It’s not a deep puzzlement!

It’s not a deep puzzlement!
Since we previously dropped in on “Arlo and Janis, The College Years”, here is the current chapter.
The CIDU matter is, What-all is going on in panel 3? The red must come from the Mickey phone, and by panel 4 we see it has been swept to the floor on the other side. But the panel 3 scene doesn’t simply show the phone partway through its flying path — there are lots of twist indicators or something.
Thanks much to chemgal, who has done all of the work of writing up the background and the CIDU question:
I really don’t get the April 7th Arlo & Janis, though it is in the middle of a series, so maybe tomorrow’s comic will explain it. For those who don’t read A&J regularly, the set-up to this point is that we’re seeing a flashback to when A&J met while she was taking art and he was working at the bookstore, and in the previous couple of comics, Janis slowed things down:
So my question is, what does “college town” have to do with anything here?
And an auxiliary question from me: Who else thinks Arlo’s moustache is the most annoying thing ever?
Well, there’s a good OY on the left, and a good LOL on the right, and I’m feeling too lazy to get out the cropper, so let’s print it twice, once today, and once yesterday or tomorrow.
Not a huge LOL, but Tiger and Punkinhead here are reproducing a classic problem in the literature of logical representation, going back to Bertrand Russell.
An Arlo-LOL from Divad who says “I’ve got a pretty good guess what was on Arlo’s mind (in general), but I’m trying to not picture what he’s specifically thinking.”
“Zzz-mailing” makes it worth it…
No, not from the Non Sequitur strip. That’s instead a characterization of this Arlo and Janis.
Not “sent in by” but still suggested by someone: commenter Tyge at GoComics said “This looks like a CIDU to me. 8^( ”
Total mystery. But yields immediately to getting a definition .
A choreography that some of us are very familiar with! But what is that remark at the end?
This is something I made sure to rescue from the old site: after the first time I posted the 1996 sequence with Arlo’s father, somebody asked me to re-post it every year.
Unfortunately most of your comments are gone, but the 47 you posted in 2018 and 2019 are below.
From 2003:
From 1985:
Our first A&J is from Mark M, who asks “Why does she feel that way at 3 o’clock? Is this an example of an overreaction as CIDU Bill used to talk about?”
Possibly the discussion of overreaction Mark is thinking of included this thread.
(For a quick factual overview of “sleeping pills”, here is a web excerpt from a book by Wallace B. Mendelson, MD.)
And Jack Applin sent in another puzzling A&J. He says: “I do not understand this Arlo & Janis. Arlo speaks of the expression bone in her teeth, explaining how it comes from the bow wave of a fast-moving boat. OK, sure. However, the way the he says it implies that this is a standard expression, used in other contexts. “
“I might say Do you know where the expression ‘read the riot act’ came from?, because people use that without reference to the 1714 act of the Parliament of Great Britain, e.g., when their mother caught them coming home late.. Who says bone in her teeth without referring to a bow wave?”