Category / CIDU

by EditorM

Endless Dads

What on Earth does he mean?

CIDU QUEUE REMINDER

As always — but it needs saying explicitly again now and then — we like to think of this as a reader-participation site, and not just for your invaluable (or anyhow amusing) comments, but for suggestions of comics to run and discuss.

Please share your specific suggestions of panels or strips, in CIDU, LOL, and OY categories, either by direct email to

(that’s “CIDU dot Submissions” at gmail dot com) or by using the handy-dandy Suggest A CIDU form page!

by EditorM

OMG! He’s been harvesting the youngsters!

These critters cannot be newly placed around the tree trunks, as shown, but must have had a newly planted small tree grow up within the loop. But Ed got hold of some by just lifting them off a still-immature tree, or perhaps felling a small tree. Monster!

Or do you have some kind of better explanation for this scene?

by EditorM

Bonus: Luann congratulates itself

They tell you where the answer can be found.
Before consulting that official answer, as a regular Luann reader but not a long-long-term fan, I was able to decode many of the individual clues, but could not give it an overall meaning. How will CIDU readers do, on either level?

Additional clue from CIDU

All the individual clues decode to the same thing.

Second additional clue from CIDU

It’s a number

by EditorM

Cat and Girl and Shoes and Plums

Cat and Girl have picked two nice and juicy little literary targets to bedevil!

Or actually, one literary target and one literary-adjacent (and probably apocryphal) anecdote. It’s probably fun, if not precisely funny, that our characters are not directly challenging the truth or the reputed depth of the anecdote, nor directly mocking it, but blithely misunderstanding it and spinning their own absurd background explanations. Which maybe does the job of a take-down without showing attitude!

What do our readers think of these two iconic stories? (Oh, of course first someone must identify them.)

Below the break, some prior responses to one of them! And the quick Snopes link for the fake. (I’m not sure the Page Break tool will work as intended. If not, don’t panic, the additional content is still there and we will just pop it out if needed.) (Update: using the Details tool instead. This seems to work better. But the “Don’t Panic” advice still holds, of course.)

Open for spoiler-ish notes!

The Hemingway authorship of the baby shoes “six-word story” is debunked at Snopes.

Here at Poets.org is the plain text of the William Carlos Williams notorious plums poem, “This is Just to Say”.

Probably the best-known response by an established poet is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. Here is a personal blog post (responding to a This American Life episode), giving the original, the Koch, and another variation, written by a sixth-grader.


Here from New York Magazine (Intelligencer), an article “This Is Just to Say I Have Written a Blog Post Explaining the Icebox-Plum Meme” , showing a series of responses or variations in the form of Tweets, from when that was a thing.