Return of the Parp
Tag / Smith
Replanting
Arrangement
Tennis joke remix
Descartes
You never know where an idea will come from. This one came from a book of transcripts from Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 programme ‘In Our Time’. If you don’t know the show, it’s essentially Melvyn and a hand picked panel of experts shut in a small room with a microphone dissecting a different randonly chosen academic subject for 45 minutes live on a Thursday morning. One show might be about string theory, the next about the fall of Constantinople, the next about Mary Shelley, and then one about the Dreyfus affair. This show was about the origins of life, and Richard Corfield (I’ve spelled his name incorrectly in the strip) mentioned this fact about cat litter in it. You can listen to the show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y29f. And then you can go through the archive – there’s over 500 shows there dating back to the first edition in 1998.
Splash
Tinkle tinkle
This came from a facebook conversation with Cynthia Sonier, who produces the strip Sooky Rottweiler (available on Tapas at https://tapas.io/series/SookyHeadsetChronicles and https://tapas.io/series/A-Christmas-Mittaines). She had a panel which showed her reactionary silver tabby Mittaines sitting on the toilet. And I remembered that my first cat, Sunday, did that for real. Not only that, when she was outdoors she would pee while sitting over drains, just like Jones is doing in this strip.
Passive dreaming
Passive dreaming is like passive smoking – dreams that are experienced second-hand. I get this a lot – only Linda is dreaming she’s back nursing in the burns unit in Covenant Hospital in Lubbock. It’s truly weird to be woken up by someone who is talking in a commanding voice about the drips she’s setting up for the latest patient to come in. Or she’ll be explaining in a gentle but no-nonsense manner to the family of a burn victim what they can expect to happen for the next few months. Or once, memorably, she was trying to push a buffalo into a wardrobe.
Flat Earth
Inspired by listening to the series of ‘Oh No Ross and Carrie’ podcasts on the growth of flat-earthery. You can listen to them at http://ohnopodcast.com/
Stocking
Merry Christmas everyone!