Tag / Bill Holbrook

by EditorM

Bonus post: train of association

This is actually a long-running plot thread in Safe Havens: The boy called here “Leo” is also, in his other time and place, going to be Leonardo da Vinci. His education in science and technology as a youth in the modern world will underlie his great talents in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

Does anyone else here look at that and think, “Oh yeah, I remember that speculation coming up in The Door Into Summer!“? That 1956/7 novel by R.A. Heinlein involved quite a bit of plot interactions in different time periods, mostly by means of cold sleep, but with a smidgen of actual time-machine travel. The narrator tracks down an eccentric inventor in his hermitage, and learns about his device. When loaded with equal masses on its two pans, it can send them into other times, one to the past and one to the future by equal time-intervals. He extracts this recollection from the inventor:

The narrator does manage to get sent back from 2001 to 1970 (both of which, I remind you, were part of the unclear future when the book was published). After some plot-heavy manipulations, towards the end of the story he reflects:

by CIDU Bill

He Must Be Nuts

aug21 kevin acorns.JPG

Kilby writes: This Sunday Kevin & Kell strip‡ was drafted by CIDU Bill in 2019, but never posted. I’m not sure why Holbrook published this strip in February.† I would have thought that late fall or early winter would have been more appropriate, but perhaps the idea was to make the stash revelation completely unexpected.

P.S. (†) – Both the strip one week before and two weeks later are covered in snow; this one and the following Sunday strip look more like springtime.

P.P.S. (‡) – According to the remaining comments on the author’s website, there was originally a misspelling in the first panel, which was later corrected. Nice to see such artistic dedication!

by EditorM

Minor Mysteries and Oopses

These are non-CIDUs or semi–CIDUs, where the joke or main point isn’t seriously in doubt, but some specifics of the writing or artwork seem somewhat off, or incomplete, or in need of explanation or correction. (Yet we don’t want to get into the territory of mockery or purely complaining.)

This first one is from Chak who calls it an Oops, and comments “The oopsies I’m thinking of are about well-drawn comics that slipped up”. In this Fastrack, the custom paperclip seems to change position without physical cause.:

Here was a Between Friends that seems to be illustrating a familiar saying with a situation that shows something different. In the picture, isn’t it more someone who has gone down and may not come back up?

The Far Side

We have been getting plenty of submissions or suggestions for The Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson, both classic and recent, some scanned from books and some copied off the 2019-established web site. Some suggestions were meant as classic solo-CIDU posts, but others might fit into one of these quasi-CIDU categories.

But there’s a big problem, that Larson has made a public point of his wish to not have his cartoons reprinted without permission and not under his control. There are people who doubt that this would have legal force if he tried to enforce it; but it doesn’t seem entirely right to defy the wishes of someone whose work we appreciate and want to enjoy.

So generally we have been responding to submissions and suggestions with a reminder of those constraints.

But thinking about Internet standards, short of copying and reposting something, and short also of the middle ground of embedding something by link, there is the fundamental WWW action of linking. That is well established as not infringing anything.

It’s also pretty inconvenient! Hard to have informed discussion threads when the item being commented on is not visible in the same window or tab! Still, it’s not beyond our abilities, CIDUers.

Sent in by Findus as an artwork/layout question rather than overall CIDU, this linked Far Side cartoon raises for them the question “what’s with the lovingly executed reflection in the mirror that is not a ‚mirror image‘? Is this intentional?”

And from Brian R we have this linked Far Side cartoon, which he suggested as a CIDU – but then understood fine the next day!

There actually is a certain amount of good sense to the now-classic bit about tech support asking “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?” as made famous by “The IT Crowd”. Now here in Lard’s World Peace Tips, it is cited in the wrong order. Is that the joke? Or was it accidental? Or intentional but supposed to be meaningful here, where the kite in the picture seems to be “off” since it is not flying, so is poised to be turned on, i.e., launched? My gosh that was long-winded!

Down the Garden Path Dept. Can you convince me this Loose Parts does not at all involve people getting squeaky voices from inhaling Helium?