by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 28th, 2024

This sub-feature of the SFPC repertoire rarely does much for me. But this instance worked well — maybe because it isn’t really “for the epically/brutally challenged” as much as “for the nightly news evaluation challenged”. 

This was a momentary CIDU — I was puzzling out which side of the deal was losing, and why — until the GoComics comments cleared it all up. If you still need a clue, look at those pages in his right hand.

Yes, we don’t publish synchronicities any more. But two comics on the obscure theme of squirrel pushing showing up not just on the same day, but right next to each other in my GoComics feed, was too much to resist.

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 Kilby

That’s not what the author meant!

I recently ran into not just one, but a pair of (independent) comics that I just happened to completely misinterpret when I first read them. Both readings were humorous, just, well, “different”.

At first glance I thought the woman was trying to trick innocent candidates into volunteering (only first-timers would be so silly as to actually raise a hand; anyone with jury experience would know that maintaining a low profile is the best strategy to escape selection). Then I re-examined the artwork and realized that the gag was just a simple pun. Ooops.

The author wasn’t making any unusual wordplay with “a star is born“, but I mistakenly identified a joke that was not there. The German term for “cataract” is “grauer Star“, and I forgot that it’s not called that in English, and was expecting the “googly eye” to go blind in the next day’s strip. Ooops again.

Feel free to chime in with similar experiences, if you like.

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 Kilby

A Nasal Asynchron-Ewwwcity

There’s nothing very mysterious about this Wallace the Brave strip (it does help to be familiar with Spud’s somewhat odd personality):


However, that strip reminded of a “Win, Lose, Drew” comic from mid-December:


I seriously doubt that Drew Litton was referring to a specific player, but most of his comics do refer to current sports events. Were there an unusual number of overly “picky” offsides penalties this year? Or was there some other football incident to which this comic is referring?

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

Identifies as a Colt

Thanks to Boise Ed for sending this in, and affirming that the surface joke is puny but obvious. (That this exec is trying to hold the mascot responsible for the team’s poor performance.)

But then, what kind of a mascot is that, anyway? The writing says Colts, twice, but the costume is a bird. Red because Cardinal? Sharp beak because Raven? Is that confusion a reason the poor thing has failed to energize the fans, and they in turn have failed to energize the players?