Comic Strip of the Day Comic strips

CSotD: Do They Know It’s Easter?

Bizarro (KFS) strikes a nostalgic note, intentionally or not.

I don’t think of Easter eggs as empty shells, but then I don’t think of them as this elaborately decorated, except in Eastern Europe where I doubt pysanky are mixed in with the candy.

But it did remind me of being a tiny tot some 70 years ago. We got sugar eggs at Easter that were hollow, but decorated inside with festive landscapes that you could see by peeking in the hole at one end.

The advantage of chocolate bunnies being that you could eat chocolate bunnies but you tried to keep the egg intact because it was art. Until you broke down and ate it.

Jonesy points out that eating the chocolate bunny is an immersive experience, though I blame the parents if the bunny is more than about four inches tall. I used to see two-foot chocolate bunnies advertised, but they were probably sold at the Noncustodial Parents’ Gift Shoppe.

And Fiona Katauskas suggests maybe we should stick to eggs and jelly beans, or else quit building coal-fired generation plants and driving gigantic SUVs and monster trucks and so forth.

Over at Rhymes With Orange (KFS), it seems the bunny is quiet quitting, and I hope he likes his Easter side gig, because he’s blowing his chances of promotion at his main job.

Just kidding. He never had a chance of being promoted. Take the day, Bunbun.

Which, speaking of rabbits walking out the door, reminds me …

The late Margaret Shulock still holds the record for Best Easter Bunny Cartoon for this 2007 Six Chix (KFS).

Also in the category of seasonal humor, Daddy’s Home (Creators) brings up an old legend I’d forgotten about.

Rice does not make birds swell up and explode. Nor does it make brides swell up and give birth, though that was the original intent.

But when the exploding bird rumor became popular, people had to come up with an alternative handful of grain. Because, of course, you have to throw something.

This 1950s-era Dennis the Menace (KFS) has been a lifelong inspiration and one of these days I’m going to do it.

Frazz (AMS) also goes for seasonal humor, but with some relatively easy-to-answer questions.

You don’t play baseball in the rain mostly because of a small, hard ball that moves at blinding speeds and becomes slippery when wet. Ray Chapman is the only player to die directly by being hit with a ball, and that was in dry weather but it would have to be, because they halt the game when it rains.

As noted.

Chapman’s death lead to a banning of the spitball, but I also remember when we had baseball first activity period at Camp Lord O’ The Flies, while the grass was still dewy. We were practicing baserunning, but when Andres — who was a big 14-year-old — planted to round first, he slipped on the dew, landed on his hand and spent the rest of the summer in a cast.

It was a boxer’s fracture. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a baserunner’s fracture.

Probably because they don’t run bases in the rain.

This week’s Betty (AMS), in which Bub cooked frozen fish and chips at her direction, while wearing a tie, reminded me of what I learned the year I was a waiter at Camp Lord O’ The Flies, which was to call the head cook “Chef.”

I don’t know what he was called the other 10 months of the year, and the rest of the kitchen crew just called him “Virgil,” but we were told to call him “Chef” and one thing you learn as a waiter is not to piss off the cook, and so “Chef” it was.

Apparently that’s not a universal rule. A decade later, I did a mercifully short stretch waiting tables, and automatically referred to the head cook as “Chef.” I was the only one who called him that, which gave me astonishing benefits in terms of getting what I wanted when I wanted it.

As it happened, he wasn’t a chef and he wasn’t even a very good cook, but that’s not an issue with which waiters need concern themselves.

The fact remains that job titles can’t change the way frozen fish and chips come out.

You might be surprised how rarely real chefs say “Pass the ketchup.”

You might also be surprised at how an advancement in job title can be a decline in everything else. As Non Sequitur (AMS) notes, a promotion can come with little more than an exalted position in the line of fire.

“Job Title in Lieu of Raise” is for mooncalves, while, if there is a raise, it won’t compensate for stress or the height of the fall when you get pushed over the edge.

I knew a Circulation Director so skilled in leaving others holding the “Here” that he got an innocent assistant to resign over some bookkeeping irregularities rather than be charged with embezzlement.

Then he tried to offload a shortfall of several thousand dollars on my department but I drummed up sufficient sponsorships to escape.

He left us to be circ manager at a much larger paper and then on to one even larger than that, but I Googled him just now and he’s a consultant, so I guess somebody finally wised up and caught him.

