Bonus post: Back in the translation shop

Today’s Macanudo, twice:

“It was nice while it lasted.” Okay, I’ll buy the pairing. Both are sweetly regretful but have just a tiny bit of a sting, don’t you think?

But now, today’s Baldo, also twice:

Now at first this looks like something we’ve seen a few times with Baldo: A pun or language-dependent joke in the English version, and then a reduction to a univocal expression in the Spanish version with no attempt to preserve the polysemy needed for the pun.

But not this time!

The key is in hachacento, which does not register as a recognized or translatable Spanish word, at least by Google Translate. But looking at parts:

hatchet ==> hacha
accent ==> acento

So we do get both axe and accent! (But not sent ==> enviad{o/a}. But who cares at this point!)

P.S. Don’t forget to stop and smell the noises in panel 3.

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, May 19th, 2024


Some comics with socks appeal:






..

From the “Wisdom from the Funny Papers” Department. Sometimes a “cry for help” must be responded to with help. Sometimes when “they’re just doing that for attention” the humane response includes paying attention.

BTW, Maritsa Patrinos of the Six Chix now has her own separate strip, called Working Cats and appearing at Comics Kingdom.


I thought this was going to be about sentence-adverbs; but it was better than that. (Hopefully, everybody remembers what the controversies and pseudo-rules about sentence-adverbs were.)


No, I don’t see a joke here. But also I can’t say there’s supposed to be one, so it’s not really a CIDU. So let’s just take a minute to admire the artistry here. Such draughtsmanship! That ice-cliff shows us both distance and height, even while a whole surface is devoid of detail.



Bonus post: train of association

This is actually a long-running plot thread in Safe Havens: The boy called here “Leo” is also, in his other time and place, going to be Leonardo da Vinci. His education in science and technology as a youth in the modern world will underlie his great talents in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

Does anyone else here look at that and think, “Oh yeah, I remember that speculation coming up in The Door Into Summer!“? That 1956/7 novel by R.A. Heinlein involved quite a bit of plot interactions in different time periods, mostly by means of cold sleep, but with a smidgen of actual time-machine travel. The narrator tracks down an eccentric inventor in his hermitage, and learns about his device. When loaded with equal masses on its two pans, it can send them into other times, one to the past and one to the future by equal time-intervals. He extracts this recollection from the inventor:

The narrator does manage to get sent back from 2001 to 1970 (both of which, I remind you, were part of the unclear future when the book was published). After some plot-heavy manipulations, towards the end of the story he reflects:

CIHS: Suburban Fairy Tales

Here’s another CIHS: Comic I Haven’t Seen. The idea here is to sample comics that are unfamiliar to the CIDU readership, for better or worse (Hey, that’s not a bad idea for a strip name.)

The idea of Suburban Fairy Tales is to take familiar characters and riff off them in a somewhat modern environment. In this case, we have the wolf and the 3rd little pig from The Three Little Pigs, a story some of us might be familiar with. Francis Bonnet, the cartoonist, has made a career in art and design, working as a graphic designer and cartoonist for over 20 years. Available at Comics Kingdom

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, May 12th, 2024

For Mothers Day, a bit of both-parental sentiment from Bliss:


Probably obvious, but for the record, it is Susan (the character shown) herself who is trying to give up caffeine.




The Hax advice column this accompanies is here.


TBH, I don’t entirely understand this. I mean, I understand the heartwarming message about group loyalty and generosity — but not whether there was actually supposed to be anything funny.

Wait, could this be heading for an idiom-origins story about “bought the farm”? No? Nah!


Saturday Morning OYs – May 11th, 2024


I guess I missed out Part I. This is trying hard, maybe too hard, but deserves to be seen for cheerful persistence even if not really for brilliant OY-ness.


Since this strip seems to offer a pun every day, it is hard not to over-indulge. But this one was immediately right in the OY spirit!

Ohhhh nooo! There is no way to stop at just one!