This Reality Check (AMS) raises an interesting question: Do you have to be a guitar player to get the joke?
My feeling is that you only need a very basic understanding of music to get a chuckle, because the G-Clef tells you it’s about music and you should know there are majors and minors that have little to do with Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers.
Then again, the days when every kid took some kind of musical instruction in school are over, so Whamond is taking a risk. But wotthehell, there is no joke so simple that someone won’t miss the point, and guitar players will be impressed that not only is that a minor chord, but it’s A Minor.
Meanwhile, over at Loose Parts (AMS), Dave Blazek offers a gag for people who shudder each time a cartoonist offers a gag in which polar bears and penguins mix. I hope a large percentage of readers would get it, but I’m often surprised at how many times the whooooosh flies overhead.
And I’ll add a note to compliment Alex Hallatt, who resolves the issue at Arctic Circle (KFS) with an explanation of the strip’s ongoing bear/bird mixing that is transparently ridiculous but more polite than telling sticklers to get a grip. And besides, if a polar bear can live in Sherman’s Lagoon (AMS), what are the possible limits?
Anyway, there are worse ways you can attract the critics’ attention, as witness this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Mother Goose & Grimm — AMS — August 20
Juxtapositions of the Day are generally coincidental, but this one seems different. Now, the 18th was a Sunday, the 20th a Tuesday, and Sunday strips generally have a longer lead time, which I think most comics aficionados know. So the two strips were not likely drawn as close together as they ran.
But what you might not know is that Jeff Parker, half the Dustin team, also assists Mike Peters over at MGG, which adds a tsk-tsk to the case.
It isn’t all that shocking in general, because a lot of cartoonists buy gags from writers.
But it’s important to remember what you’ve already put out there.
Barry Deutsch offers a timely reflection on comics and artificial intelligence, which I was tempted to pair as a Juxtaposition with this Non Sequitur (AMS):
The issue of cartoonists buying gags may disillusion some readers and there are still plenty of other cartoonists who insist on doing all their own work.
Then again, there are plenty of cartoons whose original creators are long since dead and gone, and yet the strips keep coming, with new artists and new writers every few years recreating the style of art and types of jokes that made those strips popular.
Keeping those popular strips going is a corporate decision, not an artistic one. My local paper runs 12 strips, of which three are reruns and six are zombie strips done by replacement artists, the creators having died.
I would suggest that if AI poses an immediate threat to cartoonists, it’s to those hired pens whose job is to crank out the same gags in the same style over and over and over.
Having rubbed elbows with Corporate for several years in newspapering, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see them realize that copying and reproducing can now be done by machines far cheaper than paying a human being to do it.
And I doubt most fans of those zombie strips would notice the difference.
As long as I’m in rant mode, let’s take a look at another sore spot:
I play guitar, so I got Dave Whamond’s gag above, but this xkcd got more of a shudder than a laugh, because my college had a freshman calculus requirement, and I had skipped my fourth year of high school math to take an additional foreign language course.
So I walked into freshman math with no idea WTF anybody was talking about and promptly failed the first semester, retook it in January and then was remanded to summer school to take the second semester course.
I still had no goddam idea how to figure out the thing about a tank filling and emptying and whatever.
I’ll admit to a certain amount of legerdemain and prestidigitation in much of my schoolwork, but this was the only time I did a genuine, full-bore Grade Beg.
Fortunately, the summer school course was taught by a professor and baseball coach known as “99 Klein” for his grading. He looked at my attendance record and asked me how I was doing in my other courses, and admitted that I’d probably only ever use math to figure out how much paint it would take to fix up my living room.
Then he gave me a D, which astonished my friends because Jake rarely graded that low.
But by gawd I’d (almost) earned it.
Which brings us to
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
If I’d been born a few generations later, I’d have been identified as neurodivergent, and when I doublechecked the spelling on that, I came across this delightful explanation of the term:
Neurodivergence means that a person’s brain functions differently from the typical brain. It is thought to be quite common.
It seems to me that “divergence” and “quite common” don’t really belong together. But, anyway, instead of being diagnosed as ADHD, I was diagnosed as spoiled, lazy and failing to live up to my great potential.
And as a wise man once said
Back when my problem was one of personal character rather than divergency, everyone had a cure, and it generally involved writing things down and being organized, or, to put it another way, to stop being like me and start being like them.
The benefit being that my own childhood taught me to try to see who kids are rather than who I think they probably are or ought to be. Having worked with a good number of them, I guess I’ve got more faith in kids than Steve Breen (Creators).
Will they like the no-phone policies? Probably not. Will they freak out? Probably not. Will they get used to it? Sure.
