list. It makes an excellent shopping list. If you use iCloud, you can synchronize your lists among all your Apple devices.
You can even use Siri. If you have a list named, e.g., “Shopping”: say, “Hey, Siri, add mustard to my Shopping list”.
@ Jajizi (25) – Thanks for the tip! Reminders has potential, but I think I would need to create a separate list for each “category” of items, rather than one list for the entire grocery store. However, for either app I will need to find a way to import the list from a “real” computer, because tapping an entire grocery list into a mobile device would wear off my fingerprints.
I’ve been using OurGroceries for a decade or so. It has categories, and a pretty decent set of preprogrammed items, so autocomplete saves you most of the time. And it remembers previous items, so once you’ve entered that specific item, it’s easy to find. It also scans barcodes, so replacing specific items is usually easy (“usually” because barcodes from stores like Trader Joes aren’t necessarily in the database). I’m a big fan. Also works on PC and has an Alex skill, so in the middle of cooking I can say “Alexa, tell OurGroceries to add hamsters to Walmart” and it does so.
AnyList also has categories, and most of the time it will automatically put a new item into Beverages, Dairy, Deli, etc. That can shorten my shopping time by letting me get all my Dairy items at once, etc. It sounds like OurGroceries is good, too.
@ Phil (27) – OK, searching for (and getting) OurGroceries meant that I saw and downloaded five other apps, too (one of which I immediately deleted). I’ll test them all and see whether any of them make the short list of candidates.
On the rare occasion that I make a grocerylist, I do it in traversal order.
@ Brian (30) – After my wife compiles a long list for me, I transcribe it into the order that the items are found in our local store.
Yesterday I saw Maestro. At least twice, the characters identify Millay as the source of the line “If summer doesn’t sing in you then nothing sings in you,” which you can see used at the beginning and end of this trailer (but not there identified).
Because of the movie using this line, Google is not easily giving me results about where it is in Millay’s work. I’ll do some sifting at the Poetry Foundation site.
Boise Ed – thank you. I will tell Robert to see if it is available for Android and my ##!!***** phone.
(My last phone was great – this one is terrible, so I keep my old phone to use for non-phone things around the house, then again, I still use my Palm Centro as a PDA in the house. )
@ Meryl – Yes, a number of us geezers are willing to commit “Public Displays of Affection” in support of our beloved, albeit antiquated technology. :-)
@ Kilby – where is this magical store of which you speak, where they don’t periodically move everything around to force customers to go up and down aisles they normally skip?
And if only I could find some transparent-background images of a cayenne pepper, a lima bean and a brazil nut…
The supermarket I use the most hasn’t had a reorg in quite some time. After the last one, they put up a sign headed “Having trouble finding something” or the like. It listed many common items and their current location.
There’s another store in the chain about the same distance from me, but it has a number of major differences in shelving. My store has soup and crackers in the same aisle, which makes some sense. In the other, they are far apart. On the other hand, my store has an aisle that consists of Asian, Mexican, canned fruit, coffee, tea, and cookies. The other store has coffee and tea over in one of the beverage aisles.
The main thing is getting familiar with one layout, regardless of logic.
There’s no logic, beyond putting all the newspapers/magazines/tobacco/lottery/individual drinks/sandwiches/donuts etc near the doors, and having all the fresh produce the first “proper” section you come to (to create a healthy first impression). And I’ve heard that they like to put fresh bread at the back as that drags people through the store, especially if there’s an aroma from an in-store bakery.
But other than that, all the supermarkets here periodically shuffle things about so that every now and again you can no longer use your mental map.
Kilby – In my case it is a stack of cell phones – the Centro, the Blackberry, the 4G Android (which specifically got discontinued when the 3G ones were – something I really don’t understand – all of which were better than my current one. I like each of the old ones for different things, so as long as they keep working – they travel around the house with me.
