FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for February 09, 2011

At the end of the movie it rained frogs. That kid is such a dufus at times.

thank you westplatte, I hadn’t got it either.

Me either. I was thinking of Steel Magnolias. Hey, I figured something out. Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow will rotate the screen so you can read sideways comics. Ctrl-Alt-UpArrow puts it back where it belongs.

In any event, these two “impressionable youths” will be two DEAD youths as soon as Paige recovers from the attack and hunts them down!

davidf42: That trick is fun (and also tends to freak people out if they’re not expecting it to happen while trying to use other keyboard shortcuts). But it doesn’t work on all computers, only ones with the Intel Hotkeys program installed. However, most computers have it setup this way by default. Just a note for anyone who tries this and it doesn’t work.

It would definitely be easier to read this kind of strip in a newspaper where you have manual rotation abilities!

Xane I just found out myself won’t work. When I click on picture just enlarge Alt,Corl, R arrow won’t move the picture.

Jason just what will you not do to your sister?

I’ve never heard of that movie. Must not have been terribly memorable.

I just right-click on the picture (any picture) and choose “Rotate Image” from the popup menu. Of course, it helps to have the appropriate FireFox plugin installed. (I installed it specifically to use on comics that need to be rotated!)

♥Kab♥ Buch: You don’t need to click on the picture first. You just hold down the CTRL and ALT keys at the same time, then press the right arrow. It makes the whole screen rotate sideways. You can also rotate the screen left and upside-down. But yes, only if your computer has the program for it installed. This was much more useful in the days when monitors came with the ability to rotate them sideways, so you could read an entire legal size sheet all at once. Not many come this way anymore. You have to buy a new stand for it.

I thought I knew all the tricks, too! Thanks, David!

Back in grad school, when a classmate would leave their laptop near me I would change the keyboard layout from QWERTY to Dvorak. It was loads of fun watching them trying to figure it out.

When I 1st saw this comic I didn’t get the joke until after I later saw Magnolia on cable

I didn’t know what it was about either, I thought it was about the world turning sideways!

I looked it up on IMDb. Great cast. But who saw it? Or remembers it? Or even heard of it?

This is always a problem with old reruns: if they are too topical, they don’t age well. “Bloom County”, for example, has held up very poorly.

prfesser: I don’t see why you think I’m knocking the movie. I’m just commenting on the fact that despite a really impressive cast, it seems to be known to you and one other person here, heavily outnumbered by those who never heard of it either. I could name several great movies that aren’t famous; maybe this one is great too; maybe I’ll see it someday and find out. I’ll keep an eye out on TCM.

As for its being topical, that was my word choice for the fact that it seems to be of its era and (only 12 years later) not well known today.

Compare to the classics of 1939: Gone with the Wind, Stage Coach, The Wizard of Oz. If the joke was about flying monkeys, I think almost everyone would get the reference. But not flying frogs.

(Have you ever seen “A Matter of Life and Death”, AKA “Stairway to Heaven”? My favorite movie.)

This is a repeat from February 09, 2000