Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for February 23, 2010

lols

I think it’s pretty marvelous!

Hobbes is still in the room, Calvin

Good to see you back Marg. Hope you are feeling better.

Welcome back, margueritem!

Well, Margureitem……we all seem to have missed you yesterday…:)

Thanks all. I’m doing better thanks to the wonders of modern drugs…. ;-)

Hi Marg! Read it all, Dad!

Marg…great what a bottle opener will do!

welcome back Marg!! its almost like the day’s c&h strip is incomplete without ur comment at the top…

Hobbes is a genius. and the poem is marvellous.

Poor dad !!

Another instant “A” for Calvin, by Hobbes! :)

Hobbes could be a writer someday.

Glad you’re feeling better, Marg! You’re a special person.

Based on that poem Dad should either start believing in Hobbes or start believing his son is an intellectual prodigy. Some how I think from his point of view believing in Hobbes might be easier ;)

Welcome back to the land of the slightly healthy Marg :)

Dad´s expression of puzzlement in the second panel says he realizes it was his son, not Hobbes, who wrote it, yet he cannot believe his son is capable of such well accomplished writing.

Calvin, the ghost writer.

According to the Chinese zodiac, we have just entered the Year of the Tiger (Feb. 10 to Feb. 11). Go Hobbes!

Hi Marg, Good to see you back.

Dad must be wondering who wrote that ‘An ode to tigers’.

Hey dad, don’t skip the part about the warm furry pillow at the fireplace …

Do you all remember this from high school?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the forests of the night…

…Did He who made the lamb make thee?

http://www.bartleby.com/101/489.html

Oh, and welcome back, Marg.

Glad to see you’re feeling better Marg… :)

Yeah, I sure remember “Tiger, Tiger burnng bright: Do you remember “Pigeons on the grass, alas?”

DONT say, “If you’d let us smoke what these poets were smoking when they wrote this bleeep, we might enjoy it, too.” Teacher didnt like that.

Looks like a little more than an ode. Perhaps an epic?

Since Hobbs is lying there filled with fluff and stuff it is obvious that Calvin is the ghost writer of An Ode to Tigers. Pretty imaginative and the vocabulary isn’t bad for a 6 year old either.

Who among us could believe that Calvin could come up with such an ode to his sidekick considering Calvin’s hatred of school and learning. What child at Calvin/s age knows about ‘haute couture and compares it with camoflage?

@IndyMan: Calvin’s amazing vocabulary is always one of the best parts of reading the strip. :-)

I actually wanna hear the rest of it .. :-)

“Do you like Kippling?”

“I don’t know. I never kippled.”

I wonder if it even occurs to Calvin that his parents don’t believe Hobbes is real . .

N7326 Foxtrot - lol - funny wish I’d thought of that (back then)

glad you’re feeling better Marg . .

@Susan001: “For” pages could also be correct. As in, “Yes, it goes on for pages.” (Three, four, seven, ten… we don’t really know. Dozens, perhaps?)

good job hobbes!

actually hobbs seems to be an accomplished writer of prose and poetry

Will we hear more of his works ?

Long winded, I’d say.

Good to see you back, Marg

I have this vision in my head now of Hobbes doing a Softshoe as dad reads and Calvin provides a nice music accompaniment…

I like it…………..More! More!

The irony here is that if Calvin HAD to have a poem ready for a school assignment, “Hobbes” wouldn’t have been able to come up with anything……

Calvin does learn. He is driven by his own agenda and his own thirst for knowledge. Ironically it’s school that slows him down. It’s the monotony and the filling worksheets mentality of school. This type of learning is not inspiring. You are taught facts and how to regurgitate. I’ve seen worksheets for everything including nature studies and science! My best learning came in University and on my own. I slept through many, many years of school before that.

Calvin and Hobbes writers of deep thoughts and emotions. Great

Who knows, Hobbs might get rich as a writer. Keep it up old pal.

Hi Marg!

Calvin is such a hoot! Love that last panel!

The only regret I ever had about this strip was that we always saw Dad, and so couldn’t see how Hobbes was reacting to this.

page three…

A tiger’s growl will make you faint; A cowardly lion is what they ain’t!

A tiger’s kiss makes the girls wish they could have some tuna fish!

Thanks, everyone! I’ll try hard not to fail at my job again.

;-)

Excellent poem, grazer!

Marg: Glad you’re feeling more like yourself!

I like Hobbes’ poem especially the part, “Haute Couture”’ very chic!

