Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for July 01, 2014

Calvin finally got a sound night of sleep when the iPod was invented.

Good thing they invented computers where you could open and put records in and listen to catchy music.

In Calvin’s life, the concept of concentric circles is now a matter of record.

Here is another case where Calvin was still thinking about something at a late hour. Note the crescent moon in the sky:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (April 16, 1991)Johnny Hart’s B.C. comic strip was in the newspapers when Bill Watterson was growing up. In fact, B.C. was introduced in 1958, the same year Bill Watterson was born. Throughout the years of B.C., Johnny Hart very frequently used the device of having day turn into night with a crescent moon in the sky, while someone was still thinking about something, as a means of showing that a lot of time had elapsed. Bill Watterson borrowed that device for Calvin and Hobbes.Here is an example from near the end of Johnny Hart’s 49-year career drawing B.C., just 3 years before Johnny died:Click here: B.C. (January 2, 2004)Here is what Bill Watterson said about Johnny Hart’s B.C.:“I admire the simplicity of B.C., the way Johnny Hart has gotten that strip down to the bare essentials. There’s nothing extraneous in the drawing, and the humor is very spartan. It doesn’t grab me, though, because I look for real involvement with characters, and the characters in B.C. are pretty much interchangeable; they’re props for humor. I think his style of humor is mostly in words, not in the characters. I look to strips like Peanuts, where you’re really involved with the characters; you feel that you know them. I guess that’s why I don’t enjoy B.C. quite as much. It’s better than many, though.”Following Johnny Hart’s death, Mason Mastroianni, Johnny’s grandson, took over the writing of the B.C. strip. He continues the use of the day/night/crescent-moon device in B.C.:Click here: B.C. (July 26, 2013)

Here are a couple of other strips on the subject of today’s Calvin and Hobbes.First, a modern strip on an old topic:Click here: Thatababy (October 24, 2010)And finally, a strip from the latter part of Charles Schulz’s 49-year career drawing Peanuts. You can tell it’s from the later years, because Lucy is no longer wearing a dress.Click here: Peanuts (March 18, 1988)Both Johnny Hart (B.C.) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts) drew their strips for 49 years, until they died. Bill Watterson, on the other hand, drew only about eight years’ worth of Calvin and Hobbes over a ten-year period, and then he retired.But Bill Watterson put so much content and genius into every Calvin and Hobbes strip, including multiple punchlines in so many of his strips, that he exhausted his material in that time. Bill then recognized that it was time to retire, rather than letting the strip go downhill like so many other comic strips with extended runs. Recognizing this fact was also part of Bill Watterson’s genius, as well as an indication that his entire life did not depend on continuing to draw a comic strip until he died. Consequently, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes has perhaps the most consistent level of high quality, from start to finish, among the greatest comic strips ever created.

This brain-teaser doesn’t let him sleep!!

My eyes are seriously glazing over… ;)

Calvin, you just learned about passing someone on the outside. Just wait until you’re told about camshafts and valve springs.

@ORMouseworks: Just a very brief history lesson. Didn’t want to exhaust all of my material and have to retire.

:>)

We had a litter of puppies once that seem to think that they would “fall” off the ground if they left their fenced in area. When set down anywhere else, they would immediately hug the ground.

Interesting, I never thought of that

No one ever explained that to us in science class or math class. Now that sort of information would have fascinated us, instead of that business about the two trains leaving the station at the same time…

I remember reading in a student magazine about “the music of the future”. The article said we’d be able to see the band playing the music. I thought they meant some kind of hologramme would appear when you put on the LP! (Now that would have been cool!) It wasn’t till the 90s that I realised that article had been talking about music videos.

Aw, great. Now I’m going to be up all night thinking about it.

Maybe his “matter of record” is dad’s way of screwing up Calvin’s head to get even for the car-in-the-ditch stunt.Thanks for the historical perspective, Pro!

You really know how to give a kid nightmares, Dad! Tomorrow, show him your old Algebra I book….

