by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, June 19th, 2022

Okay, is it missing a beat, or brilliantly leaving unsaid, that Martin changes his mind because the patron reveals he is preparing to use highlighter or underline if he doesn’t have Post-Its?

Thanks to Boise Ed for sending this in and noting how it does “clever damage to the fourth wall”.

And a nice plus here is that Percy was not brought in just for this meta moment, but in following days has some entirely non-meta joke conversations with Clayton.

by Mitch4

Would you like to join the CIDU editorial team?

Contact Mitch and WinterWallaby at the usual submission address if you are interested in being a Co-Editor in Training.

What you will be doing (immediately or soon)

• Join in maintaining email correspondence with readers
   • and content submitters
   • and grey-eminence type advisory panel members
• and our sponsors/publishers (the Bickel family)
• Read and monitor the flow of comment posting, manage the Pending (“moderation”) and Spam buckets, and make your own comments or edit reader comments as necessary to avoid out-of-line ill-tempered disputes. (And of course to enjoy expressing your own views!)
• Initially in consultation with the rest of the editorial team, and later independently, decide how and when to use material submitted by readers.
• Share the mouse-and-keyboard tasks of getting that reader-submitted material uploaded, posted, and editorially framed.
• Find material for posting from the course of your own comics reading, and post it

What you need to be/do/have/know to “apply”

• This is a volunteer activity, not a job. Unpaid. No set office hours.
• You should be in general familiar with the CIDU site and our usual contents and style, and in general enjoy comicstrip humor. But you don’t have to be a prolific commenter.
• You should be able to maintain a sense of humor and relaxed cooperation for negotiating collaborative plans, decisions, and solutions
• You do not need to be familiar with WordPress admin pages or app! But you should be someone who considers yourself adept at picking up and using web-browser-based forms and tools, with only casual instruction (email texts and maybe some Zoom screenshare sessions)
• You should be able to work from a full screen desktop or laptop computer with reasonably uptodate OS and web browser and related tools.
• You should not insist on tech eccentricities that would prevent effectively using the WordPress editing web app.

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – June 18th, 2022

Thanks to Bill R, who says “It’s like they’re daring us to figure it out”. Which is why there is a CIDU category (“tag”) on this, along with the “(Not a CIDU)” for the OYs list in general. Look, don’t question it too hard. Oh, and it’s not a pun really, but gets an OY as a language-related item. Also this list was sitting bare too long …

The usage they’re disputing over was taught in my schooldays as one of “those common mistakes to be avoided”. 

OK, I think (but am not positive) that I get the alternate meaning the joke depends on — from too many crime shows, the best deals a defendant’s lawyer might hope to extract from a prosecutor would involve setting no additional jail time, so the defendant gets to “walk away” or “take a walk”.

First I thought the outside guy was wearing an odd bathrobe; but throw in his laurel wreath and I guess he is at a toga party. But not the inside guy. Oh well, it doesn’t seem to affect the joke.

Possible cross-comic banter, based on spelling of the name?

by Mitch4

“My mother is a fish” (bonus post)

When people talk about Faulkner these days, they tend to concentrate on societal portrayals, and sometimes forget that he was right up there with the (other) Modernists when it comes to novel and effective experimental narration. (Or else, as some of the GoComics commenters would have it, reduce his style to complaining of unparseably long Proustian sentences.)

AILD, while still very consciously / critically “Southern”, is really fun and funny, and a great demo of taking a then-new technical experimental narrative device, and running with it!

by EditorM

Pardon my 1590 mile displacement

A CIDU (or Ooops!) from zbicyclist, who explains: The line from Folsom Prison Blues is “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”.  So what’s the significance of Kansas City (where everything is up to date, according to Rodgers and Hammerstein)?

Can you advance a principled reason for changing the city? And, more to the CIDU point, how does her “ready for marriage” second sentence relate to anything?

by EditorM

An edgy choice?

Thanks to Darren for sending this. His thoughts:

So does the fact that the statue is of Lenin mean anything here, or is it just a too-large ugly statue that could be of anyone? (Like Alice wanting a stone fountain for the backyard)
Seems odd that he would want a statue of Lenin or that his wife is only mildly annoyed with the purchase.
Or is this a name thing?  Len likes a statue of someone named Len(in)?  I don’t get it.

When I got Darren’s email, I almost immediately recognized his allusion to “Alice wanting a stone fountain for the backyard” as referencing a multi-strip story in Cul de Sac, which I had recently seen. But I couldn’t find it in recent GoComics reprints of the CdS archive. Anyhow, the CIDU advisers crew responded to my inquiry in our Random Comments thread, and identified the early appearance of the story starting around https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2009/12/02 and including for example this one:

Further, commenter jajizi identified an earlier similar storyline, starting around https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2008/09/02 and including for example: