For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for August 11, 2013

And that’s why you should wear protective hand coverings in the wood shop.

Sometimes, its easier to just nod your head and say yes, somebody bit me

And that’s why dentist aren’t allowed to do ANYTHING else with their hands. Or am I thinking of surgeons?

If you can’t lick ’em – join – ’em!!

been a carpenter and woodworker for 41 years…can still count to ten without taking my shoes off…lucky, or careful?Your choice

sometimes is easier just to go with the flow

Actually, he should have been using a mallet, and tapped lightly on the butt of the chisel. Also, you don’t take long strokes with a chisel, you do small bits as you go. Besides that, he would have been better off with the wood in a vise.

Junior High Wood Shop 101.

Obviously a number of commenters here never worked in a wood shop …

He should make up something like, “I wrestle sharks on the weekend and one slipped. I got him though, and he sure was tasty!” Have fun with it and the more ridiculous the better!

A dentist working in someone’s mouth without protective gloves? I don’t think so.

Clamp your work down and don’t push a chisel toward your hand.

a bad hair day

I feel your pain, John. Been there, done that.

Gloves? No. Clamp the wood and move the hand out of the way. Accidents happen when hands, etc. are used inappropriately in the wood shop.

Would you want a dentist that messes up his finger with a chisel “chiseling” away on your teeth?

I remember reading this comic in the waiting room at my dentist’s office.

1. The Tampa Bay Times omitted the first two panels today. After reading the strip then, I thought that John had been bitten by someone, and that the joke was that he was a bit ashamed of this but finally admitted it. Now I know that the joke was that he was sick to death of the question and finally “went with the flow.”

2. A question that always got me was, “Did you cut your hair?” when I showed up with hair at ear-lobe level after it’d been halfway down my back. I’d inhale vigorously and say, “No, I sniffed real hard like this, and it went inside my head.”

Seriously, you really do need to be careful in a workshop. Some of our group of friends bought property in north Georgia halfway up a mountain and built houses on it. One man had a circular saw blade that extended up through a slot in the table. He was preparing his work surface one day and fell into kind of a reverie while brushing wood chips off the table with the saw turned on. The blade sliced through the bottom part of the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of (as I recall) his left hand. It wasn’t his dominant hand, but he could no longer play the banjo around the campfire, which had been a favorite activity of his.

(Warning: Graphic info follows)Another friend in the same housing complex was in his workshop one day and wanted to unscrew a light-switch plate from the wall using an electric drill. Instead of the screw turning around, the plate started spinning. Somehow a screw on the plate caught under the man’s wedding ring. He felt a stab of pain and realized that his hand was bleeding. He wrapped his hand in a towel and had his wife drive him toward a hospital at the foot of the mountain. When he was about halfway there, he got up the courage to open the towel, and noted that his ring finger was not there. His wife called a neighbor and asked him to look for the finger in the workshop. The friend found the finger lying on the floor against a wall and rushed it to the hospital. They flew the fellow to Atlanta, but it was determined that if the finger were sewn on, it would just be “there” and incapable of movement. He elected not to have it attached.

Now he gets along fine without it. This sounds like an urban legend, but I’ve seen the hand with the missing finger, and have even held it when we were holding hands in a prayer circle before eating.

Night-Gaunt49 said, about 14 hours agoLynn’s Notes:“Rod spent every minute he could in his treasured workshop. He could make or repair almost anything. Even though he was usually very careful, there were times when he did go to the clinic with a bandage or two! This always gave his patients a laugh and inspired me to do this strip.”

Where do you find Lynn’s notes? Thanks.

Doesn’t he own a vice?

Back when the show Barney Miller was on Hal Lindon broke his leg for real so they had to write it into the show. For several episodes there was a running gag where everyone was trying to figure out how Barney broke his leg. What no one realized was that the writers couldn’t come up with a funny story for the show, but they also didn’t know how Hal broke his leg for real because he refused to tell anyone how he did it. Finally they badgered Hal until he told them that he was standing on his toilet to put up a picture and his foot slipped into the toilet bowl and broke. The writers looked at each other a agreed they couldn’t come up with anything funnier than that so they wrote it into the show.

This was the 1980’s, before it was “common” for that.

Nabuquduriuzhur: Pertussis was not reintroduced. There was always a small pool of infection by those who believed Reich-wing propaganda against medicine and other sciences and now it has exploded in the population that believe it is extinct like smallpox. (For that matter, we could have eradicated polio, except the CIÅ posed as health workers, killed Bin Ladin, and bragged about how they did it. Now health workers are killed as spies and polio is again spreading.