Three of the five comic strips I review today are reruns. I think that I’ve only mentioned two of them before, though. But let me preface all this with a plea I’ve posted before: I’m hosting the Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival the last week in September. Have you run across something mathematical that was educational, or informative, or playful, or just made you glad to know about? Please share it with me, and we can share it with the world. It can be for any level of mathematical background knowledge. Thank you.
Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean vintage rerun for the 10th is part of an early storyline of Funky attempting to tutor football jock Bull Bushka. Mathematics — geometry, particularly — gets called on as a subject Bull struggles to understand. Geometry’s also well-suited for the joke because it has visual appeal, in a way that English or History wouldn’t. And, you know, I’ll take “pretty” as a first impression to geometry. There are a lot of diagrams whose beauty is obvious even if their reasons or points or importance are obscure.
Dan Collins’s Looks Good on Paper for the 10th is about everyone’s favorite non-orientable surface. The first time this strip appeared I noted that the road as presented isn’t a Möbius strip. The opossums and the car are on different surfaces. Unless there’s a very sudden ‘twist’ in the road in the part obscured from the viewer, anyway. If I’d drawn this in class I would try to save face by saying that’s where the ‘twist’ is, but none of my students would be convinced. But we’d like to have it that the car would, if it kept driving, go over all the pavement.
Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff for the 10th is a joke about story problems. The setup suggests that there’s enough information in what Jeff has to say about the cop’s age to work out what it must be. Mutt isn’t crazy to suppose there is some solution possible. The point of this kind of challenge is realizing there are constraints on possible ages which are not explicit in the original statements. But in this case there’s just nothing. We would call the cop’s age “underdetermined”. The information we have allows for many different answers. We’d like to have just enough information to rule out all but one of them.
John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 11th is here by popular request. Jughead hopes that a complicated process of dubious relevance will make his report card look not so bad. Loweezey makes a New Math joke about it. This serves as a shocking reminder that, as most comic strip characters are fixed in age, my cohort is now older than Snuffy and Loweezey Smith. At least is plausibly older than them.
Anyway it’s also a nice example of the lasting cultural reference of the New Math. It might not have lasted long as an attempt to teach mathematics in ways more like mathematicians do. But it’s still, nearly fifty years on, got an unshakable and overblown reputation for turning mathematics into doubletalk and impossibly complicated rules. I imagine it’s the name; “New Math” is a nice, short, punchy name. But the name also looks like what you’d give something that was being ruined, under the guise of improvement. It looks like that terrible moment of something familiar being ruined even if you don’t know that the New Math was an educational reform movement. Common Core’s done well in attracting a reputation for doing problems the complicated way. But I don’t think its name is going to have the cultural legacy of the New Math.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 11th is another kid-resisting-the-problem joke. Wavehead’s obfuscation does hit on something that I have wondered, though. When we describe things, we aren’t just saying what we think of them. We’re describing what we think our audience should think of them. This struck me back around 1990 when I observed to a friend that then-current jokes about how hard VCRs were to use failed for me. Everyone in my family, after all, had no trouble at all setting the VCR to record something. My friend pointed out that I talked about setting the VCR. Other people talk about programming the VCR. Setting is what you do to clocks and to pots on a stove and little things like that; an obviously easy chore. Programming is what you do to a computer, an arcane process filled with poor documentation and mysterious problems. We framed our thinking about the task as a simple, accessible thing, and we all found it simple and accessible. Mathematics does tend to look at “problems”, and we do, especially in teaching, look at “finding solutions”. Finding solutions sounds nice and positive. But then we just go back to new problems. And the most interesting problems don’t have solutions, at least not ones that we know about. What’s enjoyable about facing these new problems?
One thing that’s not a problem: finding other Reading the Comics posts. They should all appear at this link. Appearances by the current-run and the vintage Funky Winkerbean are at this link. Essays with a mention of Looks Good On Paper are at this link. Meanwhile, essays with Mutt and Jeff in the are at this link. Other appearances by Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — current and vintage, if vintage ever does something on-topic — are at this link. And the many appearances by Andertoons are at this link, or just use any Reading the Comics post, really. Thank you.
nebusresearch 
Do you use the term ‘tape a show’ when recording on a DVD? I wonder if at some point after the New Coke fiasco some cartoonist came up with a comparison of New Coke and New Math.
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I do still talk about taping a show, although ‘recording a show’ is very slightly winning out. Not to brag, but I had an ironic record collection way before it was cool.
I don’t know of any New Coke-New Math cartoons, but I agree with your instinct that someone must have done it. It’s too good a match.
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Sorry for being a broken record with Stripper’s Guide entries, but here’s one with vintage interviews with E.C. Segar and the creators of “Skippy” and “Gasoline Alley” I thought you might like. One thing I wonder — was Skeezix a word in contemporary slang before GA?
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2018_01_28_archive.html
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No need to apologize; it’s a great bit you ran across here. Really feeling Segar’s comment about “All ideas seem good until they are drawn up. But after they’re all finished, their mirth-provoking possibilities, in my estimation, drop to somewhere below sea level.”
It looks like Skeezix, or
skeezicks'' orskeesicks”, was indeed 19th-century and early-20th-century slang. It started out, apparently, just meaning a rascal or rogue, and then took on affectionate connotations. Wiktionary has an example of it from P G Wodehouse’s 1912 The Prince And Betty. I haven’t read that one yet, but just from that I have to imagine it was used to mean a beloved rascal.LikeLike
For once it’s not the Strippers Guide on which I found something semi relevant http://www.superdickery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/1007supermathematics1iw.jpg
Superman using Supermathematics.
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Ah, nice example. Also a nice example of outthinking the problem, since it’d be too easy to try doing it by trying to figure out the volume of the jar and the volume (and packing) of the beans. Or figuring how many beans can be seen on the outside and working out how many have to be inside from that.
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Don’t look now, it’s the Kangaroo Cowboy!
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Now see, if the gang in Funky Winkerbean would make this I’d want to punch their little pretend comic book company a lot less.
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Some neat cartoons – my favourite, by a short head, is Mobius Trip. Geometry turned nightmare!
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Glad you like! Thank you.
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A newspaper Popeye question- In today’s installment the king of Spinachtovia(?) mentions Seahag’s son-in-law, Who or What married Haggy?
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This is a great question, and my love and I have been trying to figure it out. We have no idea. I didn’t even know the Sea Hag had a daughter, but then the recent vintage strip where we met the Sea Hag’s sister caught us by surprise too.
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