Category / (Not a Cidu)

by zbicyclist

Saluting (?) the Pharmaceutical Industry

“On April 26, 1954, [70+1 years, -1 day ago] six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.” For the first time, researchers used the double-blind method, now standard, in which neither the patient nor person administering the inoculation knew if it was a vaccine or placebo. Although no one was certain that the vaccine was perfectly safe—in fact, Sabin argued it would cause more cases of polio than it would prevent—there was no shortage of volunteers.”

by zbicyclist

Beetle … juiced?

JMcAndrew sends in a few old Beetle Baileys, noting “Mort Walker was a weird guy.”

Putting some spring in his step?

Why would Sarge have done that? Or was this Beetle’s practical joke?

JMcAndrew: “At some point I’m going to write a thesis on all the homoeroticism in Beetle Bailey. This happens too often to be a coincidence. Here’s a sample.”

JMcAndrew: “I’ve been on somewhat of a Beetle Bailey kick lately but it really is a fascinating comic. This one is some nightmarish body horror on the level of David Cronenberg.”

And then there’s Sarge’s famous gourmand appetite:

JMcAndrew: “A 4000-gallon pot would have a diameter of 96 inches (8 feet) and a height of 140 inches (approximately 11.67 feet).” Would that cook properly?

No tour of Beetle Bailey would be complete without one in which Beetle slacks off:

JMcAndrew commented: “Apparently Beetle Bailey has been murdered and his body has been stuffed inside this filing cabinet. How else could he get inside of it and close the drawer?”

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – April 13, 2025

We haven’t actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I’m really hoping are next.

The opposite of gravity is levity, so of course it’s okay to laugh at black holes.

Is it possible cartoonist Randal Monroe has been watching Philomena Cunk’s mockumentaries?

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies, LOLs – April 6, 2025

JMcAndrew sends this in: “I believe the object on the left is an old style computer. I’ve spent longer than I care to admit contemplating the mechanics of how this “affair” might happen.”

This might be filed under “jokes that don’t work well anymore”. At the time this was done (1987), this would be hard. Now, linking computers to TVs is ubiquitous in several ways, most obviously via HDMI, which dates from the early 2000s. There’s some history of HDMI here: https://blog.solidsignal.com/tutorials/sordid-history-hdmi-revised-updated/

Parenting isn’t quite what it used to be, either (or, as JMcAndrew suggested, this deserves an Arlo tag).

And: would Alice’s condition be covered by United Healthcare?

Tony sends this one in, which began as a CIDU: “as I was writing this realized that the punchline was about a nose job. It didn’t even notice the change at first. I guess not having a nose must be pretty miserable, but I couldn’t even tell that sphinx was supposed to be a living creature.”