Reading the Comics, March 14, 2021: Pi Day Edition

I was embarrassed, on looking at old Pi Day Reading the Comics posts, to see how often I observed there were fewer Pi Day comics than I expected. There was not a shortage this year. This even though if Pi Day has any value it’s as an educational event, and there should be no in-person educational events while the pandemic is still on. Of course one can still do educational stuff remotely, mathematics especially. But after a year of watching teaching on screens and sometimes doing projects at home, it’s hard for me to imagine a bit more of that being all that fun.

But Pi Day being a Sunday did give cartoonists more space to explain what they’re talking about. This is valuable. It’s easy for the dreadfully online, like me, to forget that most people haven’t heard of Pi Day. Most people don’t have any idea why that should be a thing or what it should be about. This seems to have freed up many people to write about it. But — to write what? Let’s take a quick tour of my daily comics reading.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 14th of March, 2021. My essays exploring something mentioned in Agnes appear at this link.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes starts with some talk about Daylight Saving Time. Agnes and Trout don’t quite understand how it works, and get from there to Pi Day. Or as Agnes says, Pie Day, missing the mathematics altogether in favor of the food.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays featuring some discussion of The Argyle Sweater are at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater is an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. It’s a bit risqué compared to the sort of thing you expect to see around here. The reflection of the numerals is correct, but it bothered me too.

Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News for the 14th of March, 2021. I don’t seem to have ever discussed this strip before. This essay, and any future ones mentioning Breaking Cat News, should be at this link.

Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News is a delightful cute comic strip. It doesn’t mention mathematics much. Here the cat reporters do a fine job explaining what Pi Day is and why everybody spent Sunday showing pictures of pies. This could almost be the standard reference for all the Pi Day strips.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays that have some mention of FoxTrot are gathered at this link.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot is one of the handful that don’t mention pie at all. It focuses on representing the decimal digits of π. At least within the confines of something someone might write in the American dating system. The logic of it is a bit rough but if we’ve accepted 3-14 to represent 3.14, we can accept 1:59 as standing in for the 0.00159 of the original number. But represent 0.0015926 (etc) of a day however you like. If we accept that time is continuous, then there’s some moment on the 14th of March which matches that perfectly.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays inspired by something in Frazz should be gathered at this link.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz talks about the eliding between π and pie for the 14th of March. The strip wonders a bit what kind of joke it is exactly. It’s a nerd pun, or at least nerd wordplay. If I had to cast a vote I’d call it a language gag. If they celebrated Pi Day in Germany, there would not be any comic strips calling it Tortentag.

Steenz’s Heart of the City for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays which mention Heart of the City — which until summer last year was written by Mark Tatulli, and is now by Steenz — are at this link.

Steenz’s Heart of the City is another of the pi-pie comics. I do feel for Heart’s bewilderment at hearing π explained at length. Also Kat’s desire to explain mathematics overwhelming her audience. It’s a feeling I struggle with too. The thing is it’s a lot of fun to explain things. It’s so much fun you can lose track whether you’re still communicating. If you set off one of these knowledge-floods from a friend? Try to hold on and look interested and remember any single piece anywhere of it. You are doing so much good for your friend. And if you realize you’re knowledge-flooding someone? Yeah, try not to overload them, but think about the things that are exciting about this. Your enthusiasm will communicate when your words do not.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays featuring something discussed in Reality Check are at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check is a pi-pie joke that doesn’t rely on actual pie. Well, there’s a small slice in the corner. It relies on the infinite length of the decimal representation of π. (Or its representation in any integer base.)

Michael Jantze’s Studio Jantze for the 15th of March, 2021. This is a new comic so there’s no old essays about it. But this and any future essays about Studio Jantze should appear at this link.

Michael Jantze’s Studio Jantze ran on Monday instead, although the caption suggests it was intended for Pi Day. So I’m including it here. And it’s the last of the strips sliding the day over to pie.

