Tag / Lalo Alcaraz

by Kilby

After Thanksgiving is before Thanksgiving

This cartoon by John Jonik was first published in the New Yorker exactly 41 years ago today, but I discovered it too late to add it to the Thanksgiving collection for 2023.

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The headline above is modeled after a quote by Sepp Herberger, coach of the German national football soccer team: “After the game is always before the [next] game.” Of course, discussing football (of either variety) can sometimes be even more explosive than discussing politics.

Mark H. submitted this XKCD (#2858) last year; although it did get embedded in comments (such as in the No-Politics Zone), it’s still worth a repeat in a post:

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P.S. The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.“

P.P.S. The link to the HuffPost article in the second panel still works (I already typed it in, so that you don’t have to).

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In Germany, it’s called “Erntedankfest” (literally: “harvest thanks festival”), and is celebrated on the first Sunday in October, but it is primarily an event for the liturgical calendar (both Catholic and Protestant), and is not (generally) celebrated by families at home.

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Several decades ago, my grandmother just happened to include a leftover bowl of (homemade) mac&cheese on the Thanksgiving dinner table, which resulted in some amused needling from my dad and uncle. However, both my sister and my aunt vigorously defended it, so that for many years thereafter, (fresh) mac&cheese became a standard component of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu.

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The final panel reminded me of the last scene in the song “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.

No cranberries? Frank and Ernest have suggestions:

by Kilby

Happy Halloween!

Besides the popular candy collection event, today is “Reformation Day” (in honor of Luther’s 95 theses), and here at CIDU it just happens to be Meryl A.’s birthday. Since she hasn’t been able to reschedule her day of honor, we will just have to wish her a very “Happy Birthday!” today.

Halloween is supposed to be a nice, innocent holiday, but some folks misinterpret it:

Then there are others who go really overboard:

Some kids are more scary than others:

Although very dated, this costume is still scary, too:

May Day!
by Kilby

Bonus Post: So help me, it’s May Day!

There are a number of reasons (and ways) that May Day is celebrated around the world, as these comics demonstrate:

Of course, the “real” reason for the holiday is its significance for the labor movement, but that is precisely why it has a somewhat tarnished reputation in the United States…

… especially because of certain militaristic “celebrations” in other parts of the world:

Therefore, since today is not a holiday in the United States, it may be necessary to postpone the celebration:

by EditorM

“Please help with understanding the Spanish”? — No, please help with understanding the humor!

Very considerate of the English captioning to inform us these are tamales, which is not mentioned in the Spanish, and may not have been that obvious. In panel 2, invierno means winter, but I’m glad to learn that it might be a way Spanish speakers refer to what Anglophone North America calls “the holidays” or “the holiday period”. 

But the crux of the puzzlement is in the final panel. We have the material for a pun, in partial split meanings: masa by itself can mean dough, and masacre written solid would be the obvious massacre, or as Google Translate for some reason prefers, slaughter. But we have to ask, if there are fluent or native Spanish speakers here, does this work for you as a joke?