Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 23, 2022

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking

That would be a navigation program. GPS is a system of satellites.

Are they taking the road less traveled AND the road most traveled? Frost would have never thought of that.

Nice depiction of the Frost enigma. Did he meant this or this?

That quote about the road less traveled by is on the “welcome to” sign in my town.

Apple picking time was about 4 months ago.

Looks like the road less traveled leads to — bad puns! Is that what Frost had in mind?

Frost wrote that poem to tease his friend Edward Thomas, who would agonise over small decisions, wondering if the whole world might be changed by a single thing. Perhaps it’s ironic that most audiences empathise with the protagonist and see that, yes, a small change can make a huge difference.

Frost wrote the poem at a time when Thomas was delaying a visit to the US while he considered whether the right thing to do was to join the fight in the first world war. Spurred into action by the teasing in the poem, he made his mind up, dropped his planned visit to Frost and joined the war.

He was killed in the fighting in 1917.

But he tells us in the same poem that both roads were about equally traveled. Robert Frost was confused.

Schroedinger’s Path???

when you come to the fork in the road, take it

The second quote comes from “A Servant of Servants”, which is a monologue in a woman’s voice about a dead-end life in a dead-end marriage.

Thinking about it, our paths in life should be unique to us, so not only less traveled, but only traveled.

How would he have handled navigating past an island while canoeing in the river?

Ah, the trousers of time.

“There’s small profit in comparisons.”

“Whose words these are I think I know . . . "Thank you, Jef, for a multi-layered cartoon and a great pun at the end.

Right about here we could use a particle physicist explaining what happens immediately after almost all electron-positron pair-production events.

Good firewalls make good neighbors

Schrodinger’s Crossroads ?

Very clever.

Does the road less traveled still have snack stops? That would tilt my choices.

The order in which he wrote them isn’t important; they apply to different situations. Sometimes you have a choice — and sometimes you don’t. When you don’t have a choice, the only way out is through.

How is “app-picking” a pun?