Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 18th, 2024


This is close to a CIDU, as there doesn’t seem to be a single best / obvious answer to the question.


Tim Harrod sends this in: “Whether you laugh or not, Jim Davis is historically reliable at coming up with a punchline. But here, the joke is apparently that the eggs are really spicy… and a lot of people ordered them. It could have been a scheme to sell a lot of milk, but then Irma should have more of a sly grin in the last panel.”

The gag seems straightforward, but Tim’s right: she should have a sly, knowing grin on her face.

On Monday, will we see Irma’s lasagna?



Probably more of an Awww than strictly an LOL.


18 Comments

  1. Unknown's avatar

    The alt-text for that XKCD (#2970) contains important information:
    If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

    P.S. That last comic seems more “Oy-Ewww” than “Awww”: he’s trying to arouse her interest, but she only has rectangular eyes for her phone.

    P.P.S. At first I thought the solution to the Andertoons riddle was going to be a recursive self-reference, but “similarities” has 12 letters, and the answer is only supposed to have 11. Then I realized that “tautologies” fits even better, and it has the right number of letters.

  2. Unknown's avatar

    Two well behaved Cattle including a bull in a china shop.

    Profiling, all bulls in china shops are destructive.

  3. Unknown's avatar

    Ooops a common problem here the rest of the comics didn’t load at first. Got the wrong comic to understand. Doesn’t seem to be a way to edit my other comment.

  4. Unknown's avatar

    @ deety (3) – Not literally, just metaphorically. As I keep telling my kids, if they don’t start limiting their screen time, their eyes will turn rectangular. (They, like Calvin, seem happy to risk the consequences, even eager for it to happen.)

  5. Unknown's avatar

    Irma is historically pretty oblivious to the consequences of her questionable cooking. She’s not really the type to have a clever plan, so her blank expression is on-brand for her.

    I think people are reading too much into the number of spaces in Andertoons, back in the old days a typewriter trying to make a blank line space for an answer often left gaps between underscores. On such a question, I’d answer “aspects in common.”

  6. Unknown's avatar

    Not an issue, R.A.L. — a good explication is always welcome, regardless of “(Not a CIDU)” markings for the enclosing posts.

  7. Unknown's avatar

    Mitch, thanks for the blanket reassurance re offering explications. But in this case, I think you didn’t entirely get Levesque’s followup remark. It wasn’t seeing the “(Not a CIDU)” tag late that misled him, it was seeing the Andertoons cartoon late. That meant he saw the china shop cartoon and below it the remark “This is close to a CIDU”, meant for the Andertoons but easy to take as belonging with the china shop when the Abndertoons was not visible.

  8. Unknown's avatar

    P.S. Re: Andertoons – Among other unpromising answers suggested in the comments at GoComics was “differences“, which might qualify as a snotty comment about analogies.

  9. Unknown's avatar

    The analogies test question is a pretty good dig at both analogies and test questions. Analogies are terrible arguments – you can use them in service of just about any bad argument. And there are about 50 arguable answers to the question, none of which really work because analogies are constructed and similarities observed.

  10. Unknown's avatar

    I like Downpuppy’s answer @15 to the Andertoons test question better than any of the ones that I suggested (@1 & 10).

  11. Unknown's avatar

    Remember that in an analogy a : b :: c : d, you can swap b and c, the same as in math where a/b = c/d is equivalent to a/c = b/d.

    So if “analogies are to things in common as similarities are to …” doesn’t work, try “analogies are to similarities as things in common are to …”.

    You can always do this, but it doesn’t always help.

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