As always — but it needs saying explicitly again now and then — we like to think of this as a reader-participation site, and not just for your invaluable (or anyhow amusing) comments, but for suggestions of comics to run and discuss.
Please share your specific suggestions of panels or strips, in CIDU, LOL, and OY categories, either by direct email to
These critters cannot be newly placed around the tree trunks, as shown, but must have had a newly planted small tree grow up within the loop. But Ed got hold of some by just lifting them off a still-immature tree, or perhaps felling a small tree. Monster!
Or do you have some kind of better explanation for this scene?
They tell you where the answer can be found. Before consulting that official answer, as a regular Luann reader but not a long-long-term fan, I was able to decode many of the individual clues, but could not give it an overall meaning. How will CIDU readers do, on either level?
Additional clue from CIDU
All the individual clues decode to the same thing.
At first sight, this was going to be a CIDU. Then it was agreed to be not that puzzling — still, it’s not perfectly clear if it’s just a funny situation idea.
Say, what actually was the reason for Cmdr. Bond’s preference? Do the components get more evenly mixed, or less? Does some air get incorporated? Does it bring out the flavoring of the vermouth? Or hide it?
A geezer theme for sure.
An interesting kind of Meta, that we are flatfootedly calling “LOL-Meta, alluding to an old joke, by forestalling it”. Possibly a CIDU for a few — if you don’t already know what the patient’s question had to have been, by all means venture an idea of it in comments.
Cat and Girl have picked two nice and juicy little literary targets to bedevil!
Or actually, one literary target and one literary-adjacent (and probably apocryphal) anecdote. It’s probably fun, if not precisely funny, that our characters are not directly challenging the truth or the reputed depth of the anecdote, nor directly mocking it, but blithely misunderstanding it and spinning their own absurd background explanations. Which maybe does the job of a take-down without showing attitude!
What do our readers think of these two iconic stories? (Oh, of course first someone must identify them.)
Below the break, some prior responses to one of them! And the quick Snopes link for the fake. (I’m not sure the Page Break tool will work as intended. If not, don’t panic, the additional content is still there and we will just pop it out if needed.) (Update: using the Details tool instead. This seems to work better. But the “Don’t Panic” advice still holds, of course.)
Open for spoiler-ish notes!
The Hemingway authorship of the baby shoes “six-word story” is debunked at Snopes.
Probably the best-known response by an established poet is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. Here is a personal blog post (responding to a This American Life episode), giving the original, the Koch, and another variation, written by a sixth-grader.
The CIDU here is the relevance of panel 3. Is this a Tickle Me Elmo reference of some sort? That panel seems irrelevant to the joke. This was originally published in 2012.
Comics I Don't Understand 