I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
The machine background. From Wikipedia:
The DECSYSTEM-20 was a family of 36-bit Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computers running the TOPS-20 operating system and was introduced in 1977.
The machines were routinely referred to as DEC-20s for short, preserving the association with DEC, the Digital Equipment Company.
The 12/20 Zippy finds our Pinhead outside the Ding Dong Deli, a diner and shop in Oak Ridge NJ:
(#1) Zippy is struck by the diner in its strip mall connection with Juba Realty and Newater Systems, calling up for him the very grounding of reality; Zippy is easily borne away on deep flights of fancy
Now it turns out that this is the second Ding Dong Deli Zippy strip — same artwork, different speech balloons. From my 4/27/16 posting “Ding Dong Deli”:
(#2) Fixed on the deli – dairy association
From my 2016 posting:
This is the alliterative Ding Dong Deli, a diner and shop, in Oak Ridge NJ (there is aso a Ding Dong Deli in Mahopac NY), naturally attractive to Zippy, who’s from Dingburg and who’s an enthusiast of Hostess snack products, especially Ding Dongs (see my 4/4/13 posting), as well as Ding Dong School and the song “Rama Lama Ding Dong”, both of which have been covered here.
Plus: (imitative) ding dong ‘sound of a bell ringing’ (as in the Christmas carol “Ding Dong Merrily on High”); (North American slang) ding dong ‘a silly or foolish person’; (vulgar slang) dong ‘a penis’; the Edward Lear nonsense verse “The Dong with a Luminous Nose”; and who knows what else. There’s a lot to experience in an imaginary Dongburg.
The 12/20 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro combines two disparate items from popular culture:
(#3) The Desert Crawl cartoon meme (in which the desperate and disheveled crawler, lost in the desert sands, cries out for water) plus Santa’s conventional hearty ho ho ho (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)
With H2O — both water and HO — as the hinge between the two.
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