Sent in by J-L, who says “It involves Jon trying to trick Garfield into taking a pill, and how Garfield tries to frustrate Jon’s plans. My family laughed at this because recently we have been trying to feed a pill to our dog, Honey Bun.  While the first few times were successful (it was easy to hide the pill in some delicious food of some sort), eventually Honey Bun got wise to our efforts and would spit out the pill, no matter how delicious the food was.” We agree, it is good to see Jon getting the better of Garfield now and then.

In another main segment of the domestic companion-animal kingdom, here is a dog who knows a lot but not everything:

This RWO was sent in by Le Vieux Lapin, who says “An LOL? An OTW? At the very least it’s a bit more off the wall than I expect from Hilary Price.”

I was a bit dithery over whether it could be considered a CIDU. But if there is somebody not familiar with Tetris it might briefly be a CIDU for them; but would not hold up for a day’s discussion.

Although I saw immediately that it was doing Tetris, I didn’t catch that the word PETRIS was reflecting that there are domestic pets in the scene. I thought for a second that the PETR- was the key part, and was using the Greek-derived stem for “rock” or “stone” — so that the falling tetris pieces would turn out made of stone, and were on their way to a destructive crash. Nice relief that they are pets and end up cozily tucked in.

The Arnold Zwicky blog has remarked on this cartoon twice, once yesterday when it was reprinted ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2021/10/10/enduring-classics/ ) and once in 2010 when it first appeared ( https://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/04/11/another-playful-portmanteau/ ) Zwicky seems surprised that people today are still quite familiar with Tetris, and that is the main subject of yesterday’s column. [Oh wait, I should be saying “last Sunday’s blog” not “yesterday’s”; though I am writing this bit on Monday 2021-10-11.]

The first two panels are so familiar as a turnabout joke, with a variety of particular punch lines, its nice to see Horace coming up with something different.