@ MikeP (35) – Our local supermarket doesn’t usually make random changes,† but about a year or so ago they closed for two months while they renovated the whole building . The physical layout wasn’t changed a whole lot, but they did move a lot of products around, not infrequently just flipping the sides of an aisle (left for right). Even now (more than a year later), I keep finding things that are on the “wrong” side of a particular aisle.
In any case, I don’t organize my list aisle for aisle, just roughly according by category. Fruits & veggies first, then eggs, milk, cheese, dry and canned goods in the middle, then drinks, and last of all the frozen stuff, which more or less corresponds to the layout of the store (right to left).
P.S. (†) – There is a much larger supermarket at the local mall that does pull the “annoying re-rack” trick every so often.
During the earlier part of Covid we shifted to buying our groceries at a Neighborhood Market (a Walmart chain which has only food. pharmacy and related) as it showed the least number of shoppers during the time we could go shopping (late risers) as opposed to the 6 am times that were being featured by the other supermarkets in our area as shopping times reserved for seniors.
On our first trip there I made notes (in an actual tiny spiral note pad) of what in general was in each aisle. I transferred this list to an Excel file in my computer and added a secondary list next to it of items we normally buy and where they are -some parts do not in numerical order as we jump from the last of the food aisles which have food which does not need to be cold to the non-food aisles – house cleaning, OTC meds and the like and then back to the refrigerated section, then to meats and then to frozen.
When we go shopping there now I will use this list of what we buy and where it is to write up a list sorted by aisle in Excel & print it out – that’s close enough for us.
On our first trip there we had not gone out food shopping in 2 months – we had tried ordering from BJs and from Walmart national (our local Walmarts do not deliver – nearest one which did delivers was in New Jersey – quite a trip away and with big tolls and sure they would not deliver to LI. Neither order had worked well at all. Ordered mostly meat items from BJs – we had gotten a coupon for free delivery from them from our local store. They apparently have a shopper who pulls the order and then delivers it. I immediately started getting text messages (this is May 2020) that they are out of this item, this item, this item… In the end the only meat item we received was a package of stew meat which contained more fat than meat (and is mostly still in our freezer – we really have to clean it out). We also had to argue with them to get a refund for the items they had not delivered. The order to Walmart resulted in 60% of the cans dented, boxed items (such as cake mix) which looked as if someone jumped up and down on it, and husband had ordered a 2 pack of large bottles of cooking oil (because only choice for same) which had their necks and caps bent back into the bottles (and I recently started the second bottle of oil).
So we started going to the Neighborhood Market as we needed to buy food in person. We filled 8 double bagged bags. When we went to check out Robert was not well and I sent him to the car (Diabetes low) and I checked out alone. We quickly learned from this to make 2 trips into the market if we were going to shop this rarely – first trip buy all items which did not have to be kept cold – check out , put in car. Repeat immediately with cold items.
Of course now he has us food shopping several times a week for small list of items as we did before Covid – at the Neighborhood Market as we have gotten used to it and also at locations of the other 2 chains with stores here for items that the NM does not have.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Even though typing just “Edna S…” was enough to reveal the relevant reference, I am neither familiar enough with Millay’s work, nor interested enough to derive all the parallels that would justify the humor in the strip.
All I know of Millay is from Bel Kaufman’s story:
https://jwa.org/blog/meet-bel-kaufman-she-wrote-what-she-knew
“To pass, however, candidates also had to interpret a piece of literature. Kaufman received negative grades on her reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Euclid Alone,” and failed the test again. This time she fought back, sending the Board of Examiners affidavits from her professors testifying to her literary skills, as well as a letter from Edna St. Vincent Millay herself, to whom she had sent a copy of her analysis of the poem. Millay wrote to the examiners that Kaufman’s interpretation was extraordinarily perceptive. Yet…the examiners voted her down once again. The following year, perhaps because they had had enough of her, Kaufman passed the orals and received her teaching license.”
