Today, we go way back. No one has seen this A&J sunday comic since it first appeared in newspapers in 1986, when I’d only been drawing the strip for a little over a year. Looking through the old stuff, it caught my eye because of our conversations so far this week. Obviously, this is an early example of my work; it’s unusual in that it is entirely a visual gag. As I have mentioned, I did very little of this sort of thing in the early going. I’m sure when I drew this one, I was very proud of myself for stretching my chops. Yes, it could have been a little funnier, but you can say that about all of them.
Ice Follies
By Jimmy Johnson
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59 responses to “Ice Follies”
Castler-
Thanks for the great idea for a research proposal; “Ice-Melt Predictions for the Kitchen Floor”. Heck, that might be good enough to finally win me an IgNoble prize!
It is entirely possible to forecast the shape of a puddle that a melting ice cube will make, as long as the melting takes place in a container.
Denise:
“Arlo might expect to find Janis up and texting, or perhaps gardening by moonlight!”
Or he might not. I did that most of the time if I woke up at night. I expected she’d be there, but did it anyway, gently, seldom waking her. If I did, or she was already awake, probably would get a hand squeeze. It is good to know someone is there. I also think she did the same, but I was seldom aware of it.
Today’s cartoon is as close to ‘peeking in our window’ as JJ has gotten, before Dec. ’10.
Lily black – Best modern take on that song I’ve ever heard. 🙂
Jackie – That is exactly what I do to the ice cubes that hit the floor when I’m bailing ice for the fountain machine. Drives my one employee batty. What can I say but payback?
Today was just as bad as I figured it would be. Exterminator sprayed for wood spiders; a repellant that has thus far only worked on my pregnant assistant – she went home sick. She said the stench was too much. Which is weird because I am more sensitive to smells than her, but I was okay. Which is fine because she was lazier than normal and wasn’t doing anything, and since corporate completely ruined my hours budget for this week, her leaving was a double win for me.
New electrical boxes means shutting off power … and electronics turning into paperweights. No router (read: no debit/credit, ATM, or store computer – AKA no paperwork or emails and corporate loses its mind, but all the techs are at another, bigger store with fuel issues.); no main register (read: can’t close out tomorrow morning); and our only surviving register’s power supply is plugged into a mostly dead power strip (with four other devices) which is plugged into an extension cord which runs across the floor into the back room because only one outlet under the whole counter works and it has ANOTHER mostly dead power strip with the rest of the devices plugged into it. UPDATE: Just hung up with the assistant on duty. No lights in freezer or cooler. Cooler is dying. A/C is dead. My boss is semi-seriously thinking of arson. At this point it would be a mercy killing.
… and my furnace guy stood me up.
GR6, I see you’re an in the container thinker; old pilots seldom fly outside their envelope. Think Bryan has a better chance for an IgNoble. A good starting point:
Q=MC?T(ice)+MLf(Ice/Water)
?=delta. Seems WordPress does not handle change. 😉
Prof, I feel like JJ is looking in my windows all the time. It is eerie, I am Janis, garden fanatic extraordinaire, my husband is Arlo, complete with schooner, cat, food and wine. Although he doesn’t cook much anymore and technically the schooner has been in other hands for many years but if you build one, it stays “yours” forever, like a child you birthed.
Oldest daughter went to Hilton hotel/restaurant school and is now going back into restaurant field she says, get the last few hours on her MBA, if they’ll have her back. youngest worked in food service for seven long, long years while getting her MBA, so even the Gene, Mary Lou thread hits so close so often. One granddaughter, same age as Gene and Mary Lou’s old before her time child.
No other cartoon strip has ever caught me like this one does. I used to think Charles Schulz did a long time ago, but no, not really. There is probably one of those little hidden cameras like they use in the television spy stories now!
Love, Jackie
Glad you’re life is mirrored in A&J, Jackie. I know no strip that echoes mine except maybe Annie (nee Little Orphan Annie) whose life seems full of tragedies but she stays happy and has a nice doggie and “Daddy” Warbucks as a benevolent presence. I shall live my own comic strip, though my readers in the Dark Side will comment that it is repetitive and boring and attribute all kinds of things to me.
