Month / September 2025

by phsiii

Casting about for understanding

From travelgirl again:

Seems to be my day… guy is asking for a podcaster with what looks like someone lying on the ground surrounded by people…

I almost feel like I’m old enough to be screaming “get off my lawn” when I don’t get some of these jokes :)

Uh, right. The fact that the gawkers are all white might be a clue. There’s a longstanding meme that podcast audiences are largely white, though that seems to be changing: a quick search suggests that “The percentage of white podcast listeners has dropped significantly from historical highs, with figures around 58-59% in 2024 compared to 67% in 2014”. I guess that’s a meaningful change, though it’s only slightly over a 10% drop. I did like a line I heard where some guy said, “I’m so white, most of my sentences start with ‘I was listening to a podcast…'” I might be guilty of this myself at times.

Notwithstanding all that, I still can’t get to anything resembling a joke?!

by zbicyclist

Typo

Mitch4 send this in: “Momentary CIDU / then OY after you get it.”

I’ll order the Bombe from Acme bakeries.

In other news, Olivia Jaimes has announced her retirement from the Nancy strip after 7 years. (This doesn’t surprise me; in the past months she seemed to have hit a stretch where she was running out of ideas.)

The strip will be taken over on January 1, 2026 by Caroline Cash, who did a few Nancy strips during Jaimes’s 2024 sabbatical (July 22 through August 11, 2024).

This one’s a clear nod to classic Bushmiller gags, one of which I posted a few days ago.

More here and here.

Dan Piraro had this curious take on Nancy a couple of days ago, although it’s not clear this was at all related to the authorship transition.

by phsiii

Kneel indeed

Must be something there?!

Not to be confused with this classic:

That one especially made me laugh way back when it ran because 30+ years ago in a small, struggling software company, we hired a new business development guy named Neil. He was surely told a pack o’ lies about the opportunity, and came in full of attitude about his importance.

At the time, the latest processors were Pentiums, and laptops were relatively rare. I had inherited IT and our one IT worker-bee, who dutifully got him a 32MB Pentium laptop. After delivering it, my guy dropped by to comment that Neil had been dismissive of the machine “only” having 32MB. So I wandered down to his office and introduced myself. In the process, I noticed that there was still a tower PC under his desk–one of our workhorse 4MB 486 machines.

“Shall I get that out of here?” I asked. “Sure”, Neil replied scornfully, “It’s not it’s good for anything.”

“Around here, that’s a developer machine.” ” Yeah, right.”

“Neil–I’m not kidding.”

He never complained about his laptop again! He actually turned out to be an OK guy once he got over his original attitude, but the name “Neil” has made me snicker slightly ever since.