In another version of the story, the examiners reacted by changing the exam to exclude living authors. And eventually dropped the whole thing because they were running short of teachers.
She has such a rhythmic name! (Unless “St. Vincent” is pronounced in some tricky abbreviated way- Like “Sinjin” for “St. John” when it’s part of a modern name.)
There is a contemporary musician who performs under the name St. Vincent. In this clip from SNL, she is introduced and the pronunciation is “Saint Vincent” in full. Which doesn’t tell us about Millay with any certainty.
Great song, with a nice dose of Lili Von Shtupp.
I am a fan of Annie Clark, AKA “St. Vincent”. I’ve seen her on various late-night shows over the years, and it’s always pronounced as spelled.
Glinda, to Dorothy: Just Edna St. Vincent Millay!
First Munchkin: Edna St. Vincent Millay!
Second Munchkin: Edna St. Vincent Millay!
All: Edna St. Vincent Millay! Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Edna St. Vincent Millay!
“St. Vincent”. I’ve seen her on various late-night shows over the years, and it’s always pronounced as spelled.
So “stvihn-sent”?
I guess I should have said, “as usual”.
Can someone please explain Luann?
@lolainpa = The dad is listing old band names. He wanted to be a member of one of those groups as a dream job. The kids don’t understand the references, think he might be losing his mind.
They then find his abbreviated shopping list which was made when they were out of the room and they have no prior knowledge of. As it forms a nonsensical but grammatically accurate sentence, they panic. Stroke, maybe? Call 911.
This is the first Luanne I have laughed at in a very, very long time.
The mysterious “message” in the last panel was really just the abbreviations Dad jotted for the items Mom said to put on the shopping list.
For me the Luann entry was so-so. Dad’s dream job(s) should not have been a mystery to anyone who hadn’t spent their whole life, or at least the last sixty years, under a rock. The Stones are booked for a 2024 tour, as are the Eagles – albeit their last, at least until they change their minds.
OTOH, Dad’s shopping list would be puzzling unless one had heard Mom’s orders.
Although the map is a clever visual contruction, it turns out that there are at least a half-dozen theories about the origin of the country’s name, but none of them have anything to do with the name of the spicy peppers, which are called “chili” only in Mexico and Central America. In South American Spanish, they are called “ají”:
P.S. I really don’t think we should be giving CIDU “tag” credits to individual Twitter and Facebook users, just because they were the last link in the chain before a random item got passed along.
Danny Boy (4): Yes, those two dactyls do have that pleasant effect.
Kilby (15): Thanks for that knowledge. We forget that Spanish dialects vary as much as English ones.
Because “ají” is what you say when you bite into one?
Thanks for the LuAnn clarification. You know how most of the time, if a joke has to be explained then it isn’t funny. This was the exception.
@ Lola in PA (18) – “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you learn a lot, but the subject dies in the process.”†
P.S. (†) – Multiple versions attributed to E.B. White, Mark Twain, etc.; figuring out who really said it first is not worth the effort.
Kilby (15) the issue is just not leaving the appearance of “meme theft”, no matter the distance from the actual creator of something.
I would probably write a shopping list that – a lot of abbreviations. Worked well when I was younger – and I shopped alone. Nowadays we would be in the supermarket and I would be trying to figure out what I meant by that abbreviation while Robert starts worrying about my forgetting things lately – again.
I record things, food or otherwise, we need to buy in a note in my phone so I always have it with me. If we are doing a major food shopping trip I transfer my list for same into a saved Excel sheet in my computer and we go through the list of items by a list of what we normally buy and add in anything else we need as we run through the list – it then gets printed out to bring with us.
Meryl(21): An online friend put me onto a free iPhone app called AnyList, which makes it easy to keep shopping list(s). I don’t know if it’s on other platforms. After I make and use a list, I just tap on each item as I put it in my cart, and it’s parked with a red line. I can either delete it or, if it’s a regular item for me, leave it red-marked until I want it again, then tap it to remove the red line. It saves me some time and helps deal with failing memory. I think they have a “pro” version, for a fee, but I don’t need that.
