Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 23, 2024

I guess he’s never thrown out the garbage in the middle of the night.

The only garbage he threw out went into the bin icon.

There are lots of Racoons in the Seattle area and at camp. I saw a really big one just ambling down the street in downtown Vancouver once! (I know Seattle and Vancouver are different places, but they aren’t “That” far away from each other.

The world of this strip is another Twilight Zone!!

Here in Wisconsin, raccoon’s natural predators—wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, have been pretty much eliminated. They’ve been replaced by automobiles.

“And Rocky Raccoon checked into his room only to find Gideon’s Bible”

Be sure to hug Raccoons with white stripes.

Ah, the thrill of having them come in through the cat door and dump trash all over the kitchen, then slowly leave as they’re flipping you off

Here we can’t put the trash out. We have these racoons, except they’re not masked and they’re much bigger, and jet black. We call them “bears”.

Wait till he has to figure out ‘weather’…

Q, to Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson: What’s a Woman?

A, from the woman now on the Highest court in the land: I am not a biologist.

In fact, he’s a trained unnaturalist.

Oh, c’mon…I’m as suburbanite as they come, and I know what a racoon is!

I’ve never seen a spotted raccoon, but I did have a fox wander through my back yard yesterday.

He is at a camp, out in the country, and has never encountered a raccoon?

I’d be tempted to have Alex do something completely unrelated to computers for the summer in order to gain some sort of well rounded exposure to life experiences but I suppose that would ruin the joke…

Eventually he will come to know “Rocket Racoon”

Yesterday morning I came within about 12 feet of a coyote at the intersection of Geary and Park Presidio (S.F.), crossing the street in opposite directions.

We made eye contact, and he was like “Are you cool?” and I was like “Yeah I’m cool” and he was like “Then we’re cool.”

I created one website “from scratch” using HTML. It was for a Turkish Coffeehouse. Today, everyone uses applications. Life is too short.

Why would this camp be out in the countryside? It could very well be conducted in the basement of any urban skyscraper (or building, depending on the group size).

Mike: Neither am I. Walter, where did you go to elementary school?

Does any one know the name of the camp? The tee shirt looks like it says, “Camp App,” but it could be Camp Apple.

How do you say “duh” in HTML? Oh, it’s still just “duh”…

To Walter, Mike probably is a biology nerd …

Perhaps he’d understand if Mike said “Trash Panda” instead.

One fine summer evening as the sun was going down, I was standing on my front stoop just taking in the pleasant weather, when what should emerge from the storm sewer on the corner across the street but a mama raccoon and two little ones. They made a beeline for my place, since I’d let my backyard return to nature. I waited until they were at the end of my driveway before saying “Hi, mom! Hi, kids!”. The little ones took alarm and scooted under my car. Mom just looked at me and hissed, so the kids, properly reassured that she had it all under control as usual, came out of hiding and followed her undeviating path to exactly where she wanted to go.

I have one visiting, probably a young bachelor, who comes over just before sundown each day. Seems to be finding leftover seed under the bird feeder, but I wish it would eat the little snails swarming over the plants—there are so many this year.

Desk jockeys .I’ll lay 3-1 on nature

I love the emphasis on specialized training in the natural world.

I remember a tongue-in-cheek letter in, I think, The New England Journal of Medicine, commenting on medical specialization. Something like:

“I am an ophthalmologist. I have a patient whom I suspect of having Polydactyly-Myopia Syndrome. [This is a real thing] Should I refer him to a orthopedist who can assess whether he has six fingers on his hands?”