
Right Now?



As a kid in the back seat, I used to look up after seeing “Watch for Falling Rock” signs to see if there were rocks falling. This, of course, was futile. Drivers on curvy mountain roads should be looking at the road, and looking for fallen rocks, not staring up at the bluff on the off-chance that there’s a boulder coming down right at this very second. Most, but not all, signs I see on the highway now say fallen, not falling.



Mark H. sends this in as a fourth wall breaker, and wonders: “Do cartoon characters count in base eight?”


Happy Father’s Day!





It took me years to learn not to say this, even though I like a wide variety of teas.
Why scientists marry late.

Mark H. sends this in: “Totally unexpected response.”



He’s gonna need a bigger raft.


JMcAndrew sends this in: “Firstly writing a memo asking for a tooth check is still pretty insane. Wouldn’t this be called an oral or dental exam and be performed by an actual dentist?
Also this isn’t what I expected a toot check to be. This could have been a much more interesting comic if they had the platoon taking turns farting in his face. [probably wouldn’t have made it past the comics editors then -ed.]
Maybe this is why the US army has a mandatory retirement age of 64 for senior officers?”

Ah, but those of us who worked in any bureaucrazy are well aware of something apparently nonsensical coming down from above. Is that really what they meant? Should we just do it as requested, or kick it back up for clarification? How many times can you question the bureaucrazy without getting labelled as a troublemaker?


JMcAndrew sends this in: “I believe the object on the left is an old style computer. I’ve spent longer than I care to admit contemplating the mechanics of how this “affair” might happen.”
This might be filed under “jokes that don’t work well anymore”. At the time this was done (1987), this would be hard. Now, linking computers to TVs is ubiquitous in several ways, most obviously via HDMI, which dates from the early 2000s. There’s some history of HDMI here: https://blog.solidsignal.com/tutorials/sordid-history-hdmi-revised-updated/
Parenting isn’t quite what it used to be, either (or, as JMcAndrew suggested, this deserves an Arlo tag).



And: would Alice’s condition be covered by United Healthcare?



Tony sends this one in, which began as a CIDU: “as I was writing this realized that the punchline was about a nose job. It didn’t even notice the change at first. I guess not having a nose must be pretty miserable, but I couldn’t even tell that sphinx was supposed to be a living creature.”







What’s the joke here?
Is there a pun in the name Arlo Hoyt?
This is common financial advice (e.g. in the book The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, which I just finished), or, famously, in Dickens novel, David Copperfield.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.
Or, could the joke be that Arlo Hoyt has claimed that he coined this common maxim himself, and has erected a status of himself in his honor?
For less helpful advice, certainly not what Dickens’ Mr. Micawber would have advised, we have this from Randy Glasbergen:




Rather dumb word-argument. But it prompts memory of an assortment of senior-targeted advertising campaigns which for a while used the phrasing “age 50 or better” or “age seventy-and-a-half or better” etcetera. It was supposed to be obvious, yet a sort of joke, that better would mean older. At least one that I heard regularly for a while did change to older; but then later reverted to better ; so I guess there was some complaint but it got resolved, or just overruled.



Come to think of it, probably the word-level associations of squashing things must have played a role in my lifelong aversion to the vegetable of that name.

Chak notes “I’ve read En attendant Godot several times, and I still don’t have a clue.”
Could one expect Godot to comment? Waiting for your comments below.

A couple of exercise-themes LOLs.



