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Hagar the Horrible, 10/7/12

At last, a definitive answer to the question I’ve been musing on for years: Are Hagar and his entourage Christians or pagans? Hagar, at least, appears to still worship the gods of the old Norse pantheon, as is perhaps befitting for the bloodthirsty leader of a violent war band. Given the lack of intra-Norse civil strife and the friendly relations between Hagar and Brother Olaf, we’ll just have to assume that the action of the strip takes place during one of the more peaceful lulls in Norway’s transition to Christianity, which generally involved one side gaining dominance and attempting to violently suppress the other. Indeed, today’s strip shows how hearts and minds can be changed without use of force, as Hagar begins to question his allegiance to deities that were explicitly believed by their worshippers to not be all-powerful or all-knowing.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/7/12

So I read this strip and thought “Haha, at last, I get to see the moment when Herb and Jamaal goes completely nuts,” but then … it turns out this quote is in fact floating all over the Internet as attributed to Desmond Tutu? There’s never any explanation of the context in which he said it, though, which sets my “let’s attach a quote we like to a random famous person” alarm bells going off. Still, the good Archbishop is a cyclist, so who knows! Anyone who can confirm or deny this quote gets a shiny Internet quarter.

Edited to clarify: The “give a man a fish…” phrase is as old as the hills and clearly not originated by Tutu. I’m specifically wondering if he was the one who turned it into a joke about bicycling.