In this installment of the popular web comic, the Author returns to the traditional format by including something that is easily recognizable as a joke. As is standard practice, we are treated to a combination of a geek culture character (Sauron, of Lord of the Rings), in a humorously improbable real-life situation (lamenting his lot in life while drinking in a bar), and a pop-culture reference (the song “All the Single Ladies” by Beyonce Knowles).
Having enumerated the advantages enjoyed by humans (attractive), elves (attractive), and dwarves (attractive when you are drunk), and expressing his dissatisfaction at being stuck with orcs (hideous), Sauron is struck with the solution to his dilemma when Ms. Knowles reaches the chorus of her hit song: he will ‘put a ring on it’. The juxtaposition of the song’s intended meaning of an engagement ring with the intended meaning for Sauron of rings of power to subjugate the races of Middle Earth delivers our well-earned punchline.
Thus, the Author humorously reveals the image he holds of himself as a lonely, mask wearing embodiment of evil plotting the enslavement of the beautiful creatures of the world who he views as his betters: humans, elves, and dwarves in Lord of the Rings - women in reality.
Unlike many of the Author’s works which rely upon homographic puns, today’s work relies on a visual pun. Both the seismograph (used for measuring earthquakes) and a polygraph (used for measuring a variety of body reactions) are popularly depicted using the same classical “needles dragging on paper” mechanism to form a line chart.¹
The author uses this visual similarity—backed by his mainstay, the chart—to convey the juxtaposition of a polygraph as a way to detect earthquakes. A male in a position of power dominates another male connected to an outrageously large and curiously upright polygraph in an attempt to discern if “there is an earthquake happening?!”
A clever Reader might spend more time considering this comic and ask, “Why would the man sitting be a better authority than the man standing on this subject? Presumably both would feel an earthquake?” Your Curator advises you against considering this question any more deeply; there is simply no redeeming value—humorous or otherwise—to that line of questioning.
¹ Television and movies depict these devices as mechanically based, but modern systems are unsurprisingly wholly computerized.
A man attempts to prove (by hand) the Collatz Conjecture which states that you can pick any whole number and repeatedly half it if it is even, or multiply it by three and add one if it is odd and you will eventually get the number one.
Since this requires a lot of work, the man is never available to spend time with his friends. For this reason his friends eventually stop attempting to hang out with him since he will almost assuredly be working on the Collatz Conjecture and thus will not be able to join them in their activities.
In a recreation of the Burning Bush scene from the Book of Exodus, we see Moses (complete with removed sandals) getting talked to by God. Then God says that his counterpart is “R2-D2.” This happened because in the film Return of the Jedi (part of the Star Wars franchise) the robot known as C3PO is worshiped as a god by the Ewoks and his partner was the robot R2-D2.
A man and a woman attempt to engage in sexual foreplay aided by a set of novelty “sex dice.” These dice, which generally combine a sexual act with a body part, are meant to be rolled and taken as directions for an action to perform on the partner’s body. Some examples of possible output from a rolled pair sex dice: “tickle tits”, “massage mouth”, “spank vagina” and “sex butt.”
However, the horny stick-figure couple from today’s comic strip have a problem: upon rolling the dice only one of them is a sex die - the other is a normal, numbered die. This leads to the humorously non sexual roll, “five breasts.” It is then revealed that the other sex die has been swapped into a children’s fantasy role-playing game, which causes confusion by including sexual concepts into an activity generally void of any.
The man on the left asks the man on the right how his “new project” is going. It turns out that the project is a secret, and the man on the right uses the clichéd statement, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” This causes the two men to laugh.
The man on the right (with the secret project) then corrects his previous statement by updating “kill you” to “kill you even sooner.” What this means is that the man on the right’s “secret project” was actually to kill a series of people, including the man on the left. By divulging this secret, he would be forced to kill the inquiring man earlier than scheduled, hence the addition of “sooner.”
The author pontificates on free will and the multitude of options we have as human beings in this, the 706th edition of his rigidly-scheduled web comic strip.
There is nothing to explain today, but here is a different blog to look at.
This comic is a reference to the 1988 action film Die Hard. The character with the life-like goatee is meant to be Hans Gruber, the film’s primary villain. The “guy” who is thwarting their efforts represents the protagonist, John McClane.
In the actual film, John does those same things described except in the end he saves the hostages. However in this retelling of the story, the hero instead repairs some cut cables in order to maintain “uptime,” a measure of the health of a computer network based on the percentage of time it’s functioning correctly. Through this decision to sacrifice human lives in order to keep a network online, the protagonist is easily identified as a systems administrator or “sysadmin.”
By boldly portraying a sysadmin as a heroic figure, the Author will surely boost the self-esteem of the many readers of his fine comic strip that happen to be in that line of work. For those that are not, this stark contrast simply serves as a humorous punch-line.
After following a few links off of the Tautology page on Wikipedia (see previous explanation), the Author’s creative talent was sparked once again on the Principle of Explosion page. It looks like Logic is a humor-rich mine, I hope we see some more jokes excavated soon!
The following comic is based off a misunderstanding of the Principle of Explosion, which claims that upon asserting a contradiction (a combination of two conflicting propositions), one can infer that any other proposition is true. In the comic, the Author has decided to replace “proposition” with “your mom’s phone number” (not a proposition, but a piece of information), possibly for humorous value. The character starts with the logical statement “P and not P” and derives a series of digits, which turns out to actually be the phone number of the other character’s mother.
Having gained an older woman’s phone number through the improper use of a logical device, the second character then calls her. In a shocking and quite humorous turn of events, the mother sets up a date with her son’s friend - much to the chagrin of her son. To wrap up this excellent punchline the Author mentions boxed wine, a well-known “funny beverage.”