by EditorM

Bonus: Luann congratulates itself

They tell you where the answer can be found.
Before consulting that official answer, as a regular Luann reader but not a long-long-term fan, I was able to decode many of the individual clues, but could not give it an overall meaning. How will CIDU readers do, on either level?

Additional clue from CIDU

All the individual clues decode to the same thing.

Second additional clue from CIDU

It’s a number

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, March 17th, 2024

At first sight, this was going to be a CIDU. Then it was agreed to be not that puzzling — still, it’s not perfectly clear if it’s just a funny situation idea.

Say, what actually was the reason for Cmdr. Bond’s preference? Do the components get more evenly mixed, or less? Does some air get incorporated? Does it bring out the flavoring of the vermouth? Or hide it?

A geezer theme for sure.

An interesting kind of Meta, that we are flatfootedly calling “LOL-Meta, alluding to an old joke, by forestalling it”. Possibly a CIDU for a few — if you don’t already know what the patient’s question had to have been, by all means venture an idea of it in comments.

by EditorM

Cat and Girl and Shoes and Plums

Cat and Girl have picked two nice and juicy little literary targets to bedevil!

Or actually, one literary target and one literary-adjacent (and probably apocryphal) anecdote. It’s probably fun, if not precisely funny, that our characters are not directly challenging the truth or the reputed depth of the anecdote, nor directly mocking it, but blithely misunderstanding it and spinning their own absurd background explanations. Which maybe does the job of a take-down without showing attitude!

What do our readers think of these two iconic stories? (Oh, of course first someone must identify them.)

Below the break, some prior responses to one of them! And the quick Snopes link for the fake. (I’m not sure the Page Break tool will work as intended. If not, don’t panic, the additional content is still there and we will just pop it out if needed.) (Update: using the Details tool instead. This seems to work better. But the “Don’t Panic” advice still holds, of course.)

Open for spoiler-ish notes!

The Hemingway authorship of the baby shoes “six-word story” is debunked at Snopes.

Here at Poets.org is the plain text of the William Carlos Williams notorious plums poem, “This is Just to Say”.

Probably the best-known response by an established poet is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. Here is a personal blog post (responding to a This American Life episode), giving the original, the Koch, and another variation, written by a sixth-grader.


Here from New York Magazine (Intelligencer), an article “This Is Just to Say I Have Written a Blog Post Explaining the Icebox-Plum Meme” , showing a series of responses or variations in the form of Tweets, from when that was a thing.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, March 10th, 2024

Okay, do you agree this belongs in the LOLs? Or would you put it in OY, because the patient’s mishearing error depended on a near-miss similarity of sound between urine and hearing?

Thanks to Chak for this LOL from the Chuckle Bros:

When the New Yorker website has an outage, you see this message.

Hey, just a minute there! Are you saying there’s something wrong with that? It strikes me as an eminently reasonable basis for a preference.

Here is a sampler from recent episodes of an Australian strip that is new on our radar, Insanity Streak by Tony Lopes.