This is a great way to explain many things.That’s what Dad’s are for-to take care of you, & make you think!Altho, sometimes he pulls Calvin’s leg-like driving trucks over a bridge until it collapses, so build the bridge with one less truck driven over it!!

@Hobbes. Brilliant, thanks much. Would you be able to resurrect the Sunday strip where Dad explains to Calvin why the world was black and white until the 1930s?

LOL! That must have been how my children responded to some of MY explanations!

Remember the car Calvin? Revenge.

Record players were mechanical and simple. They usually had a fan or flyweight governor to regulate the speed, so there was the same amount of recording per degree of arc on the inside and outside of a record. CD technology included constant linear velocity so that there is same data density per square of area on the inside and outside of the disk.

This is the kinda stuff that SHOULD keep a kid awake

I don’t get it. Why does this keep Calvin awake at night? It’s interesting information, but hardly some major paradox.

Nobody let him try to explain special relativity or time dilation to him, his head might explode!

Hi Michael Ford. Here is the strip you mentioned, plus the one where Calvin’s world turns black-and-white.Incidentally, when we use the term “black-and-white,” what we generally mean is “grayscale,” which includes black, white, and a lot of shades of gray (black-and-white photos, TV, movies). But the second strip is extremely clever because it is truly black-and-white, with no shades of gray – like some types of thinking.Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (October 29, 1989)Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (February 3, 1991)

Myrtly wrote: “I don’t get it. Why does this keep Calvin awake at night? It’s interesting information, but hardly some major paradox.”

Actually, research into children who are highly intellectually gifted has found that some of them, when they are very young, may lie awake at night worrying about things that would normally only concern much older children, or adults. For example, in an extreme case, a four-year-old child may be unable to sleep because of worrying about people starving on the other side of the world, or being terrified of the prospect of nuclear holocaust. This correlates with an overly-gifted imagination and a very strong ability to use abstract thinking to contemplate and visualize various scenarios that might happen. Of course, while Calvin certainly has an overly-gifted imagination, he only seems to be highly intellectually gifted on certain days and in certain ways. For example, his language skills and his ability to contemplate complex philosophical questions are light-years ahead of the math skills that he demonstrates up at the chalkboard in Miss Wormwood’s class. Then again, many of Calvin’s difficulties in school are because he is bored and he is distracted by his overly-gifted imagination. And when he imagines himself as Spaceman Spiff, he is light-years ahead of everyone.Bill Watterson says that Calvin’s behavior is not auto-biographical, in the sense that Bill behaved very differently as a child. However, I think that Calvin’s intellectual giftedness is a direct reflection of Bill Watterson’s, and that some of Calvin’s struggles with boredom in school probably reflect similar experiences from Bill Watterson’s gifted childhood. Research has also found a very strong correlation between intellectual giftedness and introversion, and Bill Watterson, who leads a totally reclusive life, has described himself as “introverted off the charts.”

@Thomas Scott Roberts: I think you are right. Especially in the early days of B.C., a lot of the humor had specifically to do with the distinct differences between the characters. Perhaps part of the problem was that some readers had trouble telling B.C., Thor, and Peter apart. Also, Bill Watterson was too young to read the earliest days of B.C. when it was first-run. He was probably referring more to B.C. as he saw it at the time of his interview. But Bill was correct that Johnny Hart’s humor was more English-oriented and gag-oriented than it was character-development-oriented. In fact, the use of English in extremely clever ways was Johnny Hart’s unique genius as a comic strip artist.

Calvin’s dad explains Angular Velocity… Must have missed this one when it first came out!

Thanks, Thirdguy. Glad you enjoy reading it. And, by the way, I never did make it to Rome. Never even made it as far as Vermont. Still living in the Midwest. Like Bill Watterson…..

Surely most kids would look at their parent and say ‘well obviously’ with an eyeroll. I know mine would have if I’d told her that as though it was something clever by the time she was school age.