But there were a couple of comic strips with some mathematics mention that were not about Pi Day. It may have been coincidence.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 14th of March, 2021. This and a bunch of other appearances of Venn Diagrams should be gathered under the Between Friends tag here.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends is of the “word problem in real life” kind. It’s a fair enough word problem, though, asking about how long something would take. From the premises, it takes a hair seven weeks to grow one-quarter inch, and it gets trimmed one quarter-inch every six weeks. It’s making progress, but it might be easier to pull out the entire grey hair. This won’t help things though.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays mentioning Get Fuzzy are gathered at this link.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is a rerun, as all Get Fuzzy strips are. It first (I think) ran the 13th of September, 2009. And it’s another Infinite Monkeys comic strip, built on how a random process should be able to create specific outcomes. As often happens when joking about monkeys writing Shakespeare, some piece of pop culture is treated as being easier. But for these problems the meaning of the content doesn’t count. Only the length counts. A monkey typing “let it be written in eight and eight” is as improbable as a monkey typing “yrg vg or jevggra va rvtug naq rvtug”. It’s on us that we find one of those more impressive than the other.

And this wraps up my Pi Day comic strips. I don’t promise that I’m back to reading the comics for their mathematics content regularly. But I have done a lot of it, and figure to do it again. All my Reading the Comics posts appear at this link. Thank you for reading and I hope you had some good pie.

I don’t know how Andertoons didn’t get an appearance here.

Reading the Comics, February 3, 2020: Fake Venn Diagrams and Real Reruns Edition

Besides kids doing homework there were a good ten or so comic strips with enough mathematical content for me to discuss. So let me split that over a couple of days; I don’t have the time to do them all in one big essay.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 2nd is declared to be a Venn Diagram joke. As longtime readers of these columns know, it’s actually an Euler Diagram: a Venn Diagram requires some area of overlap between all combinations of the various sets. Two circles that never touch, or as these two do touch at a point, don’t count. They do qualify as Euler Diagrams, which have looser construction requirements. But everything’s named for Euler, so that’s a less clear identifier.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 2nd of February, 2020. Essays mentioning Between Friends and its imperfectly formed Venn Diagrams are at this link.

John Kovaleski’s Daddy Daze for the 2nd talks about probability. Particularly about the probability of guessing someone’s birthday. This is going to be about one chance in 365, or 366 in leap years. Birthdays are not perfectly uniformly distributed through the year. The 13th is less likely than other days in the month for someone to be born; this surely reflects a reluctance to induce birth on an unlucky day. Births are marginally more likely in September than in other months of the year; this surely reflects something having people in a merry-making mood in December. These are tiny effects, though, and to guess any day has about one chance in 365 of being someone’s birthday will be close enough.

John Kovaleski’s Daddy Daze for the 2nd of February, 2020. Essays which mention something from Daddy Daze should be at this link.

If the child does this long enough there’s almost sure to be a match of person and birthday. It’s not guaranteed in the first 365 cards given out, or even the first 730, or more. But, if the birthdays of passers-by are independent — one pedestrian’s birthday has nothing to do with the next’s — then, overall, about one-365th of all cards will go to someone whose birthday it is. (This also supposes that we won’t see things like the person picked saying that while it’s not their birthday, it is their friend’s, here.) This, the Law of Large Numbers, one of the cornerstones of probability, guarantees us.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 2nd of February, 2020. Some of the many essays mentioning Andertoons are at this link.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 2nd is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. And it’s a Venn Diagram joke, at least if the two circles are “really” there. Diplopia is what most of us would call double vision, seeing multiple offset copies of a thing. So the Venn diagram might be an optical illusion on the part of the businessman and the reader.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers repeat for the 3rd of February, 2020. It originally ran the 22nd of February, 2011. Essays featuring some aspect of The Chuckle Brothers are at this link.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers for the 3rd is not quite the anthropomorphic numerals joke of the week. At least, it’s built on manifesting numerals and doing things with them.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 3rd of February, 2020. Essays with some mention of topics raised by Loose Parts are at this link.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 3rd is an anthropomorphic mathematical symbols joke. I suppose it’s algebraic symbols. We usually get to see the ‘x’ and ‘y’ axes in (high school) algebra, used to differentiate two orthogonal axes. The axes can be named anything. If ‘x’ and ‘y’ won’t do, we might move to using and . In linear algebra, when we might want to think about Euclidean spaces with possibly enormously many dimensions, we may change the names to and . (We could use subscripts of 0 and 1, although I do not remember ever seeing someone do that.)

