
The elevator call button scenario is a familiar trope for Horace :

But others are not banned from exploring a similar idea:



































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An OY!


A Sad-LOL for sure!


Or is this maybe a Semi-CIDU for anybody?


McDonald’s decides to open one test site for a new concept, CosMc’s, to overmuch social media hype, and now a tip of the hat from Greg Cravens. In the current iteration, it’s drive-thru only, with no restrooms.


The “5-31” in the panel is easy enough, but I’m having a hard time making out the year in the (c) strip. Scrolling in the Comics Kingdom archive to the previous few strips, I think it could be 1967.
Which is maybe late enough that she might have turned out to be the surgeon rather than the nurse. (Certainly by that year the joke/riddle of “A father and his son were out for a Sunday drive” was already quite popular.) Or no, how could a surgeon go out with an enlisted man?
[Does anybody need the rest of the story??]

CIDU Bill always claimed that he named the “Arlo Award” concept after Arlo Guthrie, and there is still a statement to that effect in the CIDU FAQ. Anyone who has followed CIDU for a while will have realized that this was just a polite cover story, as the strip above clearly shows.

Kilby writes: This Sunday Kevin & Kell strip‡ was drafted by CIDU Bill in 2019, but never posted. I’m not sure why Holbrook published this strip in February.† I would have thought that late fall or early winter would have been more appropriate, but perhaps the idea was to make the stash revelation completely unexpected.
P.S. (†) – Both the strip one week before and two weeks later are covered in snow; this one and the following Sunday strip look more like springtime.
P.P.S. (‡) – According to the remaining comments on the author’s website, there was originally a misspelling in the first panel, which was later corrected. Nice to see such artistic dedication!
There’s no question about whether these two comics are (nearly) synchronous, the puzzle is why both of them showed up one day apart in November. There are no Jewish holidays anywhere in the vicinity.


Sometimes she’s just so brilliant … even if not actually funny (nor trying).

For the longer-term fans than I have been, has she previously made this much use of photos and photo-realism in drawing?
The sense made of the Memory Palace idea here is more loosely evocative than a strict adherence to the traditional prescriptions for a mnemonic tool (or modern self-help and DIY expositions). It’s a bit more in the direction of emotionally evocative recollection, though not going as far into that mode as, say, Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace podcast on Radiotopia. Nor is it madeleine-sniffing. But it’s somewhere in that territory. But jumps back to face its original speculative-fictional premise in practical-level terms.
Judging from the CIDU archive, Stone Soup was one of Bill’s favorite comics, and he originally scheduled this strip to appear shortly after it was published in 2019:

The problem is that he never finished writing the text to go along with it:
“There seems to be a common theme, especially in comic strips, that physical books are more …”
Would anyone like to take a shot at completing Bill’s sentence, or offer some other perspectives about reading (for enjoyment, not as work) in paper vs. electronic form?
Thanks to Brian in STL for sending in this FoxTrot Classics:

Brian sez, “Foxtrot dailies are in reruns on GoComics. Today’s is an okay joke on its own. … However, it’s not fully appreciated without —-” But we’re going to “leave you in suspenders” for a moment or two and invite readers to treat this as a CIDU-puzzle requiring the reference to something it was based on. (Which you can read by expanding the block below.))
“However, it’s not fully appreciated without this Apple commercial that ran around the same time as the original run of the strip:”
Brian continues “The person that provided the link in comments added this: ‘Her side of the story goes that it was late at night when they filmed the ad. It had to be done after school hours for the day. Add to that, she was on allergy medication, which made her a bit “under the influence”.‘ “