The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro of 3/25 returns us to Restaurant Row in Anteaterville:
(#1) The chef of Chez Le Fourmilier brings an ant farm to the table for the delectation of an enthusiastic diner wearing an ant bib (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-run strip, on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (CFSBs), which offer “100% of the daily recommended allowance of caffeine”:
(#1) Just in case you had a fleeting moment of wondering about it, there is no caffeine RDA (recommended dietary allowance — recommended by the US National Research Council); the RDAs are for nutrients, and caffeine is not a nutrient
C&H Sugar Bomb strips. Hummingbird metabolism. The getting-high sense of the noun buzz and its verbing. The near-instant buzz of concentrated caffeine. Adalbert Stifter’s 1845 novella Bergkristall.
From Heidi Harley on Facebook yesterday, a dialogue in her household:
[Heidi, about a Terry Pratchett book]: “this story is set on a strange magical planet called Discworld”
Jasper [7,2]: “so the whole place has no squirrels, because it’s been de-squirreled?”
To which I wrote:
Every so often I complain about the reanalyses shown by the kids in Rick Detorie’s comic strip One Big Happy, as being strained and implausible. Then I see things like this.
Two cartoons in my 3/14 (Pi Day) feed — a Bizarro and a Rhymes With Orange — that present challenges to understanding; if you don’t get certain cultural references, you don’t get the cartoons at all.
(#1) A Wayno/Piraro collabo; Wayno’s title for it is “Sectarian differences” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page). So, a snake and a frog, adversaries in real life; but then…
(#2) At the top level, a variation on woman’s complaints that they are given housewares as gifts on romantic occasions (suspend your gender assumptions); but then…
Then it’s no accident that #1 was published in the middle of March, three days before St. Patrick’s Day, which comes at the end of the mid-March run of special days and events (P2P: From Pi To Paddy):
— 3/14 Pi Day
— 3/15 Higashi Day on Ramona St. (see my 3/12/20 posting “Higashi Day cartoon 1: grim Bliss surprise”), but the Ides of March in the larger world
— 3/16 National Panda Day (see the Page on this blog on panda postings) — TODAY! (Take a panda to munch)
— 3/17 St. Patrick’s Day
(Little kids, but I pursue them into the weeds of sexual anatomy, though without the photos or raunchy talk. Take appropriate cautions.)
The One Big Happy cartoon from 2/9:
(#1) Once again, about the kids finding a word (un)familiar in a particular sense: the apparel noun hood
And the OBH from 2/17:
(#2) And minute ‘extremely small, tiny’
(Yes, “Higashi Day cartoon 3: sentence-initial anymore” is still on its way; it’s just turned out to be gigantic.)
From various Facebook sources, a JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein) cartoon on his Twitter site on 1/10/18, now, ouch, virally popular as most of the world is obliged to work from home:
(#1) Appreciate his facial expression
The last two panels of the Doonesbury for March 8th, one of Trudeau’s pointedly political strips, about people whose reputations have been soiled by their association with Helmet Grabpussy: what does it mean if you turn up as a character in a comic strip (especially this strip)?
Oh, so meta: not only do the two men — a now-grey-haired Mark Slackmeyer and an aging Mike Doonesbury — recognize that they are not entirely real people, but (despite their many apparently real-life experiences) also characters in a comic strip, they further recognize that indubitably real people, people from Meatworld (like Alan Dershowitz) can join them in Stripworld — and that when such a person materializes in Stripworld, it’s usually as an object of mockery. As Mike says, “that’s never good”.
Here at Ramona Electronica, the cartoons have been piling up haphazardly, making awkward barriers to even the smallest simulated movements around the labyrinth of virtual rooms. So now, a modest effort at house-clearing — to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
(Its winter counterpart is December 15th, Nishi Day, marking the send-off for the corresponding trip west, from Columbus to Palo Alto.)
I note that, ominously, March 15th is also — oh, Julio! — the Ides of March, but that the preceding day is that edibly mathematical event Pi Day and that only two days later comes the spring green of St. Patrick’s Day (which J and I experienced annually on the road in northern Arizona).
The inaugural Higashi Day cartoon is by Harry Bliss, in the March 9th New Yorker. But first — surely you saw this coming — a note on compass directions in Japanese.
An alert from Phil Rubin about this Tom Gauld cartoon:
(#1)
Gauld — who has a Page on this blog — does a lot of strips on genre writing of various kinds, including a series on mystery fiction (two more below). This one plays on the advice given to writers to write about what you know, so that if you want to write about some subculture, you’ll need to immerse yourself in it — to become, insofar as this is possible, an insider.
Somewhat problematic if you want to write about murders. On the other hand, murder mysteries are devices for taking readers into little worlds they might know nothing of — quaint English country villages, or change-ringing, or medieval monasteries, or thoroughbred racing, or Australian aboriginal life, whatever. Or several themes at once, as Edith Maxwell has done with murder mysteries set in 19th-century New England, among Quaker midwives. (Edith is herself a Friend in Amesbury MA, so she has first-hand knowledge of some of this; the historical setting and the midwifery, however, are acts of imagination, fostered by research.)
Will McPhail (in a New Yorker “Daily Shouts” piece on 7/1/18) thinks they socialize pleasantly with one another — have a coffee together, play pingpong, eat hot dogs, shoot some hoops — while speculating wryly about how you’re managing without them and fretting poignantly about when they can get back to helping you through your lives.
All about sex, but with two feet as the only bodyparts depicted and the verb bounce as the only sexually tinged vocabulary. Unfolding in a cartoon of ten gentle, unhurried panels featuring two wraith-like personalities, one blue-green, one red-purple.
(After the McPhail I’ll write a bit about sexual ecstasy as an altered state of consciousness, with a link to some decidedly hard-core writing about sex at the gay baths, but with no actual raunch here.)