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals repeat for the 3rd of February, 2020. Many, but not all, of the essays featuring Wee Pals are at this link.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 3rd is a repeat, of course. Turner died several years ago and no one continued the strip. But it is also a repeat that I have discussed in these essays before, which likely makes this a good reason to drop Wee Pals from my regular reading here. There are 42 distinct ways to add (positive) whole numbers up to make ten, when you remember that you can add three or four or even six numbers together to do it. The study of how many different ways to make the same sum is a problem of partitioning. This might not seem very interesting, but if you try to guess how many ways there are to add up to 9 or 11 or 15, you’ll notice it’s a harder problem than it appears.

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And for all that, there’s still some more comic strips to review. I will probably slot those in to Sunday, and start taking care of this current week’s comic strips on … probably Tuesday. Please check in at this link Sunday, and Tuesday, and we’ll see what I do.

Reading the Comics, August 9, 2019: Venn Diagrams Edition

Thanks for sticking around as I finally got to the past week’s comic strips. There were just enough for me to divide them into two chunks and not feel like I’m cheating anyone of my sparkling prose.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 4th is another entry in this strip’s string of not-quite-Venn-Diagram jokes. As will happen, the point of the diagram seems clear enough even if it doesn’t quite parse. And it isn’t a proper Venn diagram, of course; a Venn diagram for five propositions has to have 31 regions, representing all the possible ways five things can combine or be excluded. They can be beautiful to look at, but start losing their value as ways to organize thought. This is again a Euclid diagram, which doesn’t need to show every possible overlap.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 4th of August, 2019. Essays in which I discuss something brought up by Between Friends should be at this link.

Michael Jantze’s The Norm 4.0 for the 5th is the other Venn Diagram joke for the week. Again properly the first one, showing the complete lack of overlap between two positions, is an Euler rather than a Venn diagram. The second, the “Amity Venn diagram on planet X”, is a Venn diagram and showing the intersection of blue and yellow regions as green is a nice way to show that. (I’m not fond of the gender stereotyping here, nor of the conflation of gender and chromosomes. But the comic strip does have to rely on shorthands or there’s just not going to be the space to compose a joke.)

Michael Jantze’s The Norm 4.0 for the 5th of August, 2019. Essays mentioning The Norm, either the current (“4.0”) run or older strips being rerun, should be at this link. There aren’t many, which is a shame. I like the comic.

Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 6th name-checks tetrahedrons. These are the shapes the rest of us would probably call pyramids or perhaps d4. It’s a bit silly to suppose a hairball should be a tetrahedron. But natural processes will form particular shapes. The obvious example is the hexagonal prisms of honeycombs, which come about for reasons … I’m not sure biologists are completely agreed on. Hexagons do seem to be efficient ways to encompass a lot of volume with a minimum of material, at least. But even the classic hairball looks like that for reasons, related to how it’s created and how it’s expelled from the cat. They just don’t usually have corners.

Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 6th of August, 2019. No credit to Steve Martin this time. Essays with a mention of Bliss should be gathered here.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 9th has you common blackboard full of symbols to represent mathematical work. It also evokes a well-worn joke that defines a mathematician as a mechanism for turning coffee into theorems. The explosion of creativity though is true to mathematicians, though. When inspiration is flowing the notes will get abundant and start going in many different wild directions. The symbols in the comic strip don’t mean anything. But that’s not inauthentic. The notes written during an inspired burst will be nonsensical. The great idea needs to be preserved. It can be cleaned up and, one hopes, made presentable later.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 9th of August, 2019. The essays discussing something raised by Carpe Diem should be at this link.

