Comic Strip of the Day Comic Strips

CSotD: A Camel, not a Woodchuck

Mike Mike Mike knows what day it is. And now so do you!

I agree with Parisi: The distance and anonymity of the Internet lets people say things they’d never say face-to-face. You have to be a close relative or somewhat pitiable to get away with such behavior in person.

The solution might be to do away with keyboards and make everybody comment on camera. And then it would go to their mothers and it would be up to the moms to post it online.

Though that would likely cut things down to the point where Mark Zuckerberg would have to take a second job to make ends meet.

Sounds like a win-win.

Another highly addictive bit of technology, and Bub offers a bit of metaphysical philosophy: If a person runs without their FitBit, did it happen?

Back in the Good Old Days, people would use distance as a measure, which makes sense because distance IS a measure, after all. But everybody knew it wasn’t exact. Even if you drove your regular running course, you weren’t — I hope — backing up the car to your doorstep to start and if anyone wanted to get really picky, your car’s odometer wasn’t that precise and it would depend on the inflation of your tires.

Which sounds like taking things to a ridiculous extreme, but now people are measuring it in steps, which is also ridiculous.

Run or run not. There is no “distance.”

This is very well done. I suppose he might have had more desks, all but one occupied, but no need for clutter. And the way Dator sets it up, the first thing you focus on is the leopard, but what’s hanging from his mouth is not clear enough so that the gag explodes when you get to the caption.

Also, I don’t think it would work as well if she spoke in a speech bubble: The fact that you had to look off the picture adds to the element of timing.

I got caught unintentionally featuring a rerun last week, so I gave this one a close look, because there are so many pages in that paper that I thought it must surely be from the 1980s.

It’s been awhile since couples could exchange sections over the breakfast table, though the NYTimes keeps asking me if I’d like to add some family members to my on-line subscription.

Which is quite a switch, because back in the days when you could split the Times up into eight or ten sections, it still only counted for them as one paper. Now — despite going from a doorstop to a pamphlet — they’re hoping to get credit for extra readers.

I sure picked the right time to hit retirement age.

It is, indeed, gumbo season. Jimmy Johnson lives down on the Gulf Coast, where they’ve just gotten a blast of why I used to make gumbo up here in the frozen north. It not only warms you up, but sticks to your ribs, which I suppose is why, down there, you might not want it in summer.

I’m on Janis’s side that gumbo contains whatever you’ve got and hopefully a mix of meat and seafood. As for file or okra, I never thought it was a choice between one or the other, except file’s harder to come by up here in Yankee territory.

I’ve been known to try to fake it by dripping a little lemon juice in, but not successfully. However, if I can’t find okra, we’re having soup.

Beans ARE protein, so Mamet wins this one by default. Except I’d expect the conversation to take place at an Asian place than a Mexican one. We have a lot of Thai and Chinese places where the menu acknowledges that the base recipe is the same and only the beef/chicken/seafood changes.

We don’t have good Mexican food this far East, but I remember a place in the Springs that you knew was the real deal because there was at least a two-to-one Chicano-to-gabacho head count, the music was Mexican rock instead of mariachi, and what went on top of your beans and rice and enchiladas was a full scoop of sauce.

The rule I learned as a young travelin’ man was that the quality of Italian food decreases East to West and the quality of Mexican food goes the opposite. Chinese and Thai seem pretty evenly distributed, and I would assume gumbo is a North/South issue.

Juxtaposition of the Day

The Tom Toro piece is dedicated to Karoline Leavitt, who wouldn’t get the gag and thinks that’s actually how polling works, while the Non Sequitur is dedicated to the people of Minneapolis who are in far more danger of running down their batteries than of running out of idiots to video.

Seemingly to prove both cartoons, the President of the United States has addressed the Polar Vortex by claiming it’s proof that global warming is a hoax.

They’ve been hip to him in South Africa for some time now.

We’ll deal with all that tomorrow.

I hope you weren’t looking for a thread throughout today’s offerings; I obviously didn’t have one. This Speed Bump made me laugh despite the fact that I don’t like bagpipe jokes, having spent a couple of years in an Irish pub band that intersected on a regular basis with real pipers.

It’s not that bagpipes sound terrible. It’s that most people who try to play them sound terrible. I think you have to be given a set before you can walk in order to play them well.

One St. Patrick’s Day, we had a gig where the owner excitedly told me he’d also hired a piper, then told me who it was, to my horror. I warned the other bandmembers, who lived an hour away and had never encountered the fellow, but they laughed it off until his turn that night, when we’d all fled to the parking lot with them saying variations of “Jayzuz” and apologizing for having doubted me.

