FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for April 15, 2023

And they call pants trousers. And underpants are called pants.

And they call apartments flats and tires are called tyres

And the first floor is on the second floor.

And just wait till you get to napkins.

I think pentiums were outdated even when this was drawn in ’02.

Yes, Americans get lots of words wrong. They don’t even differentiate spanners from wrenches.

In France they call French fries “fried apples”.

And suddenly a scene from Pulp Fiction was born.

If you think those are confusing, just wait until you “hire” (rent) a car….

I guess the implication is that since a pentium is a chip and theirs are crisp they overclock and burn them out.

hey it’s fish & chips in USA too

And a favorite dessert is ‘spotted dick’. Honestly.

It’s weird what the Brits call “pudding”.

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” attributed to George Bernard Shaw

Pentiums. Wow this comic strip is old. The original was released on March 22, 1993.

i just tried writing the words brits use for cigarettes and getting drunk but was told those words were not acceptable and wouldn’t allow my post

Back when this comic originally ran, overclocking your CPU was something you could actually DO with physical settings to change the speed your system interacted with it.

Now if you want to “overclock” you change a setting through firmware, and the CPU has an internal failsafe that prevents you from choosing modes it’s not designed for.

People always say that what the British call “chips” are what Americans call french fries. But aren’t they really more like what Americans call potato wedges? Back in the 70s, when there were two competing nationwide fish and chips chains in the U.S. (H. Salt Esq. and Arthur Treacher’s), the chips both places served were much more like potato wedges than french fries.

And how I loved those 1970s fish and chips! You can still find so-called fish and chips in my area, but they’re not even remotely as good. (And the “chips” they’re served with really are just french fries!)

The first french fries weren’t fried in France, they were fried in Grease.

Over clock gone, gone, gone…

Overclock their pentiums???

How bored are you guys?

I just remembered how, after France didn’t support the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, some fast-food chains reacted by renaming the French Fries to “Liberty Fries”. Of course this didn’t last, and the French fries denomination is alive and well.

Back in my younger days, I used to fry an occasional Pentium by overclocking it! What a nerd joke! How many people would even know about that? (Just to explain… on a computer motherboard there is a circuit that generates a “clock”, a regular waveform that synchronizes the processor and all the other chips on the motherboard. On early computers, it was possible to replace or modify the circuit to speed up the clock, and thus make the whole computer run faster. For example, you could make a 4MHz processor run at 6MHz, making it 50% faster. This was called “overclocking” the processor. It was a nerd’s way of getting a faster computer. Sometimes this worked just fine, and sometimes overclocking overheated and fried the CPU chip. So that would certainly make the CPU chip a “crisp”! I have seen overheated circuit boards overheat and billow smoke. This was called “failing the smoke test”.