GR6: Melted ice will take the shape of the inside bottom of the container (not the whole inner container unless there is enough ice) only if there is enough melted ice to cover the entire bottom. Having to account for the rounded shape of the creeping water-front & the attractions between the water and the inside bottom container material would seem to imply that a solid prediction cannot be made with certainty.
Clearly, I could be wrong.
Oysters? Yecch…never could stand them [for their dimethylsulfoxide-like flavor]. Ketchup can be useful; tartar sauce is tasty – sounds good on fries; I will have to try it.
c ex-p: No, I think you got it, other than specifying that the container would have to be under either Earth-normal gravity or at least a significant fraction of 1 G. (Sometimes I throw out incomplete statements just to see what others will do with them.)
On the other hand, I believe one could fairly confidently predict the shape a melted ice cube will assume if melting takes place in zero gravity and in the absence of air currents of sufficient strength to cause deformation of the resulting sphere of water.
Definitely try a good tartar sauce with crispy French fries. You might also like malt vinegar as a dipping sauce for fries.
Lily, the thing is that sometimes you get to pick your own reality or unreality as it were. Choose the light, my son!
If I focus on the tragedies of my life I am one of those horrible crime shows on television and then that will be my reality. Or I can choose to focus on the good or the beauty, the funny or the humor I see and that becomes my reality/unreality.
We cannot always control the events that happen to us but we can control how we react or behave afterwards. That can be our choice, not someone else’s behavior, but our own.
So, I choose A and J, and yes the panels are so often me and mine. No darkness, just the light.
I still cannot believe that Dale Earnhardt is my messenger from beyond and the hereafter! Why Dale? And he knew me!
Love, Jackie Monies
The Dutch all ate mayonnaise on theirs when I was over there, it was served to you in little containers. The Texans all wanted their catsup, which the Dutch didn’t have of course. I settled for the mayo and it wasn’t bad substitute for tartar sauce.
Herbs are looking good in garden, I need to do something fresh with dill or the basil looks great.
But a really good tartar sauce made with freshly made mayo and fresh chopped additives, I am salivating typing this. Although I have to confess not whipping up my own mayo for some time, but it is totally simple to do. I think it was the raw eggs that scared us all off fresh mayo.
Sorry Debbe!
All: FYI.
http://www.inquisitr.com/1499745/two-donkeys-at-polish-zoo-separated-after-sex-scandal-reunited/
One of the delights of working in or visiting zoos, or even watching pairs of dogs in public, is watching the people, esp. those w/ little kids. Watching primate facial expression can also be enlightening: I knew exactly when a male baboon in the Winnipeg Zoo scored. Let’s try an emoticon. : o , sort of. Wide eyes, mouth a perfect o. Mother [human] busy ushering her kids out of the bldg.
Two mutts at the U. of OR Marine Biol. Sta. on the OR coast, in a tie smack in the crossroads among the one story bldgs., again, curious kids and hustling parents, summer of ’62. Actually, a canid tie is hard to explain, esp. if a parent doesn’t know the anatomical peculiarity involved. I’ve seen only one diagram, in a ’50s French vol. on ‘Mammiferes’ by Francois Bourliere, one of their last neo-Lamarckians.
I saw some people in France eating Pommes Frites in sidewalk cafes. They dipped them in the sauce the steak came in, usually bernaise or brown butter. Me, I asked the garcon if they had anything besides pommes frites. They invariably did. My favorite was from the little cafe down the street from our hotel when they gave me three little plates with minuscule servings of asparagus, haricots verts, and cauliflower, each with their own sauce. The chef came out and glared at me and I thought I was in trouble, but he said he just wanted to see an Americaine who ate biftek without pommes frites. He had a great mustache!
We’ll soon see the thirtieth anniversary of A&J – thirty years…
Good grief, it’s 10 pm in New Hampshire and I haven’t read today’s funnies yet. You guys are so fascinating, I had to read this first. Busy day, drove mini-van to two supermarkets and carefully selected the foods I needed. Drove home, cooked, ate supper. Before that I spent a lot of time on Facebook. There is a marvellous photo of my grandson Peter, the cinematographer. I don’t know who took the picture of him, but there are a bunch of “production stills” that he took, and very nice, too.
