A nice Thurber shout-out here. And do you agree the Bliss dogs bear a resemblance to Thurber dogs?
And for fun let’s compare the color version:
I’d say the color is nicer as a mild-humor comic, but the Thurber book identity is obscured.
But no, I can’t figure out what the pairings and lines are doing. It’s certainly not the standard March Madness sort of bracketting. Maybe if I had reread the book at some point in the last 50 years I would do better. … OK, here’s a help page. Wait, how can it fail to mention Dorothea’s nickname, “Dodo”?
Oh, oh, oh! I think I know!
A LOL-Ewww of questionable taste, from Lug Nuts
Comics I Don't Understand 
Not being that familiar with Thurber, I did not understand that the “shout out” was on the cover of the book until I read the comment under the color version; but when comparing the two, I think the name is easier to read in the second (color) version. It may depend on the effective resolution and/or size of the monitor window.
P.S. Other than Twain, I have never really cared for any 19th century literature, and I did not recognize a single name on that bracket. The interwoven web of pairing lines is probably a gag on the complicated, extremely difficult to parse relationships in the ponderous novels popular back then.
P.P.S. Rae will just have to learn to type her single digit numbers with a leading zero, and she might want to convert all her dates into YYYY-MM-DD format.
Ah, but it seemed to me it was not anything Rae did that caused this absurdity, but the way the streaming service website constructs their labels or filenames. Yes, @Kilby’s advice would be the right sort of change to make, but it would be best directed not at this enduser but somewhere up the cloud. (And I’m not sure the problem is in the dates specifically — it might more be the episode numbers.)
A note to Kilby (01), I’m thinking that all the characters on the matchup chart in the Wrong Hands cartoon are from the one novel mentioned, “Middlemarch”.
But it remains unclear what the pairings in the chart are meant to represent — both the pairings in the single rectangles, and the connecting lines. The people in the first block, Dorothea and Casaubon were (unfortunately!) married, but that’s not the case for the other blocks. I notice there are three line-ends at each block, suggesting a system. But it is surely not the usual pattern for brackets that proliferates online during March Madness.
It is indeed difficult to make out the book title clearly, in either version of the cartoon. The title is supposed to be The Thurber Carnival. You can sometimes see it given as A Thurber Carnival, but I believe that is not the title to any edition of the book, though it is the title of a stage production of Thurberiana, loosely connected with the book.
Having not read Middlemarch, I presume that the joke is that the conflicts between people in that book are rather convoluted and opaque.
Oh, and now I think I know about the stashed $5K too!
My car’s audio system doesn’t want to play my USB files in my preferred order.
I really miss having a CD player in a car.
@ Grawlix (7) – Our car has a CD player, and even an Aux socket that can be used to plug in an MP3 player, but it is of course at least a dozen years old.
During lockdown, one of my “quar projects” was installing a replacement stereo system in the Venerable Bronco, as the old one had died. When playing from USB drive, I typically have it on “random” so I’m not entirely sure what order it would play the various folders and such. Or even within a folder for sure. I’d have to have a track listing and such to do some experiments.
One annoying thing about this is that the RDMON setting is not “sticky”. Every time the engine is shut off, it resets to to RDMOFF and I have to change it. If it’s a short drive, I might not bother.
I never really understood why anyone would deliberately choose “shuffle play” for an album. Do people use “shuffle play” to watch movies so they get the scenes in random order?
I always have to edit the filenames to give them leading zeros so that track 10 doesn’t play until after track 9.
Also, the computer doesn’t pay much attention to folders. You would think that a folder corresponds to an “album” and the songs in the folder are the songs from the album. No. “Album” is a field in the metadata of each song. So if I have an album named “Revolver_flac” and another “Revolver_mp3” with the FLAC and MP3 versions respectively, if my player can play both kinds of files it will show only a single album named “Revolver” and will play each song twice, once in the FLAC version and once in the MP3 version.
My car player completely ignores folders. It just takes all of the songs and sorts them into an order based on I have no idea what. So every time I connect up my iPod it goes “DID YOU EVER SEE THE FACES OF THE CHILDREN THEY GET SO EXCITED!” Which is a song that starts with C from an album that starts with T by a band that starts with T if you’re a computer, W if not, so it shouldn’t be the first in any lineup of more than a hundred or so tracks.
Brian, I like “quar project” — even if my first reaction was “My, but that’s a horrible mispelling of ‘core’! It looks to be original with you–Googling isn’t quite a Googlewhack but in the double-digits.
Usually a car audio plays the tracks in the order they are in the Filesystem, never the right one. You can use program like “fatsort” that most of the time fix this.
I never really understood why anyone would deliberately choose “shuffle play” for an album. Do people use “shuffle play” to watch movies so they get the scenes in random order?
