And I have three last strips from last week to talk about. For those curious, I have ten comics for this week that I flagged for mention, at least before reading the Saturday GoComics pages. So that will probably be two or three installments next week. It’ll depend how many Saturday GoComics strips raise a point I feel like discussing.
Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon for the 5th uses arithmetic as the archetypical homework problem that’s short enough to fit in a panel but also too hard for an adult to do. And, neatly, easy for a computer to do. Were I either shark here I’d have reasoned out the square root of 144 something like this: they’re not getting homework where they’d be asked the square root of something that wasn’t a perfect square. So it’s got to be a whole number. 144 is between 100 and 400, so it’s got to be the square root of something between 10 and 20. 144 is pretty close to 100, so 144’s square root is probably close to 10. The square of 1 is 1, so 11 squared has to be one-hundred-something-and-one. The square of 2 is 4, so 12 squared has to be one-hundred-something-and-four. The square of 3 is 9, so 13 squared has to be one-hundred-something-and-nine. The square of 4 is 16, so 14 squared has to be at least one-hundred-something-and-six. And by then we’re getting pretty far from 10. So the only plausible candidate is 12. Test that out and, what do you know, there it is.
Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 6th is a riff on the monkeys-at-keyboards joke. Well, what keeps monkeys-at-typewriters from writing interesting things is that they don’t have any selection. They just produce text to no end, in principle. Picking out characters and words that carry narrative is what makes essayists and playwrights. … That said, I think every instructor has faced the essay that is, somehow, worse than gibberish. The process is to try to find anything that could be credited, even if it’s just including at least one of the words from the topic of the essay, and move briskly on.
Larry Wright’s Motley for the 6th is a riff on the idea tips are impossibly complicated to calculate. And that any mathematics might as well be algebra. My question: what the heck calculation is Debbie describing here? There are different ways to find a 15 percent tip. One two-step one is to divide the bill by ten, which is easy and gets you 10 percent. Then divide that by two, which is not-hard, and gets you 5 percent. Add together the 10 percent and 5 percent and you get 15 percent. A one-step method is to just divide by six. This gets you a bit under 17 percent, but that’s close enough. It just requires an ability to divide by six.
There’s other ways to go about it, surely. There are many ways to do any calculation you like. Some of them have the advantages of requiring fewer steps. Some require more steps, but hopefully easier steps. Debbie is, obviously, just describing a nonsensically complicated calculation, to fit the needs of the joke. I’m just trying to think of what a plausible process would lead into the first panel and still get the right answer.
My many Reading the Comics posts are at this link. Essays which mention Sherman’s Lagoon should be at this link. Other essays with The Buckets should appear at this link. And other essays discussing Motley Classics should be here.
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