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This and other Reading the Comics posts are at this link. I should have a fresh one on Thursday, wrapping up the past week.

Reading the Comics, June 29, 2019: Pacing Edition

These are the last of the comics from the final full week of June. Ordinarily I’d have run this on Tuesday or Thursday of last week. But I also had my monthly readership-report post and that bit about a particle physics simulator also to post. It better fit a posting schedule of something every two or three days to move this to Sunday. This is what I tell myself is the rationale for not writing things up faster.

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 27th uses arithmetic as an economical way to demonstrate intelligence. At least, the ability to do arithmetic is used as proof of intelligence. Which shouldn’t surprise. The conventional appreciation for Ernie Bushmiller is of his skill at efficiently communicating the ideas needed for a joke. That said, it’s a bit surprising Sluggo asks the dog “six times six divided by two”; if it were just showing any ability at arithmetic “one plus one” or “two plus two” would do. But “six times six divided by two” has the advantage of being a bit complicated. That is, it’s reasonable Sluggo wouldn’t know it right away, and would see it as something only the brainiest would. But it’s not so complicated that Sluggo wouldn’t plausibly know the question.

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 27th of June, 2019. It originally ran the 21st of September, 1949. Essays inspired by something in Nancy, either the Ernie Bushmiller classics or the Olivia Jaimes modern ones, should appear at this link. I’m not going to group 1940s Nancy and 2010s Nancy separately.

Eric the Circle for the 28th, this one by AusAGirl, uses “Non-Euclidean” as a way to express weirdness in shape. My first impulse was to say that this wouldn’t really be a non-Euclidean circle. A non-Euclidean geometry has space that’s different from what we’re approximating with sheets of paper or with boxes put in a room. There are some that are familiar, or roughly familiar, such as the geometry of the surface of a planet. But you can draw circles on the surface of a globe. They don’t look like this mooshy T-circle. They look like … circles. Their weirdness comes in other ways, like how the circumference is not π times the diameter.

On reflection, I’m being too harsh. What makes a space non-Euclidean is … well, many things. One that’s easy to understand is to imagine that the space uses some novel definition for the distance between points. Distance is a great idea. It turns out to be useful, in geometry and in analysis, to use a flexible idea of of what distance is. We can define the distance between things in ways that look just like the Euclidean idea of distance. Or we can define it in other, weirder ways. We can, whatever the distance, define a “circle” as the set of points that are all exactly some distance from a chosen center point. And the appearance of those “circles” can differ.

Eric the Circle for the 28th of June, 2019, this one by AusAGirl. Essays which build on something mentioned in Eric the Circle should appear at this link.

There are literally infinitely many possible distance functions. But there is a family of them which we use all the time. And the “circles” in those look like … well, at the most extreme, they look like squares. Others will look like rounded squares, or like slightly diamond-shaped circles. I don’t know of any distance function that’s useful that would give us a circle like this picture of Eric. But there surely is one that exists and that’s enough for the joke to be certified factually correct. And that is what’s truly important in a comic strip.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th of June, 2019. Essays in which I discuss something brought up by Between Friends should be at this link.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th is the Venn Diagram joke for the week. Formally, you have to read this diagram charitably for it to parse. If we take the “what” that Maeve says, or doesn’t say, to be particular sentences, then the intersection has to be empty. You can’t both say and not-say a sentence. But it seems to me that any conversation of importance has the things which we choose to say and the things which we choose not to say. And it is so difficult to get the blend of things said and things unsaid correct. And I realize that the last time Between Friends came up here I was similarly defending the comic’s Venn Diagram use. I’m a sympathetic reader, at least to most comic strips.

