How many of us have a pile of unread books? How long as the oldest unread one been in that pile? When was the last time you thinned out the pile, by saying “Nah, not going to ever read that?” Did you regift the book, and later found it sitting in THEIR unread books pile?
How to you label it? “Books I’ll read when I retire”? or “Books to read when I can’t sleep”?
Geezer alert?
Or that scene has been replayed / imitated / parodied so much that it could be well known even among those who have never seen any more of the movie it comes from.
When this strip first appeared last September, I was sorry that I couldn’t read Rhymes with Orange from a source that had a functional comment system, because I was expecting flame wars from the dedicated Star Wars fanatics. However, since September seemed most inappropriate for the subject matter, I decided to schedule this post for a more opportune date in May. There were, of course, two obvious possibilities, but I decided to go with the first one (feel free to re-read this eight days from now).
P.S. The cinnamon bun on top of the Queen’s head is a nice touch, but I will leave it to the considerate (flame-proof) fans in the CIDU audience to pick apart why this strip is just all wrong.
Just continuing to document days when the English and Spanish versions of Macanudo aren’t translations. Here the text differs, but the fun conceit is the same.
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.
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.
There is an excellent pun behind this, which requires just a bit of Disney to recognize. But then there is the sub-question of whether Liniers (the Macanudo creator) is coming up with it spontaneously on their own, or is making an allusion to 1960s U.S. avant-garde theater where a famous campus-set domestic melodrama of psychological cruelty used the pun as its title — as would be familiar to theater and movie fans of a certain age [geecoughzers!].
(BTW, de paso, here for completeness is the version in Spanish, which does not attempt to re-create the pun. Leaving the question, is there then any joke left at all?)
This first one may not strictly count as CIDU, since in the end I do understand it. But it took a lot of work!
For this other one, the song quoted and the musician mentioned are easily verified to match up, even if not in your personal playlist. But …
… but I genuinely don’t get the part about “If you’re gonna sound like a Karen…” — there doesn’t seem to be enough basis to take that in the contemporary quasi-political sense of a denigrating term for a woman being fussy in a certain way. And without that, what is there for “sound like a Karen” to mean?
Here are two suggestions from Targuman, not very similar except that in both getting the joke depends on catching a cultural reference. Not entirely a geezerish enterprise, either — yes, both have roots in the sixties or before, but at least one is still in use in contemporary “intellectual properties”.
“Andy”?? How about Johnny and Henry? (Okay, yes, we know why. But strictly speaking it’s a mistake.)
So, some confusion between Nirvana and reincarnation / transmigration of souls?
Comics I Don't Understand 