Different every time
For a long time, you could buy own-brand fashion t-shirts with the number 76 on them from high street chains in the UK. Many different styles. Now, I was born in 1976, so I noticed this perhaps more than I otherwise might. I know it’s the year of the US Bicentennial, which may have introduced it into design vocabulary in a way that wasn’t clearly defined. But I could never quite put my finger on it. I still occasionally see a generic 76 and wonder what’s going on.
I’m a bit sad we don’t get to clearly see what’s written on the notepad, but I suppose such things were not meant for our eyes.
Shelley will eventually discover that there’s millions to be made in writing poppycock.
She’ll also eventually discover that much of her life, if explained to someone else, would come across as poppycock. But, at this point, she hasn’t lived that life yet.
Maybe the shirts were meant to appeal to Brits who are still sad over the loss of those 13 colonies? People would see each other wearing them and commiserate over what could have been a massive Commonwealth country, at the least.
Meself I’m all in favour of sending an expeditionary force to sort the buggers out and RETAKE THE COLONIES! After the glorious triumph of Brexit it’s the logical next step. Right then, whose with me?
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Plink.
(sound of pin dropping)
The state they’re in. are you sure you want them back?
Yes, yes. One gigantic Canada, from sea to sea, from the Pole to the Rio Grande.
Well, maybe not that far south – even Gigantic Canadians would probably be too polite to steal all of that land from Mexico.
Has Jack scanned his food replicator for Bajoran viruses lately? That’s the cause of over 90% of spontaneous aphasia cases!
So, talking doesn’t work… writing doesn’t work… Has he tried… charades, maybe?
I suspect that the charades equivalent of gibberish would be a seizure.
I was thinking renting carefully selected VHS tapes at the local Blockbuster. See how far outside the box that language filter can work. Though it could get real awkward if it could handle that.
“Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t trying to rent, uh, Tina Takes Tackleford, I was after Baccalaurate gumball cheese whistle! I mean, that one with Michael J. Fox.”
“You’re a teenage werewolf? Why didn’t you just say?”
“Teen Wolf, Twins, Double Impact, Die Hard… it feels like you’re trying to tell me something hers.:
That 76 isn’t some sort of footy player number, or a winning soccer score?
Does it have any significance in snooker?
SNOOKER COULD BE WORSE — 76
oh I absolutely laughed like a drain there
It might take a couple years for a soccer team to score 76 goals. And they generally don’t wear numbers that high.
There were (are?) Philadelphia 76ers in basketball too.
There are.
In American Football (“The football sport that is trying to get rid of the foot from the game…”), players on the offensive or defensive lines are the kinds who usually wear that number.
As far as soft reboots go, this is intriguing. Exploring the 90s (Bobbins timeline?), but with a 2010s foil? It might not be Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto reprising Kirk and Spock… but it might be.
Am I imagining things, or is Shelly noticeably shorter than her older self? Did she have a very late growth spurt in college?
My guess is that Finch is pretty tall now
Last we saw Jack, he was Mildred’s height or a little taller, and Mildred is the world’s tallest blonde thing, so.
(And I think Shelley’s still kneeling on the bed in that lower left panel, while Jack has stood up.)
Not so. My ex is the world’s tallest blonde thing.
Take it up with Georgia. It was her description.
Shelley is quite short, canonically. I think Tibkins-era Shelley is often wearing tall shoes, though.
Mogging 75, natch
I hadn’t commented on this story thus far.. because I forgot but whatever’s going on here I like it. I didn’t EXPECT Jack getting lost in time and space and winding up friends with College-Era Shelley to be the premise here, but I like it. I also hope we find out what happened to the other two. I know , assomeone here stated, Sonny is probably fine, but I think Linton would be fun to plop some extra chaos into Lottie’s life. That and I feel the two had chemistry, though I don’t think it’d go long term unless he stopped being such a dick. But it has been at least a year since they all graduated if not more, people can change.
I would love to see Linton again too. After Lottie he was the one who was most interested in investigations and mysteries and I wonder if he has changed interests. Dunno if a relationship with Lottie would work, but it would be nice to see them working together again. The last time he appeared was in Ven/Tak and his bad temper had improved a lot thanks to Mildred. For some strange reason they had a good chemistry and her being a dangerous nut helped him to be better with the others.
I thought Linton got better and more interesting as a character as he got older. To me, Sonny peaked early, Jack peaked somewhere in the middle, and Linton peaked toward the end.
I also always felt that Linton and Mildew had a lot of chemistry, in a Bruce Willis and Cybill Sheperd on Moonlightning kind of way
I kinda wonder if Linton has enrolled in a police academy by now.
I read a SciFi book once in which the hero (a writer) out of curiosity kept a note of all the typos he made and he discovered that if he put all the typos together they formed a repeated message which turned out to be a message from an alien race far away in the galaxy warning him of some disaster about to engulf the earth. They were using him as a communications conduit. Spooky eh?
Makes you think.
I was going to say charades but someone beat me to it. Jack is very good at charades though if I’m remembering correctly!
76 is a long-running chain of petrol stations in the US. You used to be able to get little orange balls with their logo on which attached to the top of your car’s aerial. I always wanted one because they were so quintessentially American (and at the same time more than a bit naff) but I never got one…
I haven’t thought about that blue and orange logo in a long time. They disappeared from the midwest ages ago, but it looks like they still exist as a chain on the west coast.
The full name or the chain is “Union 76”, and the main thing they were once known for is that the sign at each station was a huge rotating six-foot illuminated orange sphere. It was rather extravagant for a mere gas station sign. They phased these out in favor of more ordinary signs some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, presumably because they were too expensive. The little orange antenna balls were meant to be replicas of this.
Did anything notable happen in 1976 that left a mark on t-shirt design? Maybe the Olympics (or in Canadian, “Summer Olympics”) in Montréal?
I’ve just looked down at the generic hoodie I’m wearing and realised it says ‘Brooklyn 76’. What the hell?
Are you sure you’re in the right time? What year do you think it is?
It looks more and more like a curse. I wonder what magical creature Jack managed to annoy so much to ended up like this.
I’m a fellow born in ’76er, but from the US. I don’t remember t-shirts with 76 on them being a fad here while I was in college. But I’m also terribly unobservant, so perhaps I just missed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76_(gas_station)
“The 76 ball is a popular logo in the “Cult Style” of European car tuning (especially on Volkswagen Golf Mk1 GTIs, due to the debut year of 1976), and it is used on clothing items in Japan as of 2005.”
Time travel is tricky I always think. It can rupture your brain. If Jack has travelled back in time to a time before he was even born what’s he doing in that student bedroom? Has he displaced someone who has been knocked back into yet another time and place like time travel billiards. Or is that bedroom just like a place holder waiting for him to appear? Or is it, in fact, a Tardis bedroom. So many questions.
Is it larger on the inside than it is on the outside? That would be a real giveaway.
That’s normal for halls of residence. You need another person in there for scale.
Both of them have placed their shoes beneath the bed. Is there any significance to this?
Under old Welsh law, they’re married now. Poor Bruno. But I’m sure he’ll understand that they just wanted to keep the bedcovers clean.
It’s okay. If they pay a sufficient number of sheep, I’m sure they can have it annulled.
Well, there is “the condition of a dowry” in the upcoming pages.
That one little belly fold line in the last panel… extremely evocative.
Send him here to the United States. Poppycock seems to be very popular here.
He would be very “comfortably off”.