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And that was the conclusion of comic strips through the 29th of June which mentioned mathematics enough for me to write much about. There were a couple other comics that brought up something or other, though. Wulff and Morgenthaler’s WuMo for the 27th of June has a Rubik’s Cube joke. The traditional Rubik’s Cube has three rows, columns, and layers of cubes. But there’s no reason there can’t be more rows and columns and layers. Back in the 80s there were enough four-by-four-by-four cubes sold that I even had one. Wikipedia tells me the officially licensed cubes have gotten only up to five-by-five-by-five. But that there was a 17-by-17-by-17 cube sold, with prototypes for 22-by-22-by-22 and 33-by-33-by-33 cubes. This seems to me like a great many stickers to peel off and reattach.

And two comic strips did ballistic trajectory calculation jokes. These are great introductory problems for mathematical physics. They’re questions about things people can observe and so have a physical intuition for, and yet involve mathematics that’s not too subtle or baffling. John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith mentioned the topic the 28th of June. Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens used it the 28th also, because sometimes comic strips just line up like that.

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This and other Reading the Comics posts should be at this link. This includes, I hope, the strips of this past week, that is, the start of July, which should be published Tuesday. Thanks for reading at all.

Reading the Comics, October 2, 2018: Frazz Loves Mathematics Edition

Jef Mallet’s Frazz did its best to take over my entire Reading-the-Comics bit this week. I won’t disrespect his efforts, especially as I take the viewpoint of the strip to be that arithmetic is a good thing to learn. Meanwhile let me offer another mention of Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121, hosted here last week. And to point out the Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z continues this week with the letters ‘E’ and ‘F’. And I’m still looking for topics to discuss for select letters between H and M yet.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 1st is a Venn Diagram joke to start off the week. The form looks wrong, though. This can fool the reader into thinking the cartoonist messed up the illustration. Here’s why. The point of a Venn Diagram is to show the two or more groups of things and identify what they have in common. It is true that any life will have regrets about things done. And regrets about things not done. But what are the things that one both ‘did do’ and ‘didn’t do’? Unless you accept the weasel-wording of “did halfheartedly”, there is nothing that one both did and did not.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 1st of October, 2018. Regardless of the internal logic of the joke, I like the art touch of the protagonist leaning against one of the bubbles. It makes the joke more interesting than simply being a pair of bubbles would be.

And here is where I will argue Bell-Lundy did this right. The overlap of things one ‘did do’ and ‘didn’t do’ must be empty. Do not be fooled by there being area in common in the overlap. One thing Venn Diagrams help us establish are the different kinds of things we are studying, and to work out whether that kind of thing can have any examples. And if the set of things in your life that you regret is empty — well! Is it not “living your best life”, as the caption advances, to have nothing one regrets doing, and nothing one regrets not doing? Thus I say to you the jury of readers, Sandra Bell-Lundy has correctly used the Venn Diagram form to make a “No Regrets” art.

That said, I can’t explain why the protagonist on the left is slumping and looking depressed. I suppose we have to take that she hasn’t lived her best life, but does have information about what might have been.

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 1st starts a string of mathematics class jokes. Here is one about story problems, particularly ones about pricing apples and groups of apples. I don’t know whether apples are used as story problem examples. They seem like good example objects. They’re reasonably familiar. A person can have up to several dozen of them without it being ridiculously many. (Count a half-bushel of apples sometime.) You can imagine dividing them among people or tasks. You can even imagine halving and quartering them without getting ridiculous. Great set of traits. But the kid has overlooked that if Mrs Olsen wanted the price of an apple she would just look at the price sign.

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 1st of October, 2018. I’m sorry, I don’t know the child’s name here.

(Every time I’m at the market I mean to check the apple prices, and I do, and I forget the total on the way out. I mention because I live in the same area as Jef Mallet. So there is a small but not-ridiculous chance he and I have bought apples from the same place. If he has a strip mentioning the place with the free coffee, popcorn, and gelato samples I’ll know to my satisfaction.)

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 2nd has a complaint about having to show one’s work. But as with apple prices, we don’t really care whether someone has the right answer. We care whether they have the right method for finding an answer. Or, better, whether they have a method that could plausibly find the right answer, and an idea of how to check whether they did get it. This is why it’s worth, for example, working out a rough expected answer before doing a final calculation.

