Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old draft posts from March 2019. The only CIDU element is how he ran into a strip from 2013 nearly five and a half years later. (I checked: Barney & Clyde was not in reruns during that month.)
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.
Printer Noises
Sure, I guess I’d complain about this too. From Rob Stephens.
Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 14th, 2024
Zippy feeling just a bit meta.
And a semi-CIDU for this same couple:
The question being: Is the guy just pushing his point by selecting a random term meant to be absurd, or else do they maybe have something (like a remote, or an ashtray, …) which is actually crafted to look like a Stegosaurus?
Why not start off Sunday with a bit of math? Roughly how old is she?
This is Frazz’s Sunday intro panel for January 7th. Mallett posts these on Facebook. Otherwise, I’d never see them because GoComics doesn’t use the intro panels, for reasons I don’t understand.
Saturday Morning OYs – January 13th, 2024
One order of ’shrooms, please.
It’s fairly clear what is happening in each of the visible portions of this Perry Bible Fellowship comic, but I really don’t understand the sequence of events between the second and third panels:
I’m pretty sure that the man in the second panel is the same as the one in the background of the third panel, but if was he the one who called 911, how did he manage to escape the “choice”? And what is the EMT on the sidewalk trying to communicate with her hands?
What’s in a Name?
This Ink Pen rerun from February 2010 just happened to appear on New Year’s Day 2024. I can recognize the cartoon sources for all of the names mentioned by Hamhock, but I can identify only one of Ralston’s examples (the last one: “Goolagong“). I assume that most of the rest would yield relatively quickly to a concerted Internet search, but that’s not what I want to know. Is this a “geezer” and/or “millennial” issue? How many of those twelve names in the first three panels are obvious to the rest of you?
Uppsa! (Awww)
I guess it’s mostly an Awwww. But then, some questions are raised but not answered. Mainly, what’s the joke? Between panels 2 and 3 it changes from two pairs of tracks to one pair — is it meant to be a puzzle, solved by the reveal in panel 4 that one skater is now carrying the other.
Also: In the first panel, are all the skates drawn correctly facing the way they are going (or are the red ones wrong)? Where we see two pairs of tracks, are they equally skillful or is one more wobbly? In the final panel, are the tracks especially wobbly, and is that sort of the joke?
Ben and His Marks
Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old drafts from 2019. The reference was so obscure that it might have been suitable for the authors to include their running gag with “Horace”, except that there would not have been enough space for that in a daily strip. (For those interested in background information, most of the sources that I was able to find listed the name as “Benjamin Marks“).
Bears
Is this a Noah’s Ark joke? Is there a missing caption? Are they checking the Alaska cruise schedule to see when the tourists with food will arrive? I can’t bear not understanding this.
The joke in this bear comic is clear — the confusing thing is that it appeared December 29. Given that timing, a better punch line would be “Go to sleep. It’s December 29 already!”
