BillR sends this in: “I know their thing is surreality, but is there something about the shovel I’m missing here? All I can think of is how much manure there’d be to shovel.”
Are there good jobs for a shovel?
Shoveling
Author / zbicyclist
Marketing Cat
Thirty Years Ago …
Here’s some current comics as they were posted on January 16, 1995
Baby Blues is still building that family.
Big Nate is easily recognizable, without much change.
Arlo and Janis look a big younger, but otherwise the same.
FoxTrot was still in dailies.
I wanted to check Gasoline Alley, which is famous both for being long-running and for aging the characters. But they’ve switched syndicates over time, and I got the message “Gasoline Alley started on April 8, 2001”.
400 Years Ago This Month
Is Darrin Bell just trolling us? 400 years would be January 1625. I got nothin’.
Not much help from ChatGPT, either:
January 1625 was a month marked by several notable events:
- January 7: Ruggiero Giovannelli, an Italian composer, passed away.
- January 13: Pieter Bruegel the Younger, a Flemish painter, died.
- January 17: The Duke of Soubise led the Huguenots in launching a second rebellion against King Louis XIII with a surprise naval assault on a French fleet being prepared in Blavet.
- January 19: Erhard Buttner, a German organist and composer, committed suicide.
- January 27: Adriaen Valerius, a Dutch composer and poet, died.
Saddle Up!
Chak sends this in: “Why would having a saddle help with traffic? And which one was supposed to wear it?”
Love Me?
Are they zombies? Is this a comic with a touching / sad backstory about a dying couple Harry Bliss knows? What’s your guess?
Boom Times
Boise Ed sends this in. “So a real bird, possibly an eagle, snags a bird-like spy-drone, and the kids take that to mean the bird was born in the 1940s or 1950s?”
Eriksson is Swedish, but that doesn’t seem to make things clearer.
We’re gonna need a bigger website
Well, no, we aren’t going to need a bigger website. But today we’re paying comic homage to that ad-libbed line from Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”, which is #35 on the American Film Institute’s list of top movie quotes, right in between some other famous ones:
A definite call-out here, with the opposing team name being Sharks.
[E]n[o]u[gh/ff] said
Jack Applin sends in this New Year’s CIDU. “A tepid comic, not much more than “Huh”/“You know it”. Two things: Is 2024’s beard talking? Point that speech bubble toward his mouth!
Also, was I the only person to stumble over “ ’nough said”? I blame Stan Lee for making me so used to “ ’nuff said” so that I didn’t recognize the standard spelling. See https://cbr.com/marvel-comics-stan-lee-fantastic-four-nuff-said/ for a history of that.”
And a big Happy New Year wish for all of us. Here’s a classic Nancy.
How Did Those Resolutions Work Out?
According to this article in The Guardian, ” In the US, 44% of new year resolutions last two to three months; only 6% last a year..”
About 40% of Americans make resolutions, but this varies by age. Younger adults (59% of those ages 18 to 34 versus 19% of those older than 55), which I would ascribe to the optimism of youth versus the resignation of those whose past resolutions haven’t really improved their fitness or finances.
