by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – April 12, 2026

The Berrys, by Walt Ditzen: April 7, 1944. While filling in for Carl Grubert during World War Two, Walt Ditzen grew increasingly tired of drawing the elaborate lamp in the Berry bedroom. This strip was his solution. (Source: Mort Walker’s Backstage at the Strips: 1975).

One of my favorite Cul de Sac comics:

Not really an LOL, but was this a real thing?

10 Comments

  1. Unknown's avatar

    Yeah, screen magnifiers were and are a real thing and the old ones looked like that, with the front curved. In the ’80s there was a resurgence of them for PC monitors, but cheap overseas manufacturing flooded the market with bad, flimsy ones.

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  3. Unknown's avatar

    @Powers Just what it would be like to stand on Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Waterlilies if you suffer from hay fever.

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  4. Unknown's avatar

    I saw exactly one television magnifier in real life in the early 80s at a school friend’s house. Yeah, the picture was bigger, but it was also distorted. That would have been more annoying than the smaller picture, and it wouldn’t have lasted a day for me!

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  5. Unknown's avatar

    As for the “Achoo!” comic, anyone who suffers from seasonal allergies will get this one immediately.

    The suddenly explosion of springtime life and color is beautifully breathtaking, but you can only enjoying between sneezes.

    Neti pot, Flonase, Zyrtec. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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  6. Unknown's avatar

    @Andrew Millar, I also noted a resurgence of screen magnifiers; I thought they were meant for phones.

    And back in the olden days I was familiar with the magnifiers in Nancy style, but my family didn’t actually have one. A different TV accessory that I obtained by sending in sponsor box tops (or the like) from a kids’ show was a sheet of clingy plastic you were meant to press onto your TV screen. Then they would show a line drawing, broken into successive partials. With a crayon you would trace over the shown lines, drawing on the plastic covering. When all the partials had been copied together, you had drawn a recognizable picture.

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  8. Unknown's avatar

    That’s it! Thank you, I couldn’t come up with the show title but recognize it now!

    I also sent away for stuff from “Captain Midnight”. It was a decoder gizmo (not a ring, a little bigger) and they would show a secret message onscreen at the end of the show. It used essentially a ROT13 transposition cipher, embodied as a spinnable pointer with two opposing ends on a small piece with an alphabet around the circumference. A later version had three branches to one end of the pointer and the weekly message could specify which branch of the pointer to use.

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  10. Unknown's avatar

    @Millar and @Mitch4. There were also CRT overlays for B&W TVs to create the ‘effect’ of color. It was slightly flimsy plastic and was held to the screen by static electricity. It was blue’ish in the top 1/3. It was red’ish in the middle 1/3. And it was green’ish in the bottom 1/3. Each color fading/blending into the adjacent color. Worked best for shows like “Lassie” and westerns — giving the effect of a blue sky and green grass, with fake flesh tone coloring for the actors in the middle. In any case, ‘some’ coloring (even if wrong) seemed to be better than the normal black, grey, and white. (Probably sold in ads at the back of TV Guide.)

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