Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 03, 2014

Run Zonker, run!

Actually, Zonker was instrumental in eliminating the sacrifices.

Righteously done, DUDE!

Either she puts out or we dump her in the volcano!

Extra virgin olive oil

Keeps wooly mammoths away too, i might remind you

this was one of my favorite story lines

I remember reading and rereading these strips in Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits and the fact that Trudeau missed Zee’s mustache in panel 4 drove me nuts. Silly me.

@ Clark Kent. “Before puberty, boys are incapable of losing their virginity”.From which orifice did you pull that “fact” ?

In an old Playboy mag of the ’60’s, there waz a Buck Brownor Doug Sneyd (memory doesn’t serve) cartoon of two virgins being pushed towards the rim of the volcano and one says to the other “I sure got THEM fooled..I ain’t a virgin !”

What happened to MacArthur? Start giving away Genius grants?

There was a hilarious parody of Superboy in a playboy of the 70’s, about how he was a bully, always challenging guys to arm wrestle, although everyone knew who he was. The line I recall best was “Clark was so potent, he could knock up a girl just by playing with himself in the next room.”

Boys can lose their virginity as soon as they can get an erection…which basically means at birth.

Niven did well with that one.A GIFT FROM EARTH was one of my favorites, other than the eye dilation silliness.

Muttered all over the Island by females of sacrificing age to many a young man…

“No, I don’t even like you, now kiss me!”

I wouldn’t call it a short story, but an article. Niven wrote some very good articles like that on the hazards of teleportation, time travel grammar, and so on.

I think it was an episode of “The Far Side” in which island natives were rushing 2 chunky, older women up to the mouth of a flaming volcano. One of the women said to the other, “You thought they wouldn’t like tourists here. Did you see how thrilled they were when I told them we were Virginians?!” #epicfail.

“And so goes that misapplied logic.”-If A implies B and we have A, then we can expect B.In which A is the sacrifice, B is the non-eruption, the absence of wooly mammoths and pink pixies..The logic is flawless, given the initial assumptions.The initial assumptions are flawed.(actually, it only protects against wooly mammoths, the other two are mere coincidence)

I just love the expression on Zonker’s face in the last panel. (I don’t have a joke to share)

I don’t like these retro strips. Why are they doing this?

“Barring any other data”.Why would you do that?Logic exists separate from ALL data, not just “other data”. The data just lets you see if the logic squares with reality..Early logicians didn’t even care if empirical evidence and results agreed with logic; they considered logic supreme..When you adopt the scientific method, you learn all kinds of things. Until then, you’re stuck with making assumptions without testing them..It is obvious many assumptions have never been tested because they are needed by the assumer and his world-view.