by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – January 11, 2025

Danny Boy – London Derriere sends this hair-raising one in. Might be a bit of a CIDU, or maybe a Geezer Alert, although Nair is still a brand.

“This one is probably flawed by the last panel, where it seems the cartoonist gave in to the feeling that readers would need help with the senses of pivot word “down”.”

Mitch4 sends in this recently rerun Tiger strip: “The pun turns on a structural ambiguity. “That’s what they call a punching bag” and “Good name for it” (because it has ‘punched’ back at the kid who was using it) . The gerund “punching” takes on two different roles. Similar to (tho not identical to) the classic “Visiting relatives can be tedious”.”

by zbicyclist

400 Years Ago This Month

Is Darrin Bell just trolling us? 400 years would be January 1625. I got nothin’.

Not much help from ChatGPT, either:

January 1625 was a month marked by several notable events:

  • January 7: Ruggiero Giovannelli, an Italian composer, passed away.
  • January 13: Pieter Bruegel the Younger, a Flemish painter, died.
  • January 17: The Duke of Soubise led the Huguenots in launching a second rebellion against King Louis XIII with a surprise naval assault on a French fleet being prepared in Blavet.
  • January 19: Erhard Buttner, a German organist and composer, committed suicide.
  • January 27: Adriaen Valerius, a Dutch composer and poet, died.
by phsiii

Going Through a Phase

From Chemgal:

She notes, “I know phase changes, and expect someone else will immediately understand the bouba and kiki part, but I do not.”

Not sure “immediately” is the operative term, but it did sound vaguely familiar; Google finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, now alles klar. Even more interesting is searching “kiki bouba english”, which reveals that it’s not just an English phenomenon, although it does vary somewhat.

Oh, and hovertext is:

Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.