Polymarket is a prediction market — under current rules of the CFTC, technically not gambling so legal in all 50 states. It allows you to gamble (ahem, “predict” with $ at risk) on a wide variety of things. Here are some of the trending bets as I’m writing this (May 2, 2026). Note you can bet on whether Bitcoin (BTC) will go up or down in a 5 minute period. But that’s not gambling. Definitely not gambling.
Boise Ed sends this in: “So long as he considers it only a first draft and revises it as needed, why not take advantage? (I do appreciate Wayno’s irony, though.) And I like the name RevBot.”
Mitch4 writes: “Oh, am I really sending in a “Family Circus”?! But never before have I heard BALLET PARKING and it’s too good to ignore. Imagine the choreography practices!”
Mitch4 also send this one in:
and this one: so Mitch4 earns our OY Badge of the Day!
We’re going to lead off today with a nice Synchronicity sent in by Ian C:
Bonus panel:
The mouseover text also plugs his Patreon page.
Yes, we’ve de-emphasized synchronicities because we were getting too much clutter (really, talking animals show up every day in my feeds), but these from April 23 also qualify as LOLs, so here we are.
We definitely passed on a May 7 synchronicity in which both Reality Check and Real Life Adventures featured cat vomit.
Yorick’s absence: was it due to some skullduggery?
jmcandrew sends these in: “I didn’t realize that Eli Whitney was someone 6 year olds were familiar with. Also there’s a pretty funny Bizarro comic.”
But why GIN? Per Wikipedia, “gin” was simply short for engine in the 1700s, “cotton gin” literally meant “cotton engine,” and that name stuck far better than a functional description like “cotton seed remover.”
Usual John sends this in: “It looks like Goomer has been used only once on CIDU, so it may be unfamiliar to some readers. Goomer is an earthling astronaut who got stranded on an alien planet. The planet seems to resemble mid-century New York City, except that exotic alien life forms fill many roles that on earth are filled by machines or inanimate objects. Goomer recently got married, but does not seem too devoted to his bride. I have not yet seen any indication that he has been unfaithful, though.”
Some earlier Goomer comics, to explain more about his domestic life:
“The modern Macedonian alphabet consists of 31 letters, including 5 vowels (А, Е, И, О, У) and 26 consonants, with six letters unique to Macedonian: Ѓ (gj), Ѕ (dz), Ј (j), Љ (lj), Њ (nj), and Ќ (kj). It was officially codified in 1945 by a commission in Yugoslav Macedonia….Spoken as a first language by around 1.7 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia.[” (Wikipedia)
Six unique letters in a written language that’s the primary language of only 1.7 million people. In the age of computers, that’s a fairly easily solvable problem by designing a font. One wonders, though, how this worked back in the typewriter era. I get the implication that perhaps they used a Cyrillic typewriter with combinations of letters, such as the Cyrillic version of kj for Ќ.
A bit of information omitted.
Speaking of Great Blue Herons, there’s a rookery near me. You can see the nests high up in the trees — about as high up as they could put them, considering the males are about 5 lb and the females about 3 lb, plus the weight of the nest and the eggs / hatchlings. The rookery is persistent — it’s been in the same location at least 5 years now. The arrival of the young roughly coincides with the trees getting covered with leaves, so the nests can’t easily be seen.
Comics I Don't Understand 