Frogs
And more frogs
Mouseover text: “I understand it’s hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I’m worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.”
Not a CIDU; just a map I found fascinating.
iNaturalist is a social network of biologists and fellow travellers. On their app, you can report sightings. I’m using their Seek app, which is an amateur plant identification app but isn’t tied into this database. (It will identify birds and insects if you can get them to stand still and pose well enough.)
The map varies between the banal (bumblebees and milkweed for Illinois) to the inappropriate (the invasive garlic mustard in PA) to the more seriously invasive (spotted lanternflies in NJ).
Unlike my Nextdoor feed, which tends to breathlessly report each siting of a coyote as if we should barricade ourselves inside, coyote is not mentioned on this map.
More info explaining this comic is here.
“They say it’s probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.”
Boise Ed sends this in: “I can’t recall ever seeing so clever a use of the fourth wall.”
JMcAndrew sends this in: “I’m assuming Curtis is watching the 1977 schlock horror film “The Incredible Melting Man” which might be the most obscure geezer movie I’ve ever seen referenced in a newspaper comic strip.”
Perhaps some relative of cartoonist Ray Billingsley was in this movie. Billingsley was born in 1957, so he would have been 20 when this was made.
Mark H sends this one in:
Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.
For those artists whose work deals primarily in mixed messages, this place seems ideal:
Following on to Friday’s post (comic repeated below) we have further works of Genii-us.
We should have suspected!
From Chemgal:
She notes, “I know phase changes, and expect someone else will immediately understand the bouba and kiki part, but I do not.”
Not sure “immediately” is the operative term, but it did sound vaguely familiar; Google finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, now alles klar. Even more interesting is searching “kiki bouba english”, which reveals that it’s not just an English phenomenon, although it does vary somewhat.
Oh, and hovertext is:
Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.
Radio has certain requirements. Sports announcing, too. Dead air is the enemy. Some of the most painful examples to me are long bicycle races (4+ hours) that end in a sprint stage. So until the last kilometer, not much is going on if there’s no breakaway. But 4 hours must be filled with announcing, regardless. Particularly painful if there’s only one announcer, not two.
A quick look around my dwelling shows 6 books that I’m partway through but intend to finish, a couple of which I haven’t make any progress on in at least a year. (Not counting ones I don’t intend to finish, or haven’t started.) Should I invoke a statute of limitations on these 6?
The New Yorker has posted a page of the magazine’s cartoons which were most liked on Instagram.
This one pairs nicely with Parisi’s one above.
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:
BobO submitted this XKCD (#2891) as a CIDU. I’ve zoomed the image to make the details easier to decipher.
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The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “I’m sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.“
P.S. I’m impressed that Randall Monroe drew each iteration of the square separately, and did not copy/paste anything.
