Sent by Stan as a CIDU. While he didn’t specify what aspect seems opaque, the “Block Party” title can yield to your pun-sense, but it may remain dubious why Mr. Wilson’s analogy to microbial resistance would count as an inside joke.
Rikki don’t block that number
Comics I Don't Understand 
Because microbes live inside your body.
He thought he’d blocked all the junk callers, and here come more. He’s punning on strain as in strains of bacteria, and strain as in stress-and-strain.
Dennis is very high on my list of “comics that should have been retired when the original author did”. Unfortunately, it was producing too much income for King Features (and the assistant artists) to permit that. The only positive aspect I see in the strip above is that the zombie artists are no longer using predrawn templates for Dennis’s head, as was often the case in the decades immediately following Ketcham’s retirement.
The comic was sometimes worth a smile, but I can only remember laughing at a Dennis comic once. As I was searching for the original monochrome panel, I discovered that the zombie authors had retreaded and expanded the brilliant one-panel joke into a lukewarm Sunday strip:
…
The original one-panel gag (probably early 1980s) showed Dennis with his father in the bathroom, with the caption: “Boy, goldfish sure don’t get much of a funeral, do they?”
I have a personal reason for a lifelong uneasiness about the (American) Dennis the Menace strip. My middle name is Dennis, making me “Mitchell Dennis”. The cartoon character has a surname, Mitchell, making him “Dennis Mitchell”. So I long thought my parents had the intention of connecting me with him, perhaps as a model or doppelganger, or alternatively as a warning or anti-model. At any rate, I was a picky eater and somewhat tantrum-prone.
Then lo and behold!, in recent years I saw some of the actual history and discovered the strip made its newspaper debut about a year after my birth! So my parents could not have known anything about the penumbra of the name “Dennis”. Am I now free of him?
A few days ago, we had Mitch’s posting about comics that only needed the first panel.
This is the opposite: a comic that would be improved by just dropping the last panel.
@ Mitch (4) – Sure, that was just a coincidence, but it still might have led to some juvenile teasing in school, especially during the years of the TV series. The thing that I found most distasteful about “Dennis” was that Ketcham actually used the name of his own son for a not entirely likeable character, not to mention his first wife’s name (Alice) for the comic character’s mother. It’s just another reason (besides the mediocre quality) that I avoid the comic as much as possible. Ketcham’s treatment of his son was at least insensitive, if not downright abusive; it’s not surprising that they didn’t get along very well.
P.S. @ zbicyclist (5) – I had to look twice (at both strips) to see what you meant, but you are right: the “block party” strip would in fact have been improved if the “inside joke” panel had been omitted.
It turns out VTech, AT&T, & Panasonic, at least, still make cordless phones. Also too, it’s not as easy as I thought to eavesdrop.
Is there a particular reason for the panels rendered as silhouettes? (Comic at #3 plus the one at the start).
Grawlix @ 8: Easier/faster to draw?
It turns out VTech, AT&T, & Panasonic, at least, still make cordless phones. Also too, it’s not as easy as I thought to eavesdrop.
Sure, people have landlines and VOIP systems that need phones. I bought a new cordless a couple years back when I still had a landline. The mistake Mr. Wilson is making is answering the phone. If you have an answering machine, which these days are integrated with the phone base station, you can listen to the start to see if the person is leaving a message. Spammers and scammers almost never do.
The financial forum I read has an ongoing thread about scams. Frequently, people report a new one with, “I got a call that said they were from . . . .” To which the usual response is, “Why are you answering the phone? If it’s really the bank or whatever, they’ll leave you a message and you can call back at a verified number.”
Ketcham’s treatment of his son was at least insensitive, if not downright abusive
For some reason, a while back I was reading up about the Dennis the Menace TV show. The star, Jay North, says that when he was doing the show his parents didn’t want to live in Hollywood, so his aunt was his guardian for filming. He says she physically abused him for any perceived mistakes or other things.
Mitch 4 – while my name is not like anyone’s I feel for you.
My husband’s name reversed was actually used – decades ago – for a villain in early Manbat comic (posted this on an unrelated thread if anyone reads both – sorry) as a friend of ours wrote comic books for DC comics.
As to Dennis – my dad would sing “Dennis the Menace, the king of paddle tennis” so often that I thought it was the theme song of the show.
We have corded phones in our kitchen, basement, office and bedroom. Office and kitchen also have uncorded ones in case need to walk around while talking (such as when cooking dinner on Sunday nights while talking to 95yo mom on the phone for our weekly call).
We make most outgoing calls on my cell phone as it has a lot of minutes. Incoming calls unless there is a reason to give our cell phone numbers come into our landline house phone number.
Main use for my cell phone is texting husband that dinner is ready and calling my mom on Sunday nights for an hour conversation while I cook dinner. If we make another 4 or 5 calls a month it is a lot.
We get so few phone calls (almost none) that when any of the phones ring I freeze in fear. I have learned – good news comes by email or text, bad news comes by telephone.
Downpuppy, I think there was a basis for considering wireless-landline phones easy to eavesdrop on. It stemmed from early in the development of the technology, and the common report was of people unintentionally overhearing phone calls on their baby monitors.
We have had perfectly secure, wireless “DECT” handsets for our landline telephone for over 20 years (the original three units still work fine with our much more recent DSL modem). I was surprised to learn that anyone would still be worried about wireless security issues, but when I looked it up, I discovered that frequency conflicts have delayed the introduction of the DECT standard in North America.
@ Meryl (12) – “My husband’s name … was actually used … for a villain“:
Harry Rowohlt once wrote a charming anecdote about a difficult reader who kept sending in vitriolic complaints about Rowohlt’s newspaper articles. As he was recovering from a minor outpatient operation, Rowohlt decided that it was his turn to be “not nice”, and called up a friend who wrote psycho-thrillers, asking him if he could use the complainer’s name for a victim in a future novel. The author was happy to comply, indicating that the murder would be especially “beastly”.
[…] showing that they were recorded on a separate digital layer, and then simply composed in different positions for the smaller format.
If you take to following these cartoons for a while, you may join in the suspicion that she has just one saved image of the (adorable) dog, which she inserts as needed, sometimes violating sensible placement within the scene. I suppose it helps that this image of the dog does achieve making it adorable.
@ Mitch (16) – The quote shows that your comment was meant to be about Donna Lewis and Reply All (and not “Dennis”).
Kilby – :-)