# Reading the Comics, June 6, 2020: Wrapping Up The Week Edition

Let’s see if I can’t close out the first week of June’s comics. I’d rather have published this either Tuesday or Thursday, but I didn’t have the time to write my statistics post for May, not yet. I’ll get there.

One of Gary Larson’s The Far Side reprints for the 4th is one I don’t remember seeing before. The thing to notice is the patient has a huge right brain and a tiny left one. The joke is about the supposed division between left-brained and right-brained people. There are areas of specialization in the brain, so that the damage or destruction of part can take away specific abilities. The popular imagination has latched onto the idea that people can be dominated by specialties of the either side of the brain. I’m not well-versed in neurology. I will hazard the guess that neurologists see “left-brain” and “right-brain” as amusing stuff not to be taken seriously. (My understanding is the division of people into “type A” and “type B” personalities is also entirely bunk unsupported by any psychological research.)

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 5th is wordplay. It builds on the use of “problem” to mean both “something to overcome” and “something we study”. The mathematics puzzle book is a fanciful creation. The name Lucien Kastner is a Monty Python reference. (I thank the commenters for spotting that.)

Dan Collins’s Looks Good on Paper for the 5th is some wordplay on the term “Möbius Strip”, here applied to a particular profession.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 6th has Tiger complaining about his arithmetic homework. And does it in pretty nice form, really, doing some arithmetic along the way. It does imply that he’s starting his homework at 1 pm, though, so I guess it’s a weekend afternoon. It seems like rather a lot of homework for that age. Maybe he’s been slacking off on daily work and trying to make up for it.

John McPherson’s Close To Home for the 6th has a cheat sheet skywritten. It’s for a geometry exam. Any subject would do, but geometry lets cues be written out in very little space. The formulas are disappointingly off, though. We typically use ‘r’ to mean the radius of a circle or sphere, but then would use C for its circumference. That would be $c = 2\pi r$. The area of a circle, represented with A, would be $\pi r^2$. I’m not sure what ‘Vol.C’ would mean, although ‘Volume of a cylinder’ would make sense … if the next line didn’t start “Vol.Cyl”. The volume of a circular cylinder is $\pi r^2 h$, where r is the radius and h the height. For a non-circular cylinder, it’s the area of a cross-section times the height. So that last line may be right, if it extends out of frame.

Granted, though, a cheat sheet does not necessarily make literal sense. It needs to prompt one to remember what one needs. Notes that are incomplete, or even misleading, may be all that one needs.

And this wraps up the comics. This and other Reading the Comics posts are gathered at this link. Next week, I’ll get the All 2020 A-to-Z under way. Thanks once again for all your reading.

## Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.