Discussion (33)¬

1. RavenBlack says:

   January 3, 2014 at 4:32 pm

   Third panel seems a little risque.

2. Ophelia+Benson says:

   January 3, 2014 at 4:46 pm

   Friday is always a difficult day for Jesus.

3. NSPike says:

   January 3, 2014 at 4:53 pm

   RavenBlack – that is a very good observation and adds yet another layer of meaning to another J&M strip. Makes you wonder if Author knows just how dense his/her comics are!

4. Nassar+Ben+Houdja says:

   January 3, 2014 at 5:03 pm

   Of holidays, the season is too much.
   This absurd jocularity is enough.
   To try the patience of a saint.
   Relaxing and pleasant, they ain’t.
   In the appropriate orifice, up it, them stuff.

5. E.A.+Blair says:

   January 3, 2014 at 7:37 pm

   The book tells us that Jesus said thet the last day would come within the lifetime of his followers.

   So was he lying or just wrong?

   That’s a question that goddies hate.

6. Jerryw says:

   January 3, 2014 at 7:59 pm

   I’ve always thought it strange that no one’s made a connection between stigmata and Palm Sunday, but then again, everything’s been strange since the ’60s.

7. Mary2 says:

   January 3, 2014 at 10:52 pm

   EABLair,
   You are taking it out of context.
   And, it is just a metaphor.
   That part of the bible was true at the time but was superceded by the pages after it.
   Yes, I am being sarcastic.

8. Ketil+W.Grevstad says:

   January 4, 2014 at 12:07 am

   HAPPY NEW YEAR to Jesus and Mo 🙂

9. machigai says:

   January 4, 2014 at 12:40 am

   What we call New Year is the eighth day after Jesus was born.
   When I was a Catlick it was a Holy Day of Obligation (go to church or go to hell).
   It was called the Feast of the Circumcision.

10. Maggs says:

    January 4, 2014 at 1:36 am

    I do so wish there were ‘like’ buttons, as there are on Facebook. Not that I wish this were like Facebook, I just do t necessary want to comment but would be enthusiastic about registering appreciation… ‘Catlick’ for instance, I would have loved to call it that when I wS supposed to be toeing the line at my convent school.

11. Maggs says:

    January 4, 2014 at 1:38 am

    Maggs says: edited version…
    January 4, 2014 at 1:36 am
    I do so wish there were ‘like’ buttons, as there are on Facebook. Not that I wish this were like Facebook, I just don’t necessarily want to comment but would be enthusiastic about registering appreciation… ‘Catlick’ for instance, I would have loved to call it that when I wS supposed to be toeing the line at my convent school.

12. LirrelFatJohn says:

    January 4, 2014 at 2:43 am

    It is weird, the things one finds when one is whiling away time skimming the WickedPedia.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZMbTFNp4wI
    I think I’d like that guy.

    Jerryw : a powerful, much praised, famous and seminal TV serial once had an episode that ended with one character offering another reassurance with the tremendously insightful quote:
    “… just remember, nothing real has happened since 1957 … ”
    And here we are, 57 years later.

13. UncoBob says:

    January 4, 2014 at 7:38 am

    Is there something of art imitating life in this week’s offering? I.e. did Author have a really good New Year? If so, well deserved, even if we were suffering J&M withdrawals.

14. Undeluded says:

    January 4, 2014 at 5:00 pm

    Happy New Year to everyone! And enjoy the following…
    https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/q71/1520775_737617229582591_88897625_n.jpg

15. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    January 5, 2014 at 1:47 am

    I’m with UncoBob on this one, Author had one Hell of a New Year’s Eve.
    We should count ourselves lucky he only lost a day – and that he doesn’t party like that every week.

16. John M says:

    January 5, 2014 at 1:07 pm

    Only 15 comments in 5 days. There must have been some right-old goings-on (or is it going-ons) the evening of 31st.

17. John M says:

    January 5, 2014 at 1:14 pm

    By the way, Mary2, I thought you Aussies used English rather than ‘mercan. And even Merriam-Webster Online concedes that “supercede” is a possible error 🙂

18. omg says:

    January 5, 2014 at 5:54 pm

    John M,
    I think lot of people are still recovering… Please, please, please don’t ask us to think to hard 😉

19. omg says:

    January 5, 2014 at 10:07 pm

    http://www.imgur.com/r/atheism/mmXdLAb
    http://www.imgur.com/r/atheism/esAIAmd
    http://www.imgur.com/r/atheism/lZm42bq
    http://www.imgur.com/r/atheism/R1ted9Z
    No comment…

20. Undeluded says:

    January 6, 2014 at 12:16 am

    Thanks, omg! Your links (and the rest of that site) are fantastic!

21. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    January 6, 2014 at 1:55 am

    Cheers, omg. I particularly like this one http://imgur.com/r/atheism/lZm42bq .

    What is it with all these new-fangled allergies anyway? Have nuts suddenly become hyper-poisonous, for example, because it seems that half the world’s population will spontaneously combust if they so much as come into contact with a homeopathic dose of nut – any nut, yet the peanut isn’t even a nut, it’s a feckin pea, which is why if anybody tells me they’re allergic to peanuts and Brazil nuts, I find it hard to believe them.
    And seafood? Is it really possible for so many people to be allergic to every single one of the thousands of species that we have been merrily chowing-down on for hundreds of thousands of years? Is there really a common element linking everything that lives in the oceans (except for environment, smart-arses!)?
    Are crabs, mussels, squids, mackerel, cod, and sharks really so similar that a person allergic to one is allergic to all.

    Sorry to rant, but do you know how fucking hard it is a host a dinner party nowadays?

22. Jerryw says:

    January 6, 2014 at 6:51 am

    A.o.S., I find vegetarians can be the easiest guests to have over for a dinner party, I just point to the yard and invite them to graze. Of course none of them have returned for a second visit, so I don’t have the proper depth for scientific confirmation on this theory.

23. Chiefy says:

    January 6, 2014 at 9:32 pm

    That’s not very nice, Jerryw. I could almost be a vegetarian, if it weren’t for seafood, and pork. Your occasional grilled hamburger. I’m making myself hungry.

    Shameless plug: I haven’t been on much, lately, because my website went down. I’ve been spending a couple of weeks restoring the site and patching in some blog entries that didn’t get backed up. Click my handle to find it.

24. mary2 says:

    January 7, 2014 at 10:15 am

    John M, we ‘Strayans alternate between English and American. We use the American zucchini instead of courgette and both lift and elevator are acceptable but we definitely use colour instead of color – except in the anomaly of the Australia Labor Party which 100-odd years ago dropped the ‘u’. Labour in every other instance is spelt English style. With regards to ‘supercede’ it is, of course, just possible that I cannot spell. ;P

    AOS, I’m with you regarding allergies. I once made the polite society faux pas of asking a ‘gluten intolerant’ friend whether she was really allergic to wheat or just got bloated from pigging out on too many carbs. I know there are real coeliacs (sorry JohnM, on my phone without spell-check), but is it really possible for one third of the human population to become allergic to the staple of the Western diet within a generation? I am friends with a group of six who all love to cook and regularly dine together but four of us have differing dietary ‘special needs’.

    JerryW, I do the opposite: cook something vegetarian and chuck cooked chicken in at the last minute for the carnivores. Although I do, apparently, cook a mean lamb shank but have never tasted them.

25. white squirrel says:

    January 7, 2014 at 8:11 pm

    funniest panel is the second
    brilliant irony on Mo’s part

26. JohnM says:

    January 7, 2014 at 9:33 pm

    @Mary2
    Having lost my copy of “Let stalk Strine” many, many years ago, I can’t recall the Aussie names of those veggies that UK uses foreign names for, yet ‘mercans have invented English sounding ones viz. aubergines and capsicums. I do so hope you don’t say “Eggplant”, a travesty worse than asking for a “restroom” when you actually don’t want to rest at all.

27. hotrats says:

    January 7, 2014 at 11:31 pm

    JohnM:
    If you don’t mind doing your own formatting, a text version of ‘Let Stalk Strine’ is available here:
    http://www.textfiles.com/humor/strine.txt

28. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    January 8, 2014 at 3:01 am

    Mary2: asking a ‘gluten intolerant’ friend whether she was really allergic to wheat or just got bloated from pigging out on too many carbs….
    ….and is too polite to fart in company? 🙂

