Tag / Mary Lawton

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – April 26, 2026

Boise Ed sends this in. [Бојси Ед го испраќа ова]

“The modern Macedonian alphabet consists of 31 letters, including 5 vowels (А, Е, И, О, У) and 26 consonants, with six letters unique to Macedonian: Ѓ (gj), Ѕ (dz), Ј (j), Љ (lj), Њ (nj), and Ќ (kj). It was officially codified in 1945 by a commission in Yugoslav Macedonia….Spoken as a first language by around 1.7 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia.[” (Wikipedia)

Six unique letters in a written language that’s the primary language of only 1.7 million people. In the age of computers, that’s a fairly easily solvable problem by designing a font. One wonders, though, how this worked back in the typewriter era. I get the implication that perhaps they used a Cyrillic typewriter with combinations of letters, such as the Cyrillic version of kj for Ќ.

A bit of information omitted.

Speaking of Great Blue Herons, there’s a rookery near me. You can see the nests high up in the trees — about as high up as they could put them, considering the males are about 5 lb and the females about 3 lb, plus the weight of the nest and the eggs / hatchlings. The rookery is persistent — it’s been in the same location at least 5 years now. The arrival of the young roughly coincides with the trees getting covered with leaves, so the nests can’t easily be seen.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 27th, 2024

Kilby comments: This Macanudo isn’t really “laugh out loud” funny (it’s closer to an “Awww”), but I found the diagonal framing (and the “lensing” effect in the title panel) so impressive that wanted to share it with everyone:

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The strip is even better if you open the image in a new tab (or window), and let it fill the screen.

P.S. As long as we are reminiscing about summer, here’s how Calvin & Hobbes spent a similar day (three decades ago):

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P.S. The fact that Bil Keane drew a few of his own “grown up children” strips doesn’t make that Ink Pen any less funny.

Danny Boy was kind enough to send in these LOLs.

Nancy Classics this week gave us this comic from 1955. Half dollars almost call for a geezer alert. Relatively few of them are still made in the U.S.

Dollar coins are no longer minted after multiple failures to gain acceptance (Susan B. Anthony, Sakagawea, U.S. Presidents). The U.S. Mint does produce some American Innovation Dollars, but these are not intended for circulation and are sold at a premium.

From 2001-2020, the U.S. Mint produced half dollars only for collectors because the Federal Reserve already had plenty, but limited production has now resumed.

In 2023, the United States Mint produced a total of 11.38 billion coins for circulation. Here’s the breakdown by denomination:

  • Pennies (1 cent): 6.58 billion
  • Nickels (5 cents): 1.24 billion
  • Dimes (10 cents): 2.37 billion
  • Quarters (25 cents): 1.15 billion
  • Half dollars (50 cents): 40.2 million
by EditorM

DUST

Is the joke just that there are social distinctions even among these kinds of items? Or is there an aspect that “dustbin” might be more of a British-sounding term and thus carry some cachet for those American cans?

Featured image (at top): “The dust-heaps, Somers Town, in 1836.” From an engraved wood print, circa 1880.
From this UC Santa Cruz site, about Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (whose early drafts reportedly were titled Dust).

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – June 18th, 2022

Thanks to Bill R, who says “It’s like they’re daring us to figure it out”. Which is why there is a CIDU category (“tag”) on this, along with the “(Not a CIDU)” for the OYs list in general. Look, don’t question it too hard. Oh, and it’s not a pun really, but gets an OY as a language-related item. Also this list was sitting bare too long …

The usage they’re disputing over was taught in my schooldays as one of “those common mistakes to be avoided”. 

OK, I think (but am not positive) that I get the alternate meaning the joke depends on — from too many crime shows, the best deals a defendant’s lawyer might hope to extract from a prosecutor would involve setting no additional jail time, so the defendant gets to “walk away” or “take a walk”.

First I thought the outside guy was wearing an odd bathrobe; but throw in his laurel wreath and I guess he is at a toga party. But not the inside guy. Oh well, it doesn’t seem to affect the joke.

Possible cross-comic banter, based on spelling of the name?