So, it has been hot around here. Extremely hot. Like, hot to the point that there’s nothing to do but form hyperbolic statements about the heat. This does not help anyone feel cooler, but it does help us feel like we’re doing something relevant to the weather. The result is that I haven’t had time to think about my comic strip reading. I’ve been very busy trying to pop my head off and leave it in the freezer. This has not worked. Our refrigerator’s dying and we have a replacement scheduled to arrive this week.
The consequence is that I haven’t had time to write my paragraphs about the comic strips that mention mathematical issues of substance. To not be a complete void, though, let me give you the marginalia. These are the comics that mentioned mathematics in some way so slight that I don’t think them worth further discussion. I’ll get to substantial stuff Tuesday. Thank you.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 15th has a kid doing remarkably well in a mathematics exam. It’s treated as extraordinary. This is the traditional use of mathematics as the hard subject.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 7th of March, 1932, and reprinted the 16th of July has Skippy talk about arithmetic lessons. Here, again, it could be any subject, but mathematics has the reputation for being a subject one wants to avoid.
Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes from a Multiverse rerun for the 17th shows off a girl talking about her father’s ability to help with mathematics homework. There is a theme developing in the past week’s mentions.
Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 17th has a ‘Fake Maths’ textbook, the falseness of it proven by the arithmetic being wrong. So that uses a different part of mathematics’ reputation, that of giving us things we can know are certainly true, or certainly false.
The weather should be much nicer the next few days. Trusting that it is, I’ll have an essay at this link Tuesday with a new Reading the Comics post. Thank you for understanding. It’s quite hard to do anything when it’s so hot you realize your couch is melting.
nebusresearch 
2 thoughts on “Reading the Comics, July 20, 2019: Heat Wave Marginalia Edition”