Category / CIDU

by zbicyclist

What’s the Password?

Mark H. sends this one in: “It’s clear that this protects passwords from others, since she neither writes them down nor remembers them. But it would seem like they are also protected from her, hence useless. Maybe she has to use the “forgot password” routine each time, and so the password is never the same?”

According to NordPass, the most common passwords are still the most useless ones:

The same day Mark H. sent that in, there were two other password comics in my feed. These aren’t really synchronicities, because the jokes are all different, but why not pretend it’s National Password Day? (That’s actually the first Thursday in May.)

I worked at a company where every few weeks, a new 7 letter password would be automatically randomly generated for you. Well, maybe randomly. A colleague had gotten into a tiff with the head of IT, and his next password ended with 3 letters of his first name. The first 4 letters were an expression not allowed on vanity license plates. He was convinced there was nothing “random” about it. And, knowing the head of IT as I did, I’d bet he was right.

by Kilby

Prime Primes

Brian in StL submitted this B.C. strip a long while ago, commenting: “When I read this initially, I had no idea. There are some suggestions in comments that might be right. The “Transformers” one in particular. I still don’t know.“

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Even after reading some of those comments, I’m just not sure whether this gag works at all: it seems rather contrived.

by phsiii

It’s…magic??

From Irv:

He comments,

The second and third frames in the second row are what IDU. If the Wizard is cheating, shouldn’t the beam and hangers be visible there as well as in the last frame? Otherwise, maybe he is cheating and conjures the beam and hangers to “prove” he wasn’t using magic in the previous frames even though he was? All told, IDU what’s going on here.

For that matter, if there’s some magic making the beam and hangers invisible that he somehow forgets? turns off? for the last frame, how did he appear to lift it off the ground??

by Kilby

Logical Impossibilities

I have been following Leigh Rubin’s “Rubes” comics for at least a decade, or possibly two. I have to admit that it only rarely provokes an audible laugh, but it is virtually always worth a good smile. It is precisely this dependability that makes it all the more noticeable when a “Rubes” comic just doesn’t work, such as this one:

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Simply telescoping two concepts into one term doesn’t always produce a meaningful (nor humorous) result. The whole point of the “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment is “observability”. In this drawing we can see both the cat and the damage, so there cannot be any quantum (or “cat-tum”) superposition.

I had even more trouble with this second comic, which I would like to call “Stooge Trek“:

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Nobody would ever claim that anything that The Three Stooges ever did was “logical”, but Spock’s reaction (and dialog) seems completely out of place (even more illogical than the picture he is watching). For me, this comic just doesn’t work; YMMV.

P.S. Given the similarity of the hair styles of Moe and Spock, perhaps it would have been funnier to have a second frame, in which Spock pokes Kirk in the eyes.

P.P.S. I initially thought that the “dual nose poke” tableau seemed gratuitously excessive, but I was clearly wrong, as proved by this picture:

by Kilby

Dog Tuba

Boise Ed submitted this Bizarro as a CIDU, commenting: “The left man can barely hear the tuba, so the right man must be playing it very softly (which is hard to do). ‘Dog tuba’ reads like it’s the dog’s tuba, but he obviously doesn’t like the sound of it, even at that very soft volume. Beyond that, I’m stumped here.“

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P.S. I think it’s clear that this is a play on “dog whistle“, but for CIDU purposes, let’s assume that Wayno was merely referring to the physical device, and not to the political context. Even with that hint, it’s not entirely clear why or even whether this is funny.