However, I’m inspired to teach my dog to play the uilleann pipes — which have better chromatic range than the war pipes — like this:

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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Comments 18

  1. I’ve always felt that what we really need is an app that enables someone to deliver a punch to the face via keyboard. That’d cut down the trolling by about 99%. Probably cut down social media about the same. Like you say, a win-win.

    Betty cracked me up. Been there, done that, way too often.

    1. I wouldn’t be surprised if that already existed or was in develpment.

    2. I have thought a tazer would be awesome as well-
      especially on unsolicited phone calls/spammers/scammers etc.

  2. I see a lot of people checking watches when they swim laps. I just count in my head and look at the wall clock to make sure I didn’t drop 10 in my head.

  3. Our winter go-to has always been chili…without the beans, thank you very much.

  4. Here in the Pennsyltucky portion of the state, we have lots of wonderful Indian food places and decent Thai, but the Chinese food is not good — too sweet, not spicy, and generally bland. There is a surprisingly good Mexican place near my house. It just changed hands, so we’ll see if they can maintain the quality. There is also a lot of Halal places; there was a pizza place that had Halal pepperoni that is way better than what is usually put on pizzas, but they had a fire a year ago and haven’t reopened. Most “Italian” restaurants are just pizza joints that have a few pasta dishes on the menu. I miss living outside of Philly where there was an abundance of great food from many cuisines (except Mexican). I’m a Texas transplant and deeply miss Tex-Mex (about the only thing about the state I do miss!)

  5. I gotta admit, I chuckled the first time I saw the hump day commercial. Like most ads, it got pretty old pretty fast.

  6. Generally, “choice of protein” is offered that way because there’s a plant-based option among the meats. (Chipolte’s sofritas, for example, is tarted-up tofu.)

    Decent ethnic food is a lot easier to find now. I grew up just outside LA and the only Asian restaurant in town was Americanized Cantonese; my hometown is now majority Asian (with the restaurants one would expect). Rochester NY, a food desert when we arrived in 1980, now has quite a good Mexican restaurant, run by members of the family that started out feeding Mexican seasonal laborers in the fields around Sodus.

    1. We’re losing a Chinese carry-out place known as the Gas Station Chinese Place because it’s in the corner of a convenience store, which was just sold to a chain that doesn’t want the restaurant. The reporter in our local paper missed the scoop by not looking at their Yelp comments in which homesick Dartmouth students from China write “This is how my mother cooks!” There are a couple of other places in town, but none that cook like Mom.

  7. Diana Kennedy’s “Cuisines of Mexico” was my salvation back when I lived in NYC. It’s not Cali or Tex Mex but oh, those chile rellenos. Assuming you can cook and find the ingredients where you live. Abe’s Books, $6.

  8. That leopard cartoon really is brilliant. Not so much in the gag but how it’s presented.

    As you said, first you notice the leopard on the left, then you read the caption, then you see the empty desk on the right. The whole setup is perfect.

    1. And I’ll bet he didn’t sit down and diagram it. It came out like that by instinct. Stand-up comedians do a lot of polishing and re-jiggering. George Wallace makes a bit of it, taking notes as he works. But for a cartoonist, you have to drop it as it is — there’s no next show to try another approach. (Though I guess rejected cartoons fill the role of stand-up material that fell flat.)

  9. Just a nitpick: Every culture on earth has a traditional vegan dish that is complete protein. For instance, in the US, it’s a peanut butter sandwich.

    Beans and rice form complete protein, you don’t need anything extra.

    Just FYI, I only allow myself one public nitpick per week, so roll your eyes if you must, but not too loudly, if you please.

  10. Mike, Mike, Mike,

    Word balloon, not (ugh!) speech bubble.

    Sincerely
    Mike

  11. I’ve had lots of great non-pizza Italian food in California, especially in and around San Francisco. And you can get filé online.

  12. As to the pipes, Rufus Harley, a Philadelphia jazz musician fell in love with the bagpipes and recorded a couple of albums years ago. There is a you tube video of him playing with Sonny Rollins and an amazing Japanese guitarist. This is not hipster irony, this man fell in love, mastered his instrument and made great music.

  13. I’m afraid I gotta go with the haters. Bagpipes sound like ” … an indignant, asthmatic pig”. And what’s the idea of playing Amazing Grace with them at funerals of non-Scots? People are sad enough, already.

    1. I thought that was a martial thing. There was a piper (and an honor guard from Camp Pendleton) at the (small, just family) funeral of my brother-in-law, a Marine vet from the Korean police action.

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