So back in collegish I was in a production of Dial “M” For Murder and during rehearsal, I suggested we do the acts out of order. Turned out to be a great idea, everyone was energized, it broke the rut we had been getting into, it forced you to do the material with fresh eyes. (Not that I would recommend performing it that way for an audience…)
One night during performance I accidentally skipped a whole page of dialog and didn’t notice. Everyone else was furious with me, and I had to be told why. They thought I did it on purpose to “mix things up” (which it certainly did: key pieces of dialog containing clues were skipped over, and everyone else was scrambling, trying to figure out how to reinsert those vital pieces of info, and I was blissfully ignorant), but I honestly was unaware that I did it; two of the monologues I had were in my mind too similar, and I just elided from one to the other… The audience didn’t seem to notice, or at least most of them were about as befuddled as with the “full” version of the play.
My unintentional error broke the fun we’d been having up to that point of changing a line or two here and there, like one night when I changed the name of a railway station to the name of a cheap beer we’d been making fun of all through production — I looked the other actor straight in the eye and said the beer name instead of the station name, and you could see him trying to keep a straight face. And then later, when he had to say the name of the station, you could see the gleam in his eye as he remembered to use the beer name. So when I inadvertently dropped the whole page of the script, everyone thought I had done it deliberately and was an asshole for having gone too far.
I will occasionally use shuffle play if I’m in a “comfort food” kind of mood and playing a playlist of some sort of “favorites” or statistical list like “most often played” — which latter then cements those songs in that status unfortunately. I like Paul Robeson singing “There is a Balm in Gilead” but don’t need to start every listen with it.
“I never really understood why anyone would deliberately choose “shuffle play” for an album.”
In my case, I have many albums on the USB drive. So the random play becomes a radio station of songs chosen by me.
I suppose “shuffle play” may be OK if all your music is individual songs. But if your album separates Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini Variations” into 20 different tracks it’s not so good. You wouldn’t get just the variations out of order. You’d get parts of the piano concertos and the Symphonic Dances in the mix.
One of the many wonderful gifts my mom gave me was introducing me to Thurber. I don’t know if that was the beginning of my twisted sense of humor or I loved Thurber because it was twisted already.
I got my current car in 2020, it was a 2017 model. Unfortunately for me the CD was dropped from my entertainment system a model year or two prior. From what I read after getting it, it appeared that swapping in a CD player from a previous model would more trouble than it would be worth. I really do miss listening to my CDs in the car, and I’m not going to get rid of them. I don’t have time to convert them all to USB readable files. I have wondered whether a bluetooth CD player might be a solution.
If you want to replace a stereo system, I’d look up web sites and videos on doing so for your vehicle and stereo model. The Venerable Bronco is a 1995, and the cassette stereo system was basically unchanged for many years and was used in most Ford truck models. So even though old, applicable equipment and instructions were readily available.
I was able to swap in the new one with relative ease. In that case, the connectors for the old one were proprietary, but the new one was ordered with an adapter cable set. That did require crimping the lines together. I am a retired electronics/software engineer, so I have past experience some similar things, but it’s still not that difficult.
Or rip your CDs to a USB drive if the stereo supports that.
I always have a stack of CD’s for listening in the car. Usually I take out the one that has finished and put in the next one in the stack. Of course I will have selected the CD’s for the stack before starting out. Now, have you tried selecting music with a streaming service? Say for instance you want to hear Arthur Schnabel’s recording of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. It takes a good five minutes to figure out what to type in to search for it. You had better have pulled over or you’re sure to get into an accident.
Whether you play it from CD, USB or a streaming service, the title will appear on the display as “Beethoven: Sonat”.
MiB, have you seen Idagio? That is a streaming service designed for classical music. I don’t know what the filenames are like or how tracks are identified when used with car/portsble players, but they do understand about the indexing fields required to manage a classical library.
@Mitch4: Classical music streaming services have come and gone. Remember Rhapsody? I might look into Idagio.
@MiB: Oh yes. I remember trying Primephonic (unsure of name), which did not have its own library but functioned as a front end to a more general music service, I think Spotify. So you were supposed to subscribe to Spotify, but manage your searching and playlists and all of that thru Primephonic. Not really satisfactory, to my mind.
@Mitch4: If I remember correctly, Primephonic was designed to go along with Pono Music Player, an audiophile-quality portable music player that was very expensive and had an odd shape that would not easily fit into small pockets.
Primephonic was acquired by Apple, which has released its own version, Apple Music Classical. It is a front-end to Apple Music, Apple’s streaming service.
Supposedly the search function is tuned for the nuances of classical works. I haven’t tried it myself, but the reviews I’ve seen have been positive. It only works with Apple’s streaming service, not recordings you have downloaded or ripped from CD. It is currently only available on mobile devices (including, they say, Android).