Category / Physics mistake

by EditorM

Yay! … but Boo!

The background story is hard to explain (especially as I have barely followed it myself). Suffice it that — due to some repairs or renovations on their house — this family has been living outdoors in an extended backyard for a long time, variously in tents, or in this treehouse, or in the scrub with local wildlife.

(The one previous appearance of Home Free on CIDU was from the setup of this situation. We didn’t get it then, either.)

And Yay! to the cartoonist for that “Ring Ring Ring” in the first panel! I completely accepted it as a drawing device to indicate the electro-mechanical sound of a phone ringing. But no, it was the wife just saying the words “Ring Ring Ring”. Good job of surprising us with a defeated assumption!

But then tut-tut on showing the string just drooping there slackly! As of the day following the GoComics appearance of this strip, some ninety percent of the comments there are devoted to pointing out that for a “tin can telephone” to work, the string has to be pulled taut between the cans, essentially in a single straight line. (And secondary to this, the attachment of the string with a piece of tape, shown in the first panel, is a rel;ated part of why this setup wouldn’t work — to get the vibrations to transfer, the traditional setup is to punch a small hole in the base of the can, thread the string thru the hole, and tie a knot on the end so it can pull taut.)

Hard to guess whether the cartoonist just didn’t know; or knew but just didn’t think it would matter; or knew but built in an excuse, that they can quite easily hear each other by the sound carrying in the open air, and the tin-can-telephone is just their little joke!

by EditorM

After a while, we scooted out over the pool and were eating pizza on the high dive, in the rain

Thanks to Targuman, who offers this as not as CIDU but a physics challenge. “The comic is easy enough to understand (although having been a Jeremy and a pool rat, I can NOT imagine using napkins at a pool, no matter the location), but what is insane is the length of that board! Can someone with math skills figure out how long that would be in real life? A ‘high dive’ is 3 meters tall and the board looks at least three times as long as it is high…” However, do we know the math to apply to cartoon physics?
by EditorM

The newer collection of Oopsies, Quickies, We-can-improve-its, Semi-CIDUs, Mysteries, and flops (11th Series)

This is just a blah. But can we improve it?

Sure, there’s a fix just calling out to us! Change the thought balloon to “Can I come up with the atomic symbol for Sodium?” and the bottom caption to “Na, he can’t.”

Other improvements from y’all?

And on this train of thought, for those with trigonometric inclinations, “Can he remember the sixth of the basic circular functions?” and the answer “No, of ____ __ ___ “.

This Breaking Cat News comes from Andréa as a problem of the physics. “Won’t the eggs fall out if they’re in the holder like this? I’ve not dyed eggs for YEARS, but I distinctly remember putting the egg in the holder small end DOWN . . .”

Here’s a new sub-category. It’s not LOL material, there is no joke to be understood, and it’s not a comic flop either. It’s just something you gotta see!

Okay, the joke here isn’t that far away from easy understanding — it’s that she’s at home, not in a hotel lobby or restaurant waiting area, yet her remark is appropriate only to the latter kind of situations. But the furnishings are not that different from what a public place might have. So how is the casual reader to know this is her home (the regular reader might be expected to recognize the furnishings and decor).

A “quickie CIDU” because it is entirely opaque while misinterpreting the artwork; then becomes a clear and simple joke the instant you re-interpret the artwork.

I think we’ve argued this point before: If a question is posed which is not answered within the comic itself, and is not clearly discernible after thinking about it, can we say “Well there isn’t meant to be an answer, but that’s part of why it’s meant to be funny”? On this one I just don’t get it.

Oh but wait! This was the 4-19 panel so of course it was a 4-20 joke. Ermmm.

Well this one might be called a second-take CIDU. I thought I had gotten it, or enough for a chuckle, when originally reading it – the guy hanging on the wall is a (baseball) catcher, and is the ideal one for the husband/fan-guy, so is his “dream” catcher. But the offstage wife takes that phrasing to mean a “dreamcatcher” wall hanging, whose proper placement she issues a reminder about. I didn’t give any significance to the nickname “Pudge” which the husband bestows on the catcher.

But then now Mark M sends it in and notes some complicating factors: I’m thinking if you’re not a MLB fan AND a geezer, this comic will be confusing.  I’m both and it’s still confusing.  Pudge was a nickname for Carlton Fisk, who played as a catcher some 50 years ago.  A very good player, so “dream catcher” is a great pun.  Maybe this belongs as an Oy or LOL.  But the CIDU part is the response in Spanish.  Fisk was born in the U.S. and had no Latino connections that I’m aware of. And then there’s maybe even more to this if we start to worry about him saying “This is how it works” which may go on only some readings.

(P.S. A few days later, he got down from that wall, and the husband caught him rifling in their liquor cabinet, and strewn about him were several bottles of this family’s favorite kind of American distilled grain whiskey. Which made him the catcher in the rye.)