M’aidez with some Not-Quites and Oopsies

Peculiar but not quite an intriguing CIDU, wry but not quite a LOL, pun-adjacent but not quite an OY, or just based in a factual mistake …

Here in a current two-day sequence for Reply All, is there room to agree “Neither one is actually funny at all”?

Thanks to Mike Pollock, who says “You don’t often see graphical captions with typographical errors. Is Curly Bracket [ } ] there intentionally?”

Okay, maybe this is just quibbling, but we all know a real Etch-A-Sketch doesn’t erase that way. You need to turn it face-down and shake. Or maybe it can marginally work to keep it face-up and shake vertically as well as side-to-side — but the shake lines here don’t suggest that enough.

Well, no. Frank does have multiple sources, multiple origins — so the Ancestry.com jokes work well. But there’s nothing about his special situation that puts him here, and here, and here too.

And the squirrel trying to justify it accomplishes nothing much. The map notations say “You are here” not “You have been here” – just as real building directories do.


This says “WANTED — [strikeout]ALIVE[/strikeout] OR DEAD”.

But, but … which party is supposed to be pictured on the poster, the hunter or hunted?


Sorry to pick on Whamond, but while we all know about cartoon physics I have some doubt about cartoon math. That’s the plain number three, he’s not in any respect irrational or in danger of turning irrational. He could slide up to pi nearby and be not only irrational but transcendental — but there is no indication of that happening. He’s just three, the natural number, not irrational and not even negative.

Turn, turn, turn

Thanks to Targuman for sending this in, with illuminating comment.

That idea, and its expression as “nothing new under the sun”, is most prominent to our contemporary culture from the book which Targuman (and scholars of the Hebrew Bible) refers to as Qohelet (The Teacher), also known to most of us as Ecclesiastes (The Preacher) — famous for collaborating with Pete Seeger on that song. :-)

Though that is the most familiar source, what are the chances it was actually the first? Hard to say, after several thousand years. However, somebody had to be first. And in that very moment they were making it false, since there was now something new: that very thought.

So that gives a fun-paradox! But … is it really a case of hypocrisy?


Some random retro LOLs





This next one depends on remembering when Lars von Trier and friends declared the Dogme 95 principles for filmmaking. (And probably does not require remembering the Kevin Smith film Dogma.)



With this December 2011 Brevity, we’re getting a bit into OYs.








And we interrupt our parade of Oldies to drop in a Duffy Lug Nuts on the same theme from current GoComics publication:




The sine qua non

In this 2009 PC and Pixel, it seems to be Pixel from within his carrier dispensing the wisdom. But what is he agreeing with? That computer customers just want Internet connectivity? Or want no options so they need not make decisions?

And what is grabbing everyone’s attention?

And BTW, how many other cat cartoon protagonists deign to be confined to a carrier?