Is it possible for a comic to be able to be both CIDU & LOL? Because while I have less than no understanding of sailing ship rigging, (… which is likely part of the point of this… and several other … XKCD comics…) the hover text, where I don’t understand “yawl” or “ketch”, still had me LOL-ing: “I wanted to make the world’s fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it’s not a yawl anymore! It’s a ketch-22.”
I thought this was a variation of the old joke / soap opera premise in which the mother is shown to have been unfaithful, since 2 + 5 <> 6. But they are laughing in the last panel.
Having grown up in southern Ontario, I knew it was a game sorta like hockey, so this is just a cheap pun. Wikipedia adds more detail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinny
…which is interesting, because I played a lot of street hockey and never once heard it called “shinny”. Nor was raising the ball (never a puck!) forbidden, nor were teams chosen by throwing sticks into a pile. May be a regional thing. Body checking was indeed not part of the game, though of course it happened occasionally.
We’d get out there of a winter’s Saturday morning–the churchyard behind my parents’ house was ideal, except for all those cars on Sundays–and play until it got dark around 4, skipping lunch. Nothing quite like taking a frozen tennis ball to the ear after you’ve been outside in subzero temperatures for several hours: first you feel nothing, then it starts to itch, then burn.
Comics I Don't Understand 