29. LirrelFatJohn says:

    January 8, 2014 at 9:50 am

    Mary2: according to some research, it’s not the food that’s triggering the allergies and intolerances, it’s the chemical additives. These are damned near universal and have increased dramatically since the 1950’s. It may be that individually they are safe but there are zoos of the things added to everything from cakes to baked beans.
    It seems to be pot luck as to which particular food or food group you are sensitised to when chemical overload kicks in. There are familial trends that do increase your odds slightly of getting an intolerance to something but these are not overwhelming factors.
    And, AoS, yes, it is possible to be intolerant to whole groups of proteins. I have a very smart, educated sister who has been intolerant to animal proteins most or all of her life. She can tolerate a little milk, cheese or egg every so often but dares not eat so much as a bacon sarnie. Like Mary2, it doesn’t stop her cooking lovely, real food for those of us who are more fortunate. The first morning I stayed with her, she made me a wonderful “full English breakfast” fry-up with bacon and other deliciousness.
    Her intolerance is real. It’s been “clinically tested”. By real doctors.
    Another sister is vegan/vegetarian (depends on the day) by choice. She could eat meat but chooses not to. Ethical choice.
    I had my hay-fever triggered by a massive overdose of plant pollen a few years ago. Before that, I wasn’t allergic to anything. Now, I need anti-histamines from about March until October or so unless the weather is exceedingly cool and wet. I also need them if I want to eat bread in any quantity. It’s the gluten that exacerbates my chronic urticaria but it was initially triggered by drug cocktails. This, too, is real and has been tested.
    These conditions are real in millions of people. It is possible to kill people by feeding them lobster soup with peanuts. People who are diagnosed with a triggered allergy or intolerance have to be exceedingly careful about reading the ingredients lists on modern products.
    Gooey sweeties (“candies”?) often contain beef, for example. Some chicken pies, casseroles and curries have beef gelatine in them. Many sausages are wrapped in beef skins. If you are intolerant to beef, there are a lot of foodstuffs out there that could harm you.
    Even vaccinations used to kill some people because the protein substrates were of the wrong species, the stuff was bred in cows or horses and those people were intolerant.
    Yes, it has got out of hand, and some people may be pushing it a bit, but this stuff is real. It is a real chemical and biological effect and it can kill people.
    If you and your nearest and dearest are fortunate enough to be able to eat everything from ground glass to cyanide, I’m happy for you, truly I am, and I wish I were among the lucky – cream cakes look so tempting and wine gums smell lovely – but some of us could kill ourselves by injudicious use of chocolates or peanut-butter.
    I don’t know if it is caused by increasing processing of foods but something is triggering more intolerances and that does look like a fairly good place to start looking for a culprit. Unless it’s atmospheric nuke tests or TV aerials.
    (More TV aerials, more cancers, therefore TV aerials cause cancer.)
    (Or, to be even more strange: more cancers, more TV aerials, therefore cancer causes TV aerials. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.)
    Apologies for being verbose, but being snarky and childish about something that could kill my beloved sister is bloody annoying.
    Hey, I’ve a good idea, why don’t we mock some cripples and care-in-the-community folks? Anyone have some good spaz jokes?
    Oh, and don’t worry, you’ll never need to think about a menu for me. I wouldn’t break bread with you were I starving.

30. hotrats says:

    January 8, 2014 at 10:55 pm

    Apologies for being verbose, but being snarky and childish about something that could kill my beloved sister is bloody annoying.
    Hey, I’ve a good idea, why don’t we mock some cripples and care-in-the-community folks? Anyone have some good spaz jokes?
    Oh, and don’t worry, you’ll never need to think about a menu for me. I wouldn’t break bread with you were I starving.

    Up to this point, your post was on-topic and informative. Yes, we know it’s wicked to mock the afflicted, but what Mary2 said was hardly ‘snarky’ (assuming that means something like ‘snide’ or ‘contemptuous’). It wasn’t meant personally, and taking it that way, then raising the stakes with accusations of exploiting disability for a cheap laugh, is to put it politely, disingenuous (or as we say at the Cock and Bull, ‘utter bollocks’).

    Calm down a bit, hang around a while and you might notice that no-one is actually getting at you. If you are going to make personal criticisms of strangers, it’s only polite to allow a space for people to explain themselves, apologise, or respond in whatever manner, before writing them off. Right now, it seems you mainly came in here to slam the door on your way out, which is kind of sad.

