Category / Geezer Alert

by zbicyclist

Double Geezer Alert

So, what holiday is Nancy refusing to appear on, on February 22, 1950?

Some choices:

  1. My parents welcomed me into the world. I’m sure it felt like a holiday to my Mom, after a 3 day labor. As I am now a Geezer, that’s Geezer Alert #1. Bushmiller was probably unaware of this.
  2. It was also Ash Wednesday, which it is also is today. That’s more of a holy day (but not a Holy Day of Obligation) than a holiday, though.
  3. February 22 was then the national holiday of Washington’s Birthday, until that was moved to the third Monday in February in 1971. That’s over 50 years ago, so that’s Geezer Alert #2. And, while the national holiday is officially Washington’s Birthday, it’s more commonly known now as Presidents’ Day.
  4. Lastly, if we were asking a ten year old George Washington what day he was born, he would have said February 11, 1731, not February 22, 1732. The British Calendar Act of 1751 to adopt the Gregorian calendar was applied retroactively to some dates, changing both the day and the year. Therefore, the fact that this was rerun on January 31, 2023 seems appropriate.
    • Why would they have changed George’s birthday? The answer may lie in this passage from the British Calendar Act of 1751: “no Person or Persons whatsoever shall be deemed or taken to have attained the said Age of one and twenty Years, or any other such Age as aforesaid, or to have completed the Time of such Service as aforesaid, until the full Number of Years and Days shall be elapsed on which such Person or Persons respectively would have attained such Age, or would have completed the Time of such Service as aforesaid, in case this Act had not been made”. To make the proper calculation of when young George would turn 21, his birthday had to move.

That’s your (over)dose of trivia for today.

by EditorM

Do you have “The Philosophy of Modern Song”?

The questions keep branching out. What is the drawing meant to show? Empty spaces on the shelves? So then the geezer is being sarcastic about “I wouldn’t have any of that stuff in my library”? Or they really are audiobooks, on physical CDs with shiny plastic cases? And then Zack is dumbfounded because he has never heard of audiobooks? Or instead, Zack is dumbfounded because he is quite familiar with audiobooks, but always in electronic or virtual form and never before this in a physical recording?

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

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, September 4th, 2022

To anyone who might have a birthday this year, Happy Birthday!

This is one that takes up a bunch of hyphenate tags. It’s a LOL-Meta-4thWall with a geezerish allusion to a story (urban legend) you just have to know to make it clear….

Would this hyena might benefit from checking Comics I Don’t Understand?

This Rhymes With Orange LOL is from Alan Smithee.

UPDATE

Let’s see if this image is any cleaner

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 7th, 2022

This should fulfill the category tag of “Momentary CIDU”. It presents something genuinely puzzling, but solvable quickly enough that it wouldn’t work as a daily standalone CIDU post.

A delectable one from Mutts’ finicky cat.

I couldn’t resist tossing this in the list … for the sake of quoting these classic lyrics:
Ahh you've gone to the finest school, all right Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get JUICED in it
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
But you find out now you're gonna have to get USED to it

Here is the Dark-LOL advertised in the Category links:

This reminds me of a joke by Steven Wright: “I wish, when I was first born, the first thing I said was “Quote” so the last thing I said before I died would be “Unquote.””

Chemgal sends in this pair from Strange Planet:

Is the phrasing that somebody “is assisting the police in their inquiries” used everywhere? I first learned the phrase back when I worked for the Journals Division and a certain scholarly Association worked with us to draft a press release and statement to go in the journal they sponsored and edited but we published. The readership / membership had to be told that there would be an interim Acting Editor for an issue or more, as the Editor’s stay in the UK was being extended as he was needed there “to assist the authorities in their inquiries into the circumstances of the death of his wife”! [mitch]

We just had “The Grill is On” as an OY yesterday, so we’ll pick another song to wake you up this morning. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1fImXAeS-s if the embed doesn’t show up correctly; your new editor is still learning a few things ]

by EditorM

Summer at Home

Thanks to Rob S. for this one by Tom Falco. That “Summer at Home” title is the cartoonist’s title for it, and goes with his inflation-leads-to-staycation topical message.

But the real interest the panel holds for us is the way the picture is based on an ad campaign from a ways back. Can you remember the brand that used that picture, and a slogan (in the form of a question) associated with that brand and this ad campaign … or a competitor’s?

Rob shares that he indeed thought of the competitor first, as did the cartoonist according to his blog entry. See the Tomversation blog for Falco’s discussion of this, including the original windswept photo from the ads.

by EditorM

Three-hour tour

Thanks to Dan Sachs for this CIDU-Geezer.

Because the CIDU will be quickly solved by anyone who can fill in the geezer reference, we thought to provide a little more entertainment …. The editors weren’t really familiar with Diamond Lil, so we looked around in some recent strips, and found an interesting mix of OYs, Ewwws, “dad jokes” (a.k.a. bad jokes), and of course a baseline of geezer alerts!

(I like that the Siri or Alexa is named “Surli”.)