Okay, so exposing and satirizing clickbait and spam is not entirely an original idea. But what excellent execution there is in the deflating domain names!
Possibly inspired by the number of people who refer to a pickleball racquet, rather than paddle. Oar maybe not.
Typically when we’ve dealt with a long-form Cat and Girl, the cartoon has seemed to need some explaining, and we shoehorn it into a CIDU option of some kind. So what a pleasure it is to see them straightforwardly taking on some “complaint observational humor” (well, with exaggeration, but that’s to be expected).
This is a massive LOL, and jam-packed with easy and harder allusions as a sort-of CIDU element. Hey, I’m still struggling to decide if a particular Frederick Wiseman film is invoked. And is Sprechtswimming best understood in relation to Sprechstimme?
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.
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.
the lower one of this pair arrived in the mail and made me say, first, “Huh? What? IDU!” — but then “Maybe this is from an arc and the context will help”. The immediately previous comic did seem to go with today’s, and is printed below, as the upper of the pair. (The Girls are drowning in “history”, so maybe the recent mini-thread on time-travel — discussed here — would also fit as relevant, but it didn’t seem a strong case.)
Well, these do seem linked but different. What can provide a rescue from history? Technology maybe? No, says the top entry. Then maybe philosophy? Dopes the lower entry also say No to that suggestion? Or does it offer some hope? And how the heck can intoning Derrida’s name as parts of other words invoke any magic?
P.S. Those with behind-the-scenes interest can take a look at this excerpt from the tree of categories:
The artist’s title for this one is “Far From Home”, and the mailing message was “In the future all magazines will have one issue.”
I can pretty much follow the time-travel ruminations. But there is much more backstory than anything I remember them doing. But then, I haven’t been a fan forever — perhaps someone who has can tell us how this was all anticipated long ago…?
BTW, for regular readers of the comic, does the Girl have some sort of alter ego or doppelganger? Differentiated by number of hair spikes, and in this one by wearing shorts or skirt?
And by the bye, is “More’s Law” an accidental typo for “Moore’s Law” ; an intentional misspelling, meant to direct us to think about some actual person named “More” ; or an intentional misspelling, meant to direct us to the concept of having more rather than less?
Note that the quote about loneliness and solitude is from poet Marianne Moore. But if that’s what’s meant, it would still be Moore not More. So if it were written here as “More’s Law” there might be a joke that the Girl takes it to mean Marianne Moore rather than the late Gordon Moore.
But we can’t really make that emendation, as we would lose the relevance of “more” to the idea of the biggest milkshake. Which is itself still in need of some explication.
Comics I Don't Understand 