Do you remember the world before internet mattresses? Before a podcast would offer you a 20% discount code for a mattress in a box that you could return after 100 days if you weren’t totally satisfied? I’ve slept on a few of them. I was far, far from totally satisfied. SNAKE OIL!
Green Door
What a beautiful kimono. That’s Dean Thompson style, then and now. Lottie is far too young for the X-Files, but this fascination will be explored in the next Solver story.
The return of the giant sloth, living carpet and automated one-man band! I love those guys! Especially when I don’t have to draw the one-man band. I suppose, strictly speaking, he’s a no-man band. But that’s a question for robot personhood experts.
Dean has filled poor Glenn full of mead and now all he can do is inexpertly attack a kebab. A sore head tomorrow, but an overwhelming sense of a job well done.
I got nervous after making this comic that “happy as a sandboy” is racist, but apparently a sandboy was a youth paid to collect dry sand from coastal caves to spread on saloon bar floors. I know. Dodged a bullet there.
I always liked the term “the catbird seat”, though it’s not in common usage these days, so it’s not a great one to drop in the supermarket when making idle chitty chat (oiseau) with the cashier. Its origin is a short story by James Thurber.
The number 60 bus was the first local bus a lot of Sheffield students would catch when they started university in the city, as it would run past the halls of residence in Broomhill, to the University, into the city and sometimes beyond. I felt a pang of sadness when I learned that the route was replaced in 2009.
Claire has given her all for the cause. She’s very close to irreparably broken, by the looks of things.
“Northern giant hornet” is the new name for the Asian giant hornet. This is a bang-up-to-the-minute edict from the Entomological Society of America (ESA). Whatever the nabobs of insect life want to call it, you wouldn’t want one to join you when you were sitting on a bench, innocently drinking an orangeade.
VERY SCARY:
Aren’t a wry neck and a torticollis the same thing? Yes. Here I am trying to recreate the phenomenon where one thing is understood as two things, almost identical, but somehow discrete from one another. The best example of this is how as a teenager I didn’t join the spoken word “misled” and the written word “misled” together. When I read “misled” I thought “my-zelled” and thought it meant, specifically, “confused”. Which is clearly what I was. This issue was genuinely resolved by my purchase for 99p of Celine Dion’s minor hit, “Misled” as a CD single, an enjoyably out-of-character voyage into new jill swing by the Canadian balladeer.