Though she did get herself momentarily boggled by finding that a gradient on a graph really could be minus infinity last night. (she’s a bit older than Calvin now!).

You don’t get these kinds of brain-seizing ponderings with CDs… since you usually can’t get at ’em…

Just let the poor kid enjoy his music.

Ah physics, got to love it!

I believe Watterson did the black-and-white strip in response to syndicate people who accused him of seeing things in black-and-white when he was in contract disputes with them because they wanted to license C&H for other media. Thanks to all who provided interesting history and background in these comments.

Dad’s lecture about records spinning inadvertently (maybe) made Calvin’s head do the same.

My father would bring home things with broken mechanisms. I would fix them. The things he brought became more and more complicated. Though I received my degree from IIT, I learned more from him than any college professor.

It’s dark matter, Calvin. You don’t have to understand it, you just have to believe it exists,

Nice going, dad! Nothing like an educational moment to mess up your kid’s life!

You spin my head right round, right round, when ya go down when ya go down down…You spin my head right round, right round, when ya go down when ya go down down

Make it stop….

Boy, today’s comments are wonderful, and I appreciate all who avoided turning to a political bashing!There was a reference to “concentric circles”; I think, by Hobbes. To set the “record” straight, it is a continuous spiral, not concentric circles. If I misunderstood the comment, I apologize.

I don’t understand why simple physics is keeping C awake. ??

I got the same answer when I asked how fast does the earth rotate on its axis. Grrr! True, but mind boggling. ☺

And the absolute center point (where the center of the post is) does not move at all. Of course it’s an infinitesimal point – too small to see – but it’s there. Or is it? And that led mathematicians into “infinitesimals” (Calculus).

Dad’s revenge.

Hobbs et al..best BC evar was the one “if you don’t know what it does don’t mess with it”..great great short speech along with keep eating and keep moving,cheers RE

Just one long spiral groove ;-) If you mean how many turns it does around its centre, you need to solve a differential equation; not difficult, but a bit clumsy (and surely pretentious) to post here.

It’s ‘Canada Day?’ Above, ‘Somebodyshort’ said, ’It’s Canada Day.’

Tuesday, July 1, 2014From The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said 2014 Page-A-Day Calendar »

ON: MERELY, EH?

10:10: Suspicious people were reportedly doing something with flashlights by the side of North 5th Street in Custer. A deputy checked and found that the people were not suspicious, but merely Canadian.

police blotter item in a South Dakota newspaper

I did exactly the same thing when we parked a the edge of the parking lot and I got out of the car at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and found myself looking OVER the tops of all the trees we had just been driving through. Yes sir, those little puppies had nothing on me when it comes to ground-hugging!

Hi neverenoughgold. To clarify, you are correct that the groove in the record is a spiral. But Dad is talking about a point on the label and a point on the outer rim. Those two points move in concentric circles.

One on each side!

I love the comic as much as I love the comments! Thank you Hobbs for the additional lesson!!!

It’s one of the few times that Calvin’s dad actually explains something for real, not just an imaginative joke…

They reprinted this strip in one of my high school math books.

I don’t think Calvin was ready for that.

Would kids today even know what a record is?

“Spiral, torn from the tone-arm…” (Spiral by XTC).

This is so WICKED SICK!

Dad’s revenge! Push the car into a ditch, will you?

That’s also how whole galaxies rotate.

Hi GretchensMom. Yes, I’ve seen “Dear Mr. Watterson,” and it is great for Calvin and Hobbes fans. However, I was disappointed that it is too slow and not entertaining enough to catch on with the general public — too much of a documentary to grab the interest of non-fans. The movie shows the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State, where Bill Watterson’s work is located. Since you don’t live too far from there, you should go there sometime for a visit. They will let you handle some of the original Calvin and Hobbes strips.

I’m very sorry I thought it the wrong way :-/ It’s much easier and straightforward than I wrote in my previous comment: just multiply 200 seconds by 0,705 revolutions per second: that’s 141 turns. My deepest apologies!