Re abbreviations on shopping list: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3o4di1/i_spent_5_minutes_trying_to_figure_out_who_tom_is/
must
let
tom
pick
onion
@ Boise Ed (22) – Thanks very much for suggesting shopping list apps. I wish I had thought to get one years ago.
I first downloaded “AnyList”, but deleted it very quickly, because the app refused to work without an Internet connection. However, a quick search in the App Store produced hordes of other options. I collected about a dozen of the best looking ones, and then tested each for usability. Many of the apps were far too intricate, expecting the user to enter specific quantities and even prices, which I found ridiculous. (How am I supposed to know what things cost, unless I’m already in the store?)
P.S. I currently have two or three viable candidates, but the clear frontrunner is “ThatShoppingList” (by Markus Liebschner).
iOS (and macOS) have a built-in app called Reminders. You can add any list. It makes an excellent shopping list. If you use iCloud, you can synchronize your lists among all your Apple devices.
You can even use Siri. If you have a list named, e.g., “Shopping”: say, “Hey, Siri, add mustard to my Shopping list”.
@ Jajizi (25) – Thanks for the tip! Reminders has potential, but I think I would need to create a separate list for each “category” of items, rather than one list for the entire grocery store. However, for either app I will need to find a way to import the list from a “real” computer, because tapping an entire grocery list into a mobile device would wear off my fingerprints.
I’ve been using OurGroceries for a decade or so. It has categories, and a pretty decent set of preprogrammed items, so autocomplete saves you most of the time. And it remembers previous items, so once you’ve entered that specific item, it’s easy to find. It also scans barcodes, so replacing specific items is usually easy (“usually” because barcodes from stores like Trader Joes aren’t necessarily in the database). I’m a big fan. Also works on PC and has an Alex skill, so in the middle of cooking I can say “Alexa, tell OurGroceries to add hamsters to Walmart” and it does so.
AnyList also has categories, and most of the time it will automatically put a new item into Beverages, Dairy, Deli, etc. That can shorten my shopping time by letting me get all my Dairy items at once, etc. It sounds like OurGroceries is good, too.
@ Phil (27) – OK, searching for (and getting) OurGroceries meant that I saw and downloaded five other apps, too (one of which I immediately deleted). I’ll test them all and see whether any of them make the short list of candidates.
On the rare occasion that I make a grocerylist, I do it in traversal order.
@ Brian (30) – After my wife compiles a long list for me, I transcribe it into the order that the items are found in our local store.
Yesterday I saw Maestro. At least twice, the characters identify Millay as the source of the line “If summer doesn’t sing in you then nothing sings in you,” which you can see used at the beginning and end of this trailer (but not there identified).
Because of the movie using this line, Google is not easily giving me results about where it is in Millay’s work. I’ll do some sifting at the Poetry Foundation site.
Boise Ed – thank you. I will tell Robert to see if it is available for Android and my ##!!***** phone.
(My last phone was great – this one is terrible, so I keep my old phone to use for non-phone things around the house, then again, I still use my Palm Centro as a PDA in the house. )
@ Meryl – Yes, a number of us geezers are willing to commit “Public Displays of Affection” in support of our beloved, albeit antiquated technology. :-)
@ Kilby – where is this magical store of which you speak, where they don’t periodically move everything around to force customers to go up and down aisles they normally skip?
And if only I could find some transparent-background images of a cayenne pepper, a lima bean and a brazil nut…
The supermarket I use the most hasn’t had a reorg in quite some time. After the last one, they put up a sign headed “Having trouble finding something” or the like. It listed many common items and their current location.
There’s another store in the chain about the same distance from me, but it has a number of major differences in shelving. My store has soup and crackers in the same aisle, which makes some sense. In the other, they are far apart. On the other hand, my store has an aisle that consists of Asian, Mexican, canned fruit, coffee, tea, and cookies. The other store has coffee and tea over in one of the beverage aisles.