31. Mary2 says:

    January 8, 2014 at 11:34 pm

    Hey Hotrats, many thanks. I wrote a full response to many folks on this post last night but it was swallowed by the ether-goblins and so I chucked a wobbly and didn’t re-write. I’ll give you all the gist of it now:

    JohnM, definitely ‘yes’ to ‘eggplant’ – although I have always wondered what is the appropriate name for the shrub on which they grow = ‘eggplant plant’? Definitely ‘no’ to ‘restroom’. We always call a capsicum a capsicum: I thought you lot confused them with peppers? As far as I am aware, pepper is the little black powder you throw on food, possibly part of the name of chillis etc.

    AOS, as regular readers here will know, I often think I am much funnier than I actually am.

    LirrelFatJohn, thanks for the info. I can definitely relate to unfunny jokes about dietary choices. As an ‘ethical vegetarian’ who grew up in a cow farming area I had to put up with a decade of ‘but carrots feel pain too’ comments.

    I apologise if you read our discussion as mocking people with real allergies rather than mocking those who jump onto fad diets which they discard and pick up as suits. In my previous post I did attempt to make sure I clarified this with “I know there are real coeliacs” but was obviously not obvious enough. This is a site where we often dissect entrenched cultural assumptions and patterns and I believe that attempting to use humour to do so is not ‘out of the ballpark’ (JohnM – an Americanism sort-of beginning to creep into our lexicon). We will ‘overstep the mark’ (JohnM – another?) on occasion but no topic should be out of bounds for discussion and challenge.

    My brother is allergic to peanuts which he only discovered after marriage. I do not doubt he is allergic but am surprised he made it to adulthood without anaphylactic shock as, as I remember it, we lived on peanut-butter sandwiches throughout our school years …

32. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    January 9, 2014 at 2:29 am

    I was going to say that when it started to look as though compensation culture was making its way eastwards across the Atlantic I gave serious consideration to covering myself by having Warning: Contains Nuts tattooed onto my scrotum (H/T Marcus Brigstocke), but I think the joke will fall flat now, so I shan’t bother.

    LirrelFatJohn, I’d have added my apologies for any misunderstandings to Mary2’s but your last lines, from ‘Apologies for being verbose onwards were just so over-the-top – almost bordering on histrionics really – that I changed my mind, and that’s a shame because the rest of your post would have served perfectly well as the consciousness-raiser it was obviously intended to be. I even enjoyed your bit of word-play regarding TV aerials and cancer – despite the fact that cancer killed my mother – until your coming over all drama-queen and saying shite like ‘but being snarky and childish about something that could kill my beloved sister is bloody annoying‘ , and then I just thought that you were starting to sound a little hypocritical.

    Of course some people have genuine allergies. My wife, who suffers with rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia syndrome, and urticaria is one of them, so in my case at least my nearest and dearest cannot eat anything from ground glass to cyanide. She has to dose up on Telfast if she’s going to be eating salmon, which also happens to be her favourite fish, but has no problem with cod or sea bass or tuna, and also has a mild intolerance to gluten ( as I plan all menus around the wonderful Mrs. o’Sagan, you could break home-made gluten-free bread at my house in comfort and without putting me to any inconvenience).

    I also know people allergic to shellfish who are OK with other seafood, and I also know that there is no ‘ingredient’ common to all water-living animals that isn’t also present in land- and air-living animals, which is why I’m dubious about people who say they’re allergic to all seafood but happily chow-down on beef or chicken.
    This, of course, is different to your sister who, if I read you right, is intolerant to all animal protein whether from the sea, land, or air, so obviously wasn’t the unintentional target of my rant.

    Regarding the sudden and steady increase in genuine allergies over the past couple of generations, I can’t help but wonder whether this is a result of the decrease in the number of mothers breastfeeding their babies and so not passing on their own resistance built up over the several hundreds of thousands of years-worth of successive generations for whom breast milk was the only source of nutrition for babies? Could it be that the benefits of several millenia of accumulated tolerance to certain foods have been undone in just a couple of generations of milk formula use?

    Mary, because of the problems we’ve been having with vanishing comments I’ve tried to get into the habit of copying my longer posts so I can just paste and retry. It’s done wonders for my blood pressure – until I forget to do it, that is.

33. Mary2 says:

    January 10, 2014 at 10:23 am

    AOS, one anecdotal data point for your theory. Neither my brother nor I were breast-fed: he is allergic to peanuts, I am only allergic to idiocy. Tell Mrs O’S I make a mean gluten-fee banana bread if she’s ever in town.

    I know, gotta remember to type in Word and paste in comment section but have a good dose of inherent idiocy myself.