Tag / Gasoline Alley

by zbicyclist

Merry Christmas

Just as in TV shows and movies, we don’t see people on the toilet, there must be part of the Santa experience they don’t show.

Santa – the true story

Yes, Fuzzy Math Gurus, there is a Santa Claus.

There are “facts” floating around the internet, “proving” that one Santa just couldn’t do it all, but they fail too see the obvious conclusion — FRANCHISING!  This also explains why “Santa” is often known as “Santa Claus”. 


Let me explain:

1.  Yes, it’s true Santa would need to make 822.6 visits per second, or 2,961,360 per hour.  However, if we assume that there are 740,340 worldwide Santas (the exact number is known only to the Salvation Army), then each Santa has to make 1 visit only every 15 minutes.

2.  Roughly speaking, this is

5 minutes for travel (footnote below)
1 minute for sorting out that house’s gifts
1 minute for chimney diving / lock picking
3 minutes for gift arranging
2 minutes for cookie eating
1 minute for exiting premises and returning to sleigh
2 minutes “slack” time for unforseen events (most commonly, large dogs)
—
15 minutes

3.  “Santa” is, of course, a very sought after title, and the geographic franchises to be the local “Santa” are subject to yearly adjustments due to population shifts.  The changes in the legal paragraphs governing geographic territories in the “Santa” agreement are called “Santa Clauses”, a term which eventually has been commonly applied to “Santas” themselves.

Thanks for the opportunity to clear this up.

Footnote: The travel time has been reduced considerably in this century by the use of “jet sleighs” manufactured by Boeing.  The original model 7 sleigh, in fact, is what gave the Boeing corporation its name.  Elves, noticing how the new sleighs (with, sadly, aluminum reindeer) bounced from housetop to housetop, cheered “Boing! Boing!”, which in an Elvin accent sounded like “Boeing! Boeing!”. 

[Mike Kruger, December 2003]

by zbicyclist

Labor Day: Do Cartoonists Work?

Some examples of cartoonists taking it easy on Labor Day. That’s not accurate, of course, because these comics would have been drawn some days ago.

Nancy steals from the future.

Arlo and Janis hearken back to an older Nancy comic:

Tank McNamara could just put new dialogue into the radio show form he often uses.

Gasoline Alley often just closes down.

by zbicyclist

Recent or Old?

The New Yorker has a feature called Laugh Lines. The challenge there is to place several cartoons in chronological order. We’re going to play a version of this with pairs of cartoons that appear in the CIDU archives. Each pair will be from the same comic, so style will be a clue. The link with the letter points to the original posting here at CIDU. The years aren’t that far apart, because they only go back to when Bill had to restart the site. I’ve added a couple at the end that aren’t from the CIDU archives and are farther apart.

Pair #1. A:

B:

Pair #2. A:

B:

Pair #3. A:

B:

#4, a triplet (not from CIDU archives)

A:

B:

C:

#5 (not from CIDU archives)

A:

B:

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 20th, 2024

Boise Ed submitted this Cornered panel, commenting: “What a great put-down!“

…
P.S. A German flasher would hope she says: “That’s gross!“
P.P.S. To which he would then reply: “Dankeschön!“

F.Y.I.: Is everyone is already prepared for the upcoming holiday(s)?

How to tell a fruit from a vegetable:

…
Your attitude towards caramelizing may depend on whether you’re the one who does the dishes. Similarly with dishes such as tahdig, “a beautiful, pan-fried Persian rice that is fluffy and buttery on the inside with a perfectly golden crust, which is the layer at the bottom of the pot.” — if you make it right. The first few times might not produce “a perfectly golden crust”.

And we couldn’t leave without a couple of nods to autumn.

The character in the leaf pile is Wallace’s mom:

This one’s from 1962, when leaf burning was still a tradition:

by multipleciduers

Labor Day 2024

A bit of nostalgia here, since we seem to have been in a continual U.S. political campaign since 2018, with little or no letup.

The day after Labor Day used to be the traditional day for school to start, but the start has crept backwards: the local schools start a full two weeks earlier. Are there schools that have the patience to wait until after Labor Day? (colleges don’t count).

Since this is CIDU, we’re including this one, that’s not so much a CIDU as a search engine lookup for Hokas.

Labor Day is typically the end of the period when vacations are taken for adults as well, at least those who have children in school.

And to close out with a return to a pet view :