Category / CIDU

by phsiii

9CL is twice again baffling

Thanks to Mark H.:

These were separated by five days (12/26 and 1/1), but the intervening strips didn’t seem to help.

Mitch suggested “I think there is supposed to be a confusion-of-twins plot going on” but I’m still lost. And Mike mooted “I think newspaper editors have just decided to give 9CL a permanent pass”, which might well be true, but surely Brooke had something in mind!?

by phsiii

Must maintain standards

It’s the poodle that stumps me. I know what a standard poodle is–friend had one, bog-standard except for floppy ears option (also uncharacteristically dumb as a post: it would frequently sleep under the kitchen table, then wake up and run headlong into a table leg). But what makes this a SUBstandard poodle? I do like the biscuit-shaped phone case!

by phsiii

The New Yorker maintains its streak

…of being often incomprehensible:

I know what “spoon” means here, but???

This is a scan of a page my sister found in my parents’ house after they passed, with a note from my dad:

The summer I was six I was sent to camp for about six weeks. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it wasn’t really bad. The best part, of course, was leaving to go home. My mother came in the Model A touring car and fetched me at the end of August. The camp was in Maine, not too far up into that state, and we were headed for Arlington, Massachusetts, where we were living with Aunt Fawny and her children.

Our travels took us along the seashore for a considerable distance, first the coast of Maine, then the small amount of New Hampshire shoreline, and finally the ocean north of Boston. Throughout the journey I clamored to get out and go swimming in the ocean, but it was rainy almost the whole way.

My mother promised, though, that if the rain stopped we could go swimming. Finally, when we were nearly home in Arlington, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. Filled with camp spirit I let out a cheer: “Two, four, six, eight; Who do we appreciate; God! God! God!”

My mother thought this was very cute and told it to all her friends. One of them wrote it up and sent it to The New Yorker, which published it. When Mother died I found that December 1933 copy of The New Yorker among her possessions.

Kinda neat. The cartoon happened to be on that page. Curiously, in TNY’s version, my dad’s name was Roger and it was ice cream he wanted, not a swim. Doesn’t matter to the punchline but I’ll always wonder if the details got lost in transmission, or some editor needed to assert his [presumably, in that era] power.

by zbicyclist

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.
by phsiii

Going Through a Phase

From Chemgal:

She notes, “I know phase changes, and expect someone else will immediately understand the bouba and kiki part, but I do not.”

Not sure “immediately” is the operative term, but it did sound vaguely familiar; Google finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, now alles klar. Even more interesting is searching “kiki bouba english”, which reveals that it’s not just an English phenomenon, although it does vary somewhat.

Oh, and hovertext is:

Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.