Jackie – You might get a kick out of Sharyn McCrumb’s book St. Dale. In her comments about how she came to write it, she talked about how she had always wanted to do something along the lines of the Canterbury Tales. She was also fascinated by what she referred to as “secular saints” – think Elvis, Princess Diana – but had never figured out how to work that into one of her books “and then Dale Earnhardt died”. I wasn’t really a NASCAR fan when I read it and understood such fans a lot better afterward.
Hum. Donkeys. Sex scandals. Politicians.
I shall continue my self-imposed moratorium on political remarks. And Polish jokes.
Somehow NASCAR has always baffled me, I cannot figure out the addiction which even my husband has succumbed to. I told him it was like the gladiators or Christians and lions, the same blood spectacle of everyone waiting for a giant catastrophe. Just watching everyone go around in circles.
I tried to watch “Talladega Nights” but that didn’t help either!
So having Dale Earnhardt appear like that was more shocking than if Elvis had sat down at my kitchen table and asked for a peanut butter and banana and bacon sandwich.
I never so much as got to go see Elvis perform anywhere but my cousin was president of his fan club in Louisiana and apparently a groupie of sorts, along with my aunt who fostered this particular obsession. Cousin was underage, kind of a Priscilla in drag kind of look from early years. So, I snickered about all this since I didn’t much like them anyway and knew what was going on.
It is hereditary perhaps, as her son cultivated an Elvis persona look and his son became an Elvis impersonator and appeared at his grandmother’s funeral in full white concert jumpsuit and cape.
Don’t tell me the South isn’t full of secular “saints”! And weird relatives.
I need to write this all down before I develop dementia myself!
Love, Jackie
Don’t tell me,Jackie. I have read Walker Percy and am trying to read Faulkner
Don’t tell me,Jackie. I have read Walker Percy and am trying to read Faulkner
For those of you who are curious, I had that stone blasted into dust yesterday, with a laser. I am very happy to report that I was sound asleep when it happened, and spent most of yesterday sleeping off the anesthetic. Not only that, whatever it was they gave me finally got rid of the muscle spasms in my back.
Although getting upright and sitting down are difficult, I managed, more or less at services today and hope to Friday. If you want to know why I’m having trouble, think about how the laser was inserted, and what kind of after-care is needed. The one good thing is that I may not need all of the Vicodin I was given. (10)
sideburns, hope you make a fast recovery and feel better at once!
Husband has to have two blasted same way in November. Not sure why November but that might be earliest date the rock crusher is available. It seems there is a huge increase in kidney stone formation, think we all talked about this and why? Don’t know we solved it?
Housekeeper’s husband is on list for surgery/removal/blasting of his at the VA hospital. God bless our veterans, they are not being treated as well as I think they should medically but it is all many of them have to turn to.
Everyone begin consuming large amounts of fresh lemons or limes squeezed into water or weak iced tea. It helps with stones and you won’t have scurvy probably either or Vitamin C deficiency. I swear, good advice from urologists, along with diabetic and cardiologist who probably just want to keep fluid intake uptake.
My sympathy for your husband, Jackie. I’ve had kidney stones and they’re not fun. If they’re kidney stones and still attached, they can be broken up by sound waves. Mine was a bladder stone (formed there) and needed the laser because they couldn’t have pinpointed the position accurately enough.
If the other gentleman’s on a VA waiting list, that’s good news. It means that the condition isn’t serious enough to be scheduled ASAP. In my case, it was about three months between being diagnosed and having it removed.
As far as the lemon juice goes, we have a Meyer Lemon tree just outside our back door. I like lots of ice water in hot weather, with lemon juice added for flavor. I’ve been keeping my intake up ever since I learned about the stone and am planning on keeping the habit.
Actually a pretty good report, sideburns, even though you may not think so right now. Happy New Year 5775.
Lily, you want a little Lite Southern Gothic, read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, if you haven’t already.