Category / (Not a Cidu)

by zbicyclist

It’s the 4th of July!

[2024-07-04 note: This post was originally from last year, 2023, but now bumped up as a republish. One or two strips added to the post proper as of the 2024 republish. Previous comments are retained, and current readers are encouraged to continue the comments thread!]

July 4th is zbicyclist’s wife’s birthday. She had to age a few years before she realized the fireworks weren’t for her.

But that’s not all of the story: On July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams also died. His last words included an acknowledgement of his longtime friend and rival: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Adams was unaware that Jefferson had died several hours before. At 90, Adams was the longest-lived U.S. president until Ronald Reagan surpassed him in 2001. (and now Jimmy Carter, born October 1, 1924) Source: Wikipedia.

[This Mutts strip added for 2024. It was just too sweet to resist.]

[This Peanuts is from 1964]

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – June 29th, 2024

And I still maintain that the ugly Internet phenomenon of “trolling” started being called that from a metaphor on the fishing practice (dragging a baited hook behind a quiet small boat), and not the Scandinavian bridge-dwelling threateners.

Are we done with Bizarro for this post? Never say so!

I was preparing to protest that the expression is traditionally “strait and narrow” — which would be preferable despite its redundancy. The pattern of redundancy in rhetorical pairs remains hale and hearty, though some may wish it null and void.

But no! The useful sources recognize only “straight and narrow”, with just a nod to the echoes of “strait”. Here’s Etymonline f’ristance [in entry for straight (adj.2) = “conventional,” especially “heterosexual,” 1941]:

probably suggested by the stock phrase straight and narrow path or way, “course of conventional morality and law-abiding behavior” (by 1842), which is based on a misreading of Matthew vii.14 (where the gate is actually strait); another influence seems to be strait-laced.

No, let’s not get started on straight-jacket!

Et tu, Jeremy?

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, June 23rd, 2024

Nice variation on a standard cat-behavior joke. (Do you’all remember Business Cat #1?)

I’d call this Andertoons just about perfect!

Hmm, would it be better if the two ideas in the last panel were reversed? First “wonder why” then “and how”?

Subscribe in the Founding Member tier.

Comics Kingdom is heavily promoting Goomer:

by Kilby

Bashing on the Drummer

We discussed this first Macanudo strip (in both languages) in the “Macanudo Road” post in April:

At the time I thought that Liniers changed the name of the leader because Ringo is still alive (and John isn’t), but a pair of subsequent strips give me the impression that he just likes bashing on drummers:

(Of course, this strip has absolutely nothing to do with the way nor why Best was actually dumped from the Beatles.)

Just like the first strip above, the question here is “Why Ringo?” (Perhaps he is supposed to be the one with the lowest level of awareness-enhancing substances in his system?)

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – June 15th, 2024

Rather dumb word-argument. But it prompts memory of an assortment of senior-targeted advertising campaigns which for a while used the phrasing “age 50 or better” or “age seventy-and-a-half or better” etcetera. It was supposed to be obvious, yet a sort of joke, that better would mean older. At least one that I heard regularly for a while did change to older; but then later reverted to better ; so I guess there was some complaint but it got resolved, or just overruled.

Come to think of it, probably the word-level associations of squashing things must have played a role in my lifelong aversion to the vegetable of that name.

Chak notes “I’ve read En attendant Godot several times, and I still don’t have a clue.”

Could one expect Godot to comment? Waiting for your comments below.

by Kilby

More Repetitive Asynchronicity

Over a year ago I posted a set of Non-Sequitur comics in which Wiley had repeated the exact same joke (including some lengthy dialog) in three different versions. The following examples from Tom Wilson’s “Ziggy” aren’t nearly as sophisticated, but the identical setups seem to show that the author has either forgotten the own material, or simply doesn’t care (“…just run it again, readers will never remember it…”)

All three of these were created by “Tom II” after his father retired, so it’s not a case of a legacy artist not knowing what the original author wrote: he did these all by himself.

Just three years later, with new artwork, but exactly the same joke, word for word:

Sixteen years after that, a new rendition (and now in color), but it’s still the same gag:

I’m sure that it is difficult (effectively impossible) to remember every single joke over a span of 18.5 years (and over 6800 comics), but insulting Ziggy as “shorty” is something of a running gag (besides these three, I ran into half a dozen other examples), so perhaps reviewing the GoComics archive might have been a good idea. That’s exactly why somebody has been going to all the trouble of making sure that the dialog is included in the GC index.