Category / (Not a Cidu)

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 17th, 2021

Sent in by J-L, who says “It involves Jon trying to trick Garfield into taking a pill, and how Garfield tries to frustrate Jon’s plans. My family laughed at this because recently we have been trying to feed a pill to our dog, Honey Bun.  While the first few times were successful (it was easy to hide the pill in some delicious food of some sort), eventually Honey Bun got wise to our efforts and would spit out the pill, no matter how delicious the food was.” We agree, it is good to see Jon getting the better of Garfield now and then.

In another main segment of the domestic companion-animal kingdom, here is a dog who knows a lot but not everything:

This RWO was sent in by Le Vieux Lapin, who says “An LOL? An OTW? At the very least it’s a bit more off the wall than I expect from Hilary Price.”

I was a bit dithery over whether it could be considered a CIDU. But if there is somebody not familiar with Tetris it might briefly be a CIDU for them; but would not hold up for a day’s discussion.

Although I saw immediately that it was doing Tetris, I didn’t catch that the word PETRIS was reflecting that there are domestic pets in the scene. I thought for a second that the PETR- was the key part, and was using the Greek-derived stem for “rock” or “stone” — so that the falling tetris pieces would turn out made of stone, and were on their way to a destructive crash. Nice relief that they are pets and end up cozily tucked in.

The Arnold Zwicky blog has remarked on this cartoon twice, once yesterday when it was reprinted ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2021/10/10/enduring-classics/ ) and once in 2010 when it first appeared ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/04/11/another-playful-portmanteau/ ) Zwicky seems surprised that people today are still quite familiar with Tetris, and that is the main subject of yesterday’s column. [Oh wait, I should be saying “last Sunday’s blog” not “yesterday’s”; though I am writing this bit on Monday 2021-10-11.]

The first two panels are so familiar as a turnabout joke, with a variety of particular punch lines, its nice to see Horace coming up with something different.

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 16th, 2021

I really like treating “erudite” as the name of a mineral. But don’t care for the supposed punch line here that was used to get that across and try to pun on the standard meaning.

by EditorM

Second-order synchros of LOLs

What I mean by “second-order synchronicity” is that Arthur was struck by two different synchro pairs on the same day.

“Barney & Clyde matches with MGG:”

“And Close To Home matches with Off the Mark:”

“Neither are exact matches, but both immediately caught my eye.”

by EditorM

Random: New Yorker non-contest non-captioned cartoons bit

Frequent CIDU contributor Ooten Aboot (aka “Canadian Raising Is Real”) sent for our enjoyment news of The New Yorker working to out-do themselves with a variant on their widely-beloved Caption Contest. It’s a series of drawings, mostly by their cartoon artists, and mostly lacking captions, presented online as a “Daily Shouts” humor feature.

The intro write-up, by Dahlia Gallin Ramirez, goes like this:

Once a year, a team of demons at The New Yorker provides “cartoons” in need of captions. You, the readers—so full of hope, so charmingly mortal—upset yourselves trying to think of jokes. There are no submissions, no finalists, and no votes, but there are winners: the evil beings who created these uncaptionable images. Good luck!

We can’t print here any pictures that are their current content, but here’s that link again!

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies and Minor Mysteries – LOLs and Semi-CIDUs, October 10th, 2021

Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Minor Mysteries

These are comics that somebody thought were pretty good, or even full LOL, and not baffling but a little hard to pin down. Like, you can think of a rather plausible explanation of the chuckle — or maybe two! — but there’s nothing that clinches the case that *this* or *that* just has to be the key to what’s going on.

For example, with something like this Andertoons, we might think of the minor mystery as expressed in terms of providing the missing caption. Is it about the odd feeling you’re being watched? Or more like “Oh, where did I set down my glasses?”. It could be either, do you agree?

A Minor Mystery from Darren, who says “I can’t tell if Watson’s jarns need to be interpreted as a specific term.  I’m flummoxed.  Apparently the squirrel is as well?”

Okay, the joke here is that the threatened punishment will involve a cannister vacuum cleaner (in what seems to be a photo clip?) rather than a conventional physical beating or the like. But it’s an unanswerable mystery just what the threat is. Torture by exposure to noisy motor, like a household pet? Being inhaled altogether? Having some portion of his body inhaled?

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 9th, 2021

Boise Ed recommends Doc Rat, and this Oy from the October 1 front page at Docrat.com.au was more available than others.

A CIDU-Oy of sorts, sent in by Usual John, who says “This is from Brevity, so it presumably is some kind of Oy, but I really don’t get it. I guess this is a version of Doc Holliday, but why is he offering to be my huckleberry?”

And indeed Brevity is generally going to yield up some species of OY, as here:

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 3rd, 2021

under the remaining five red baidagko

The last few weeks I’ve felt that Wrong Hands has been a bit off their best form. But this one seems a good case of returning to their former standard.

So here is another Wrong Hands, sent in by Philip, who notes that as an Oy it would be tripartite. (Have we seen this one before?)

I have never sat down on a cat …. that did not immediately make the situation known! :-)

Six of one, half-dozen of the other, sent by Phil Smith III

(Also adding in another Condron as he was unfamiliar to me.)

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – October 2nd, 2021

Arrgh, they just missed the chance to pun it off against serialism, the academic successor to atonal or twelve-tone music as a body of theory and compositional practice. To boot, cerealism and serialism are pronounced identically, while surrealism is distinguishable! Well OY to that, or indeed ARRRGH!

This time the squirrel does have something to say — and he’s clearly wrong.

Here’s an Oy-Ewww. Wait, do I know the actual etymology? And how’s about “steak tartare”?

by EditorM

Bonus: Estamos texting todo el tiempo

(Or as Google Translate would put it: Nosotros estamos enviando mensajes de texto todo el tiempo.)

Our recent foray into the Baldo translation mysteries included an interesting subthread on whether the Spanish seemed to reflect any particular national-origin variety of the language (or since the setting is in the U.S. , there might be contemporary U.S.-regional varieties at play ) , or rather a textbook or generic Western Hemisphere compromise variety of the language. Also in question was “official, standard” language versus slang and colloquial.

Last week’s and this week’s strips provide a wealth of material bearing on those issues. The teen characters are doing a lot of texting, so we get to see the handling of such matters as: standard texting abbreviations; spontaneous abbreviations or “shorthand”; accidental typos, and bad autocorrect and autocomplete insertions; and intrusion of English terms instead of “official” Spanish. Thus for OMG they stick with OMG in the Spanish context, though I think elsewhere I’ve seen DM (for Dios mío not in this case Direct Message); and “texting” in both English and Spanish versions.

(Two wordless strips depict a deepening of the romantic jealousy crisis.)

(For anyone paying close attention to the dates, there were strips over the weekend that were not part of this series.)