I love a happy ending.

Tony Carrillo takes a step into media and politics with today’s F Minus (AMS).

I once wrote a column wondering what would happen if the fellow rushing to tell Congress not to regulate children’s television because it’s really not all that influential, were to accidently swap briefcases with the fellow rushing to tell McDonald’s they should buy ads on TV because it is unsurpassed at getting people to buy things.

Meanwhile, over in the news department, they honestly believe that polls reflect public opinion. They are blissfully unaware of their own role in shaping that opinion.

With 1 as “very much” and 5 as “not at all,” how much do you believe in self-fulfilling prophecies?

The kids of Grand Avenue (AMS) have discovered ancient documents. My teacher brought in candle molds and flatirons. His brought in some books the thrift shops won’t accept.

Which brings to mind this ancient song:

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Comments 11

  1. Jiminy taught me how to spell encyclopedia. What he didn’t teach me was the plural form.

    Today they call off games ahead of time even if it’s only a prediction of rain if the date is important enough. It’s happened more than once that a “rainout” involved no actual rain.

    My childhood favorite Easter treat were the half (flat-bottomed) chocolate eggs filled with whipped cream of various flavors, from vanilla, to maple, to fudge to other flavors I can only vaguely recall (sold in boxes of a dozen or more) because, as I’ve discovered over the past couple of decades, the only ones they still appear to make are only filled with marshmallow. While okay, they’re quite unsatisfying if you remember what the others tasted like.

    1. You’re obviously not a season ticket holder to the Richmond Flying Squirrels (AA-Giants). When we get a rainout, you’re half expecting to see an ark come down Arthur Ashe Boulevard. A rain delay? The crowd has moved into the concourse at least half an inning before the ground crew has headed for the tarp.

  2. If the entire set of books is an encyclopedia, is one of the books called an encyclopedium?

  3. That first panel is a jab at chocolate bunnies being hollow.

    The whole rice/birdseed thing is another prime example of traditions being so ingrained we don’t even know why we do them anymore, but it seems sacrilegious not to.

    On that same trend, Non-Sequitur is another prime example as why I despise slimy big business executive-types (but doesn’t everybody? unless you’re a politician looking for money that is)

    And I just love that F-Minus. Agreeing to disagree is one thing Americans excel at.

  4. Re: F Minus, one question the pollsters love to ask and then, it seems, love even more to misinterpret, is “Do you believe the country is heading in the wrong direction?” The number of people who agree with the statement is often very high, like 80%, but that result is always framed like it’s a criticism of the current administration. “More bad news for Joe Biden…” Seems to me it’s a question that people at either political pole would answer the same way. I sure as heck think the country’s headed in the wrong direction because it’s on the verge of being taken over by fascism. No doubt the fascists would say the same about liberalism. Which is just a restatement of Carrillo’s point. So, good cartoon.

  5. I’m guessing that Delainey and Rasmussen are doing a riff on F/X Network’s “The Bear” for the week.

  6. Why is the Dodgers’ manager happy in that Norman Rockwell painting? They’ve played 5 1/2 innings and the Dodgers are losing, so if the game is rained out, they’ll lose 1-0. Shouldn’t the Pittsburgh manager be gloating instead?

      1. I always interpreted the Dodgers coach’s reaction as “Look, it’s going to stop raining soon”.

  7. “Ray Chapman is the only player to die directly by being hit with a ball …”

    Technically, he’s the only player to die hit by a *pitched* ball in a *major league* game *after 1900*.

    I’m aware of two other instances. John Dodge was killed when hit by a pitch in a minor league game in 1916. And in 2007 Mike Coolbaugh was killed by a batted ball in a minor league game while working as a base coach. There are more players in the minor league than in the majors, so there are likely to be other instances. It’s also possible a player may have been killed by a hit or thrown ball while a baserunner (I am not aware of this having happened in the major leagues). One could also consider similar deaths in semipro and amateur baseball.

    The majority of fatalities in professional baseball have been from collisions between players (presumably brain injuries), usually a baserunner colliding with a fielder. I’ve come across a few of these in the minor leagues in the 1900-1920 time frame (but am too lazy to look up details at the moment). I do recall a 1974 incident in which two minor league teammates collided resulting in a brain injury and death.

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