Will they find ways around it?
I’d be a little disappointed in them if they didn’t.
Ha! I thought your stickler point was going to be that seeing shoes isn’t seeing feet!
I was great at math, but Calc wasn’t until college back in the day. Then I got an F on my first Calc exam but pulled out a C for the semester. In the second semester I got an A on the first exam and a C for the course. Last actual math course I ever took…until Statistics. Where they graded on total points, it being statistics and all…for the final, it was a two hour exam worth 250 points; I needed 225 for an A and 70 for a B. So I skipped studying for that particular final to concentrate on others, went through the Stats final quickly and did what i knew. It added up to about 75, so I went back and added maybe 20 points just to be sure and walked out after about 20 minutes. Really got some stares as I handed it in and walked out.
My engineer father insisted I take high school calculus, but I reminded him it took me 4 years to get through 2 years of algebra. I took geometry instead and sailed through. Why geometry made intuitive sense to me and algebra might have well have been witchcraft is a whole ‘nother question.
Struggled through two semesters of calculus in college because you couldn’t get into medical school without it. Don’t remember a darn thing about it, but as a now retired physician, I don’t care anymore.
However, if you had ever had a patient who was drinking one liter of water per hour and peeing 25 milliliters per hour …
Since it’s stickler day I have to point out that any problem that starts out with constant input and output is highly unlikely to require calculus; algebra should suffice. The point of the xkcd scenario is that the output rate will depend on the pressure at the hole, which depends on the height of the liquid above the hole, which depends on the volume of liquid remaining in the tank. As suggested by the rollover text calculus can be removed from the problem by pressurizing the tank, although the pressure would need to be increased as the height of the liquid drops. (Yes, I’ve used a lot of calculus over the years.)
I wondered if I was the only one who picked up on “clown shoes” week. Could use them myself!
I was wondering about it too, and appreciate the explanation.
I also took calculus in high school and got a gimme grade from a kind teacher. Never understood it.
Every one of my Parent-Teacher Conferences beginning with 3rd grade started with the words, “Parnell is not living up to his potential.” I never found out who determined what my potential was or why I had to live up to it.
Really, when you get right down to it EVERYbody isn’t living up to their potential.
No matter how successful someone is, they could always do better.
It’s the name. Parnell sounds like a superior human.
I love the Charlie Brown and Jack Skellington earrings on the girl in the Barry Deutsch comic.
I’m sure there are plenty of cartoons that show cacti in the Sahara Desert, yet nobody complains about that
Many years ago, things like dyslexia, ADHD, etc. were lumped under the SLD (specific learning disability) label. A local school that specialized in helping these students when they were in their earliest years of school (you know – when it’s most important) emphasized to both students and parents that LD just means “learns differently”.
Had an interesting conversation with a retired special-ed teacher at the dog park this morning. She was emphasizing the difficulty of parents who hope their kids can become “normal” instead of helping them find places where they can excel. I ran a Quiz Bowl for several years where no team ever won without at least one Aspie on the team, but I also wrote about job coaches who helped find young people with disabilities areas where they could do really good work and find enjoyment. One job coach told me of a Dunkin Donuts where the other workers didn’t like her client, who had Downs, because he insisted on doing everything right. A lot of employers would kill to have people on staff who insisted on doing everything right.
Really enjoyed your opening today with Whamond’s cute musical gag. But it reminded me of another which has been bugging me since its recent appearance, an execrable attempt at a pun by the obviously musically illiterate Bob Gorrell:
https://www.gocomics.com/bobgorrell/2024/08/08
He was probably well pleased with his effort at a topical slur here, but undermines the entire premise of his “joke” by not being interested enough to take the 10 seconds of due diligence it would have required to Google the correct time signature.
Perhaps I too should join the Sticklers Association. (Sticklers’ / Stickler’s ??)
The 2 and the 4 probably refer to the year, I suppose. The cartoon might have worked better had Gorell made the slightest effort to mimic musical notation.
Also, it’s pronounced “walls” not “waltz.” I’ve pretty much passed over any cartoons based on not knowing the guy’s name.
“Dustin” is one of the lamest, most unoriginal strips out there .(“Speckticles” is a panel.) It is a rip-off of Zits (and every other teen-age character strip), except that none of the characters are likable. I believe this marks its first appearance on CSOTD, but we are treated to it daily in one of the local papers. No, I don’t have to read it. But you don’t have to watch an unfolding train wreck either.
Thanks for that, Mary.
Okay. In my defense, as Mike states, Sundays and dailies are drawn on different calendars, as are both strips. There were weeks and weeks between producing both gags. But more than that– I have a really shitty memory…