Category / CIDU

by zbicyclist

Way Cool?

I remember my many years with window A.C. units, and remember the fall struggles to get them out (easier, though, than the spring struggles to get them in). But is there a joke here? None of the family members ever found my request for help with this task funny.

Could this also be a geezer alert? I think current units are better conditioned for winter, so they are commonly left in all year. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 2nd, 2022

Is it nice to pose a math problem on a Sunday?

I had a stationary bike. After a few years, I had done 12,500 miles on that bike — halfway around, at the equator. But I wondered what degree of north latitude would be12,500 miles long (so I could see what cities were at that latitude). I thought I’d figured it out, but wanted validation; it had been a long time since I was in junior high. We were having parent-teacher conferences, so I asked the 7th grade math teacher. She took the problem and said she’d get back to me. Never did. When my daughter asked about it, she said she’d lost the problem — but didn’t ask for another copy.

I repeated this with math teachers each year. Never got an answer.

Can you finnish this problem?

Thanks to Chemgal for this Zits, which earns a LOL-Ewww!

And here is your LOL-CIDU-Geezer for the week!

Another CIDU-LOL, or Arlo-LOL, and the one calling for the category tag about “There must be a popculture reference that will clear it up instantly” — if you can see putting the chess world in “popculture”. Yes, something upsetting happened recently in the world of chess, and then Twitter has its way with answering some of the questions raised.

Thanks to dollarbill for this DSOH, featuring one of their favorite tropes, counting sheep.
See also the posts in Random Comments and Site Comments on his idea for a structured-commenting game. (Please respond there, not so much here.)

And now, a mini-fest of Wrong Hands!

by EditorM

Knitting a Searle Cardigan? (Bonus CIDU)

Thanks to Harvey Heilbrun for separately submitting and discussing this one:

Yes, you’ve seen it before! It was embedded as a comment in the “Shouldn’t his brow be knitted?” thread, and discussed in some respects, alongside the cartoon in the main post there.

The discussion there touched on the relation of Nick G’s illustrations to the Carolyn Hax advice column, and on the palpable relation to The Scarlet Letter. But Harvey points out something not noticed in that discussion: The man’s newspaper has a mostly legible title or headline on the visible back page: “After Searle”.

Harvey and the editors all figure this refers to John Searle, prominent American philosopher — and not to, say, the big pharma company. But what is the point? Is Nick sneaking an irrelevancy past us? Or hinting at a connection?

by EditorM

The Jiggs is up

Sent by Dirk the Daring, who says “This may be from 1948, but I still don’t get it.” And some of us who are from 1949 still don’t get it either.

And to start off, who are the characters in the final panel? The guy stretched out must be the tall loudmouth from the main encounter. But the guy across the street is not wearing Jiggs’s patterned waistcoat, and might be just a passerby / witness. But this still leaves open the question, What exactly was the bone of contention?

by zbicyclist

Shouldn’t his brow be knitted?

Kenneth Berkun sends in this puzzler from the New Yorker.

The joke would be simpler to understand if we had the inbox with yarn and the outbox with garments with a knitting grandmother in the middle. Then the joke would be that the knitter was treating her hobby as if she was (still) in an office.

So, the CIDU question would be why put it in a business office context? Why does the businessman have that deer-in-the-headlights look? Why, if he has the status to get a window office with such a nice view of the skyline, does he have so many pens, and why are they in his suitcoat?  Or, are these details just because Roz Chast probably hasn’t spent much time in a business office (lucky her)?

And should the presence of the inbox and outbox pair be a geezer alert? I don’t think I had an outbox since the mid-1990s, and my physical inbox didn’t have much in it.