Tigers are indeed magnificent animals! Go Hobbes, go!

Could the tiger’s stripes lacking hues compared to “you-know-whose” possibly be related to Dad’s striped shirt?

Keep healthy, Marg!

Only from the mind of a child (oh, sorry, mind of a stuffed tiger).

More … more … more!!!!!

Does this kid have ADHD? I have seen him produce reams of stuff on other subjects of his interest before. He is no more a normal six year old than I am…

No, khpage he’s just a normal INFP male. Quite rare (about 2%), they find ways to amuse themselves, and need to, since most “average” masculine pastimes–like sports–are not very interesting to them. Instead, they plunge deeply into what does interest them, and produce large quantities of, as you say, “stuff” on often erudite, often age-inappropriate matters. (Not that they are particularly into “adult” or erotic materials, mind you. Rather, they often know surprising details about very technical stuff: they learned Darwinian evolution through researching dinosaurs, or know the universal ideal gas law because they got curious about balloons…)

Of course it goes on for pages, you imaginationless “dad”. A tiger’s beauty is poetic, and must be appreciated in full deTAIL.

bmonk, I respectfully disagree (again). Calvin’s archetypes (how he uses his mental faculties) are those of an ENFP, not an INFP.

The types are often confused because the two have such closely related orders of thought processes (and like all NFs, have a strong tendency to invent imaginary friends). But Calvin’s Extraverted Intuiting is Heroic (Spaceman Spiff), not Good Parental; it’s his sense of personal values (Introverted Feeling) that’s Good Parental (and also Utterly Screwball). Whereas his sense of group values (Extraverted Feeling) is Bad Parental (giving rise to such verbal gems as “People are scum”). And no normal INFP resents authority and bureaucracy as a matter of principle in the way an ENFP does - and as Calvin does.

Christopher Robin (the original version) is an INFP. Calvin is an ENFP. The orders of thought processes are flip-flopped in closely matched pairs. They’d be great typical Pals if Calvin had Christopher Robin’s personal ethics.

@bmonk: You may be thinking of Joe Butt’s analysis (yes, that is his real name) on this page, on a site which I find valuable myself:

http://www.typelogic.com/infp.html

What he says applies very well to the creator of Calvin, but it doesn’t apply to Calvin. Mr. Butt may not see that because he’s using a four-level model rather than the eight-level model, and apart from archetypical considerations. (Sorry for the technical language, folks.)

ENFPs are just as apt, if not more so, to “switch between reality and fantasy” (indeed, we ENFPs often never really leave the latter and prefer the latter, unlike most INFPs I know who can differentiate readily between the two). Here are other, diagnostic things:

Calvin is very, very good at starting projects (even imaginary ones) but has more trouble with the follow-through. He has a consistent “get-things-going” social style, in other words (ENFP). INFPs work “behind the scenes” by preference, something Calvin never does.

Calvin’s “motto” in life is to “be authentic” - to be true to himself (ENFP). While he shares the NF compassion for life, it is the INFP who overwhelmingly “values every living thing” in a way Calvin doesn’t in either real life or especially in his fantasy (cf. Joe Butt’s own summary of ENFPs and INFPs in the mousepads on his site).

Calvin’s “silly switch” is so classically ENFP that it alone rules out his being a “core” INFP (again, compare Joe Butt’s own analysis of ENFPs!).

Truly diagnostic: Calvin’s “Trickster” archetype is tied to how he interprets why the way the world works the way it does. That thought process almost always leaves him stuck between two bad options (and often at the bottom of Dead Man’s Gulch). Unlike INFPs, Calvin isn’t uncomfortable in dealing with the sensual world; on the contrary, like an ENFP he often overindulges mindlessly in it.

The Prosecution rests.

(and the angels rejoiced that it finally shut up)

Um…… Did you ever consider that Calvin is close to the border on the INFP/ENFP personality? There are different degrees of introvert/extrovert.

Way back when I took the test my scores all fell into the closest to middle score possible.

There was someone on this list who was always coming up with funny variants of “Tiger Tiger Burning Bright” in response to the day’s strip. I wonder if he or she is still around?

this one’s not really up there by Bill’s standards..

the one where Hobbes makes calvin read pages of verse just to let him climb into a tree is pretty hilarious..

Nice, Hobbes. Reminds me of the one where Hobbes and Calvin start a G.R.O.S.S meeting by announcing themselves in rhyme.