The main thing is getting familiar with one layout, regardless of logic.
There’s no logic, beyond putting all the newspapers/magazines/tobacco/lottery/individual drinks/sandwiches/donuts etc near the doors, and having all the fresh produce the first “proper” section you come to (to create a healthy first impression). And I’ve heard that they like to put fresh bread at the back as that drags people through the store, especially if there’s an aroma from an in-store bakery.
But other than that, all the supermarkets here periodically shuffle things about so that every now and again you can no longer use your mental map.
Kilby – In my case it is a stack of cell phones – the Centro, the Blackberry, the 4G Android (which specifically got discontinued when the 3G ones were – something I really don’t understand – all of which were better than my current one. I like each of the old ones for different things, so as long as they keep working – they travel around the house with me.
@ MikeP (35) – Our local supermarket doesn’t usually make random changes,† but about a year or so ago they closed for two months while they renovated the whole building . The physical layout wasn’t changed a whole lot, but they did move a lot of products around, not infrequently just flipping the sides of an aisle (left for right). Even now (more than a year later), I keep finding things that are on the “wrong” side of a particular aisle.
In any case, I don’t organize my list aisle for aisle, just roughly according by category. Fruits & veggies first, then eggs, milk, cheese, dry and canned goods in the middle, then drinks, and last of all the frozen stuff, which more or less corresponds to the layout of the store (right to left).
P.S. (†) – There is a much larger supermarket at the local mall that does pull the “annoying re-rack” trick every so often.
During the earlier part of Covid we shifted to buying our groceries at a Neighborhood Market (a Walmart chain which has only food. pharmacy and related) as it showed the least number of shoppers during the time we could go shopping (late risers) as opposed to the 6 am times that were being featured by the other supermarkets in our area as shopping times reserved for seniors.
On our first trip there I made notes (in an actual tiny spiral note pad) of what in general was in each aisle. I transferred this list to an Excel file in my computer and added a secondary list next to it of items we normally buy and where they are -some parts do not in numerical order as we jump from the last of the food aisles which have food which does not need to be cold to the non-food aisles – house cleaning, OTC meds and the like and then back to the refrigerated section, then to meats and then to frozen.
When we go shopping there now I will use this list of what we buy and where it is to write up a list sorted by aisle in Excel & print it out – that’s close enough for us.
On our first trip there we had not gone out food shopping in 2 months – we had tried ordering from BJs and from Walmart national (our local Walmarts do not deliver – nearest one which did delivers was in New Jersey – quite a trip away and with big tolls and sure they would not deliver to LI. Neither order had worked well at all. Ordered mostly meat items from BJs – we had gotten a coupon for free delivery from them from our local store. They apparently have a shopper who pulls the order and then delivers it. I immediately started getting text messages (this is May 2020) that they are out of this item, this item, this item… In the end the only meat item we received was a package of stew meat which contained more fat than meat (and is mostly still in our freezer – we really have to clean it out). We also had to argue with them to get a refund for the items they had not delivered. The order to Walmart resulted in 60% of the cans dented, boxed items (such as cake mix) which looked as if someone jumped up and down on it, and husband had ordered a 2 pack of large bottles of cooking oil (because only choice for same) which had their necks and caps bent back into the bottles (and I recently started the second bottle of oil).
So we started going to the Neighborhood Market as we needed to buy food in person. We filled 8 double bagged bags. When we went to check out Robert was not well and I sent him to the car (Diabetes low) and I checked out alone. We quickly learned from this to make 2 trips into the market if we were going to shop this rarely – first trip buy all items which did not have to be kept cold – check out , put in car. Repeat immediately with cold items.
Of course now he has us food shopping several times a week for small list of items as we did before Covid – at the Neighborhood Market as we have gotten used to it and also at locations of the other 2 chains with stores here for items that the NM does not have.