Author / zbicyclist

by zbicyclist

Heads Up! Tomorrow is Stranger’s Day

Why not a day to celebrate strangers?

Where would we be without strangers? Strangers grow our food. Strangers in factories make stuff we need. Strangers make important decisions for us, like whether we get into our first-choice college, or whether we get audited by the IRS.

Let’s face it. In the aggregate, strangers are more important to us than friends.

But speaking of obscure non-holidays:

Did we post this before?

Adding today’s Arlo and Janis as a late entry:

by zbicyclist

Spendthrift

What’s the joke here?

Is there a pun in the name Arlo Hoyt?

This is common financial advice (e.g. in the book The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, which I just finished), or, famously, in Dickens novel, David Copperfield.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

Or, could the joke be that Arlo Hoyt has claimed that he coined this common maxim himself, and has erected a status of himself in his honor?

For less helpful advice, certainly not what Dickens’ Mr. Micawber would have advised, we have this from Randy Glasbergen:

by zbicyclist

Shark week!

Shark week 2023 began July 23, so when I started this accumulation some months ago I assumed it would be the same week in 2024, and scheduled it for then. But I guess the chaos around the Discovery / HBO / Warner merger confused even the sharks, and shark week was last week.

by zbicyclist

A Few Holes in the Anthropomorphism

Carl Fink contributes this. “OK, why would the rhino have holes in its cardigan? Its own horn wouldn’t be poking it. Is it a joke about how anthropomorphic animals arms and legs don’t let it move on all fours without its chest scraping the ground, unlike the actual animal? I don’t get it.”

[start of rant] To your editor, this seems roughly like the comic strip analogy to the uncanny valley: “as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers’ emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it becomes almost human, at which point the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot’s appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels”.

As we move animal characters from being animals acting mostly naturally (the cat Ludwig in Arlo and Janis, for example) to animals not acting much like actual animals at all (Pearls Before Swine) there’s a spot where the jokes just don’t work. There’s so many human characteristics put into the characters that we don’t accept the remaining animal characteristics needed to make the joke work.

Here’s a case where, in my opinion, the use of animals actually gets in the way of the joke. Hippos don’t need sunscreen and don’t sit upright on the sand. But the joke doesn’t have much to do with hippos at all: it’s that there’s a tiny bottle of sunscreen that’s too small for one of them, but the second is complaining there’s none left for them. The joke would be clearer with two normal sized people and a tiny bottle of sunscreen. [end of rant]