Category / CIDU

by EditorM

Do you Mean What you Say?

Thanks to Usual John for sending this in, and for useful email discussion! His focus is on the bottom strip, where we get amusing literalized visions of some common idiomatic expressions. Except — we apparently no longer have an idiom to match “He had a pony on his cuff”. So, what would that mean, apart from what’s in the literal illustration?

By the way, can anyone assist my memory and give me a clue why I remembered this Origins of the Sunday Comics feature as not always in the past being a genuine historical exploration, but rather including sometimes a parodic or fictive-history take? Maybe mental contamination from reading a sometime series of posts in Working Daze, pretending to trace a century-long history of that strip, thru different writers and artists, and even titles and publishers. 

by EditorM

Ban on passive progressive

Thanks to Dale for sending this in, and saying “Is that fish supposed to be smoking? That doesn’t seem funny. Is it that it’s out of the bowl & sitting human fashion? Would that be funny? Are the other fish frowning or is that just resting fish face?”

Also I wondered, as did Dale, as did some commenters at goComics, whether this could have something to do with smoked fish.

That’s where the title about passive progressive comes in. It used to be that you weren’t supposed to say something like “Their house is being built currently”. And instead the recommended form was “Their house is a-building currently” or (slightly less eccentric sounding today) “Their house is building currently”. And by those rules, in place of “The fish is being smoked” you would have “The fish is smoking“. And voilà, here we have a picture of “The fish is smoking”.

Okay, in the spirit of supplementing the daily CIDU with entertaining musical clips, here is Cream doing “Strange Brew”:

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – February 12th, 2022

Let’s mark this Lard’s as a CIDU-Oy, inasmuch as it does a rather nice word-play joke, but may take a couple beats to figure out.

Not a perfect portmanteau but it’ll do, and we get to treat the cat fans. For those not into cats, you may not be aware that a vernacular name for this sort of tricolor marking is “calico cat”.

And not-a-perfect exemplar of “pun”, but this is certainly word-play!

by EditorM

March to the beat of

I sort of get the point. The drummer’s point of view concentrates on the business at hand. It includes, but blurs, the crowd of audience … even when there wouldn’t be one. And the beach ball the crowd is tossing around .. in all scenes?

Okay, this is a rock/pop/jazz band drummer, not a marching band drummer or marching army drummer — but the title is phrased in terms of marching, so that we would have an excuse to enjoy these performances of the same song. Same song, different drum.

by EditorM

Pardon my implausibility

Thanks to “👓 caren” for sending it in, and saying “my friends and i have only the slightest idea what vic might have ingested to publish this…  perhaps we need a little to understand it…  :)”

This started out for me as simply a complete CIDU:

But a comment on the Comics Kingdom site clarified the basic “what’s going on, what’s the main intended joke?” issues: he’s lost his shot glass inside the patient.

But that just raises soooo many more new questions! Does the Assisting Surgeon (the person speaking) seriously think loss of the shot glass is the only reason the Surgeon is trying to recover it? Wouldn’t he be hugely in hot water when the glass shows up on some X-Ray someday? And what was a shot glass doing in the OR anyway? And did he seriously have just one good one, important enough to make a good birthday present?

by EditorM

Wrong Elephants

Darren notes that only one subpanel is CIDU-level puzzling. “Friday’s Wrong Hands is pretty straightforward to me for all the elements except for xenon. I know of xenon used in lamps and as spaceship fuel, neither of which would seem to hide an elephant. Is there a pun or a pop culture reference that I’m missing?”

And while that was indeed the Friday Wrong Hands on GoComics, their own newsletter had a different cartoon on Friday, which as it happens is also pachydermic.

by Mitch4

DNS ISSUES FOR COMICSIDONTUNDERSTAND.COM

I don’t know yet exactly what the problem is, but the address “comicsidontunderstand.com” is no longer working; there seems to be a DNS forwarding issue.

Unfortunately the default free Word Press site name “https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com ” also is not working, for purposes of using the plain web browser type web site — because it tries to redirect to “comicsidontunderstand.com”!

(The “https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com ” does work for the admin back end. That’s where I am posting this from, and working to undo that frustrating redirect, and other solutions.)

Partial solutions or work-arounds you can do, now or later.

  1. Right now, if you have (or choose to obtain) a Word Press account, you can use Word Press Reader mode to read CIDU posts and comments and leave comments. 1A. Go to https://wordpress.com, sign in with your WP account, and click on Reader. OR go directly to https://wordpress.com/read .
    1B. Look for “Followed Sites” and a red MANAGE button. Add godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com to sites you follow.
    1C. This is about Reader Mode of wordpreee.com . It is not about tyhe reader modes that some browsers provide.
  2. Wait for fix to be found, and keep trying regular browser site for “https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/”
  3. We have obtained the domain name “COMICSIDONTUNDERSTAND.NET” and will be working to make it work for the CIDU site. DNS stuff always takes a couple days to propagate, so just stay tuned.
  4. Also you can keep checking “comicsidontunderstand.com”
  5. RSS users, I don’t know if those are still working. Please let us know.

Apologies for this problem!

yours,

==mitch