Category / Quasi-holiday

by Kilby

The shortest day of the year…

… will occur tomorrow (well, at least up here in the northern hemisphere):

…
Most countries in the temperate zones have one 23-hour day every year’s calendar, but it falls in Spring, not in Winter.

…
As opposed to both of the “Born Loser” strips, Frazz is referring here to net sunlight, rather than total duration.

P.S. Jef Mallett lives in Michigan, and must be very familiar with how short the days get in northern latitudes. On the other hand, Berlin is located ten degrees farther north than Detroit, so Mallett doesn’t have that much to complain about.

Of course, the shortest day of the year is followed immediately by the longest night:

by zbicyclist

Heads Up! Tomorrow is Stranger’s Day

Why not a day to celebrate strangers?

Where would we be without strangers? Strangers grow our food. Strangers in factories make stuff we need. Strangers make important decisions for us, like whether we get into our first-choice college, or whether we get audited by the IRS.

Let’s face it. In the aggregate, strangers are more important to us than friends.

But speaking of obscure non-holidays:

Did we post this before?

Adding today’s Arlo and Janis as a late entry:

by multipleciduers

Wearing (out) of the green

A general note of remembrance for the holiday of green beer and green Chicago River.

The first two are holdovers from last week, when we had other things a-posting and didn’t remark Saint Padraic’s Day on CIDU main feed. A few helpful readers posted St Patrick’s Day jokes to the thread for that day, thank you for renewing the principle of thread drift!

This one was sent in by BillR, looking for what the gag is. It provoked a good discussion behind the scenes of CIDU, where we soon enough agreed on the intended gag but remained divided on whether some terminology was being misapplied!

(For the tag-watchers [or actually, category], yes this post is marked both CIDU and not-a-CIDU. Those just apply to different cartoons, that’s all.)

by zbicyclist

Beware the Ides of March!

Beware the Ides of March! We all know that phrase, but it seems odd that it has crept into the language, since we know few other facts about Roman history. The meaning of “Ides” is a bit confusing to us in the modern world, as these comics show.

Interestingly, the Ides of March were notable in Rome as a deadline for settling debts.