Quite the fellow
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months learning to identify the flags of the world. I can tell which is which between Kiribati, Uganda and Papua New Guinea’s flags. Is that a bird on Papua New Guinea’s flag? Or a moth gone mad? Either way I like it a lot. But I have no idea exactly which national flag Sir Robert Mapplethorpe is planting in the first panel. It might just feature his family crest.
While I am improving on flag identification, there are swathes of world flaggery that remain hard for me to pin down. A lot of flags are some stripes with a star in the middle. I’ve yet to come up with a system to nail down these stripy mysteries.
Very nice angle in the last panel.
So, each of the siblings wants the ashes scattered on a different peak, perhaps?
I suspect that one wants to go to great efforts to place it in one of the most inaccessible places that Pater Mapplethorpe has bounded upon, while the other would just as soon as pour it into the grate.
I’m thinking two different mountain peaks to go with the two mountain peaks in the cover picture.
If it were merely a question of this mountain versus that mountain, one need not be a Solomon level solver to have a solution.
But if it were this mountain versus *anywhere except* this mountain, that’s a tougher one.
It could be “This mountain but absolutely not that mountain” versus “that mountain but absolutely not this mountain”.
My goodness. You are one of the few people who are honest fans of the Big Bang Theory fan group “Fun With Flags.”
Bless you.
Or else a closet Geoguessr player.
Oh yes: Mali and Guinea (and Senegal, despite the star) are my bane when it comes to vexilology. Not to mention Indonesia, Monaco and Poland. At least the flags of the former United Provinces of Central America have the decency of having different crests to tell them apart (Nicaragua’s is a triangle, El Salvador’s is round, Honduras’ has stars, Guatemala has vertical stripes and a lighter shade of blue and Costa Rica just does its own thing).
As a mature reader of literature, I daren’t imagine the use of the name “Robert Mapplethorpe” to be anything less than masterful allusion. But, fellow Allisonian scholars, what must it mean? In a fictional universe wont to make subtext text, do the undocumented expanses of Allison’s Mapplethorpe map onto the psychosexual terrain charted by ‘IRL’ (as it were) Mapplethorpe? Or is it that, modulo a British temperament, the drive to mountaineer is just the drive to erotically photograph? Fascinating…
I’m now wondering if there was also a traveling companion named “Patricia Smith” who accompanied Mapplethorpe on these global escapades.
I dunno, “Shelley Winters” was not an allusion to anything or anyone.
I’m actually at this moment watching Shelley Winters fight Batman.
Wasn’t she some “Ma Barker” kind of villain? I vaguely remember that she had, like, one stint as a villainess.
She was Ma Parker.
John really missed an opportunity, not having his Shelley there to fight the Bat-like Man.
I was assuming that it was an allusion to Shelly’s “If Winter Comes …”
And they want a stranger to decide what to do with their fathers ashes??? I hope they will pay VERY well!
It’s the tricolors that get me. I once played a game of Freeciv that had the French, Italians, Irish, Romanians, Mexicans, Dutch, Hungarians, Belgians, and Germans in it. It was almost a relief when I inevitably ended up at war with the entire world and I could just blow everything up without having to figure out who it belonged to.
Though that wasn’t as bad as the game where for much of it I was at war with the Indonesians and at peace with the Poles.
I’ve occasionally had trouble telling whether a given flag was the Irish flag or the Italian flag. If that stripe’s really red or really orange, it’s easy to see the difference, but sometimes it’s kinda reddish orangish…
I do not think that the conflict runs along the line of “a specific spot” vs. “anywhere” because “anywhere” would be ready to agree to let his/her sibling take to burden of disposing of daddys remains.
They both must have set their eyes uncompromising on a certain spot.
It would be more fun, if the sent Charlotte & Cie to recover the fallen off toes and fingers.
Sir Robert Mapplethorpe sounds like an associate (or descendant??) of Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III (…hell and come back alive!).
Their old web site has not disappeared yet
http://www.klaatu.org/
OMG now THAT is a deep cut
also, dang, I wish they were on Bandcamp
I assume that one of the siblings has taken the ashes hostage, and the urn contains boiled sweets.
Ashes (or “cremains” as I hear they’re referred to in “the industry”) are SO convenient* to dispose of (unlike, say, an actual corpse). Just split them into two containers, as King Solomon might have said. Problem solved! *[I am aware there are some stuck-up places, possibly Disneyland, which have restrictions on ash-scattering.]
Perhaps the one thing the siblings are united on is that they must be scattered from that specific urn, and neither wants to go last, so it has to be done at the same moment.
On certain peaks in the Lake District, locals are VERY fed up of crunching through swathes of unidentified ashes as they reach the summit.
As someone currently listening to a 10 part podcast series on Ernest Shackleton (come for the boat getting crushed by ice, stay for the tidal wave) I am *very* invested in this arc now.
On the opposite climactic pole, I just finished “The River of Doubt”, the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition into the Amazon jungle. Very interesting!
It’s supposed to be a bird-of-paradise on the PNG flag. Fun fact, that flag was designed by a teenage girl. Though the design of the bird is not hers.
Its origin is all the more reason for me to like that flag!
And a different crest on the JPG?
That’s a surprising urn of events
If it was actually an ossuary jug, that would be a surprising urn of bones.
Raggiana bird-of-paradise
on flag
photos at https://search.macaulaylibrary.org/catalog?taxonCode=rbopar1
Veering off the subject, I made a return to the Mastodon social media platform yesterday, and started following two John Allison instances there. Which he apparently set up years ago and has never used since. But I’m hoping. John is one of the reasons I haven’t entirely disabled my Twitter account — one of the few people I don’t yet want to give up on following there. But I’d rather follow them somewhere else, somewhere not run by an egotistical clueless billionaire.
Why is Lottie so amused at Glenn’s quip in panel 2?
I don’t think it’s what Glenn’s saying in that panel that Lottie’s amused by, exactly. I think she’s amused by what Hetty said, and Glenn’s reaction.
I assumed she was amused by Glorg’s tie.
Boss mode: Chad vs. Romania
I hope Lottie doesn’t drop that urn.
Way to really… urn that paycheck!
*Flaggery*
My mother was not a famous explorer and yet we scattered her ashes on the flanks of Denali
Fred Denali,, I assume. I hope you obtained Denali’s permission first. Scattering your mom’s ashes on the flanks of random strangers isn’t quite the thing.
Her ashes were thrown onto the side of an SUV?
Oops! (Crash) Well, problem solved. So that’ll be 158,20 thanks
Do you have a flag?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEx5G-GOS1k
There can be but one solution to this problem that involves the ashes being scattered in only one place: TO MARS! Olympus Mons, the biggest mountain in the solar system!
On the other hand, it seems an argument could be made for a permanent location with a good view of the front door lock.
I know that nagging feeling.