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 2nd of October, 2018. Seriously, why doesn’t every comic have an up-to-date cast roster with pictures? It would make everybody’s life so much easier.

The talk about flight paths reminds me of a story passed around sci.space.history back in the day. The story is about development of the automatic landing computers used for the Apollo Missions. The guidance computers were programmed to get the lunar module from this starting point to a final point on the lunar surface. This turns into a question of polynomial interpolation. That’s coming up with a curve that fits some data points, particularly, the positions and velocities the last couple times those were known plus the intended landing position. You can always find a polynomial that passes smoothly through a finite bunch of data points. That’s not hard. But, allegedly, the guidance computer would project paths where the height above the lunar surface was negative for a while. Numerically, there’s nothing wrong with a negative number. It’s just got some practical problems, as the earliest Apollo missions were before any subway tunnels could be built.

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 3rd of October, 2018. Also while writing does show off your work, it doesn’t show all your work, not if you’re writing anything that isn’t really basic. There’s research, there’s thinking, and there’s (often) outlines and drafts and revisions and editing. And, come to think of my own school experience, I didn’t like showing my outlines or drafts either. (In my defense, I am one of those people with a gift for academic narrative, so I can do an essay of up to two thousand words with little to no outline. And while I do better on my second draft, I don’t do enormously better most of the time.)

Jeff Mallet’s Frazz for the 3rd continues the protest against showing one’s work. I do like the analogy of arithmetic skills for mathematics being like spelling skills for writing. You can carry on without these skills, for either mathematics or writing. But knowing them makes your life easier. And enjoying these building-block units foreshadows enjoying the whole. But yeah, addition and multiplication tables can look like tedium if you don’t find something at least a little thrilling in how, say, 9 times 7 is 63.

Tim Lachowski’s Get a Life for the 2nd of October, 2018. You know, that guy has an enormous desk. Maybe he’s at a conference table.

Tim Lachowski’s Get a Life for the 2nd is a bit of mathematics wordplay. So that closes the essay out well.

Thanks for reading Reading the Comics. Other comic strip review essays are at this link. More essays with Between Friends should be at this link. Other essays with Frazz in them are at this link. And appearances by Get A Life should be at this link.

Reading the Comics, April 29, 2017: The Other Half Of The Week Edition

I’d been splitting Reading the Comics posts between Sunday and Thursday to better space them out. But I’ve got something prepared that I want to post Thursday, so I’ll bump this up. Also I had it ready to go anyway so don’t gain anything putting it off another two days.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 27th reruns the strip for the 4th of May, 2006. It’s another probability problem, in its way. Assume Jason is honest in reporting whether Paige has picked his number correctly. Assume that Jason picked a whole number. (This is, I think, the weakest assumption. I know Jason Fox’s type and he’s just the sort who’d pick an obscure transcendental number. They’re all obscure after π and e.) Assume that Jason is equally likely to pick any of the whole numbers from 1 to one billion. Then, knowing nothing about what numbers Jason is likely to pick, Paige would have one chance in a billion of picking his number too. Might as well call it certainty that she’ll pay a dollar to play the game. How much would she have to get, in case of getting the number right, to come out even or ahead? … And now we know why Paige is still getting help on probability problems in the 2017 strips.

Jeff Stahler’s Moderately Confused for the 27th gives me a bit of a break by just being a snarky word problem joke. The student doesn’t even have to resist it any.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th of April, 2017. And while it’s not a Venn Diagram I’m not sure of a better way to visually represent that the cartoonist is going for. I suppose the intended meaning comes across cleanly enough and that’s the most important thing. It’s a strange state of affairs is all.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th also gives me a bit of a break by just being a Venn Diagram-based joke. At least it’s using the shape of a Venn Diagram to deliver the joke. It’s not really got the right content.

Harley Schwadron’s 9 to 5 for the 29th is this week’s joke about arithmetic versus propaganda. It’s a joke we’re never really going to be without again.