Category / Oy

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – February 10th, 2024

An Awww:

Ooops, accidental repeat! This was already here in the OY list, when the Lard came along and triggered the Thursday quasi-synchronicity post. And we forgot to delete this occurrence.

There was a “Save the Naugas” movement! (Was that the Car Talk bros? Um, no, they were doing “Save the Skeets”.)

Here in the mid-South Side neighborhood around the University of Chicago, we think of this fabled pair as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-Park.

Thanks to Chemgal for sending in this Frazz, a good combo OY/LOL.

For what happens if you mix probiotics and antibiotics, see https://xkcd.com/2177/

Hey, what an interesting odd combo of meta and straight-up OY!

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – February 3rd, 2024

Love that Monty Crisco! (But I don’t know what typo on Nesselrode Pie would be likely, or funny.)

Always go for consistency!

And a P.S. from B.C.

He tries just about every day, so why not give in and post one now and then.

Growing up, I knew only two pasta shapes: spaghetti, for spaghetti and meatballs, and macaroni, for macaroni and cheese. Imagine my surprise to find such an endless variety of shapes coming out of the extruder. And tortellini! And soba! And rice noodles! Now there’s chickpea pasta, etc. It’s a wide, wild world out there.

Just pasta these comics is a place to comment on your own favorite shape/type.

A synchronicity here, with two Dante-themed comics on the same day. What a Paradiso!

by Kilby

How Much Ground…

…could a groundhog hog, if a groundhog could hog ground?

…unless of course Phil beats the believers to the punch:

Here are four different approaches to affecting the prediction:

by zbicyclist

Saturday OYs — Some math for e day

Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14) gets a lot of play in the U.S., but doesn’t work in other countries that write dates as DD/MM/YYYY, so it becomes 14/3. An alternative in those areas is e day, after the base of natural logarithms, e, (2.71) on 27 January. So, we’re going to avoid the Pi Day rush and post some math cartoons today.

Like pi, e shows up in a variety of places in mathematics, and is associated with some of the greats in mathematical development. From Wikipedia:

“The number e is sometimes called Euler’s number …—after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler —or Napier’s constant—after John Napier. The constant was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.”

Some fuzzy math from websites. The first is from Kiva.org.

This one is from MyVirtualMission.com, a site where you can virtually pretend to climb Everest or complete the Camino de Santiago as you run/walk/bike around your neighborhood. Somehow, their counter of missions (trips) has gone awry. Or maybe I did one backwards?

by EditorM

“Please help with understanding the Spanish”? — No, please help with understanding the humor!

Very considerate of the English captioning to inform us these are tamales, which is not mentioned in the Spanish, and may not have been that obvious. In panel 2, invierno means winter, but I’m glad to learn that it might be a way Spanish speakers refer to what Anglophone North America calls “the holidays” or “the holiday period”. 

But the crux of the puzzlement is in the final panel. We have the material for a pun, in partial split meanings: masa by itself can mean dough, and masacre written solid would be the obvious massacre, or as Google Translate for some reason prefers, slaughter. But we have to ask, if there are fluent or native Spanish speakers here, does this work for you as a joke?

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – January 20th, 2024 

This “dogged effort to learn a foreign language” has paid off! 

And as my brother recently messaged me: Yo no soy marinara! Yo no soy marinara! Soy carbonara, soy carbonara, soy carbonara — por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti seré. 

Some celebrity-name pun memes

by EditorM

Bonus etymological dispute

I thought I *knew*, as an evidence-based origins account and “official” answer, that the term flack for a public relations officer was closely tied to flak “anti-aircraft fire” — via the intermediate occupational descriptive term flak-catcher for their role in deflecting or absorbing abuse and accusation. And that this was popularized in Tom Wolfe’s essay title “Maumauing the Flack Catchers”. (His flak-catchers were local bureaucrats rather than p.r. agents but the idea was closely related.)

But I wanted to check with something besides my own memory, in scholarly sources or some easily-accessible online approximation thereto.

And so, how disappointing that Dictionary.com gives us a story about some guy named Flack, and no mention of flak except a link in a “words sometimes confused with flack” section.

 ORIGIN OF FLACK

  1935–40; said to be after Gene Flack, a movie publicity agent

Well! At least some support from Etymonline, though they also give precedence to Gene Flack, but give some skeptical considerations against him. 

  flack (n.)

“publicity or press agent,” in Variety headlines by September 1933; sometimes said to be from name of Gene Flack, a movie agent, but influenced later by flak. There was a Gene Flack who was an advertising executive in the U.S. during the 1940s, but he seems to have sold principally biscuits, not movies, and seems not to have been in Variety in the ’30s.

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – January 6th, 2024

Have you kept count for how many times this joke has come up this week?

Woops! Turns out this is now the third appearance of this “kerning pun” (as jjmcgaffey called it) on CIDU in one path or another. 

This fun Rubes from a few years ago was brought to our attention by Professor Jerry Coyne (a big supporter of ducks) on his Why Evolution is True web site (blog, but he doesn’t like it called that).

As reported by The Daily Cartoonist (but nowhere visible at mutts.com), Patrick McDonnell has announced that he will be taking a six-month sabbatical to work on other projects, and that (almost all of) the strips from now to June will be re-runs (note the absence of any year in the copyright line on this one).