Unnecessarily erudite Monday
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Daddy Daze, 4/28/25
One of my favorite little linguistic quirks is the existence of true homonyms: when two separate words with different meanings and different origins evolve in a language until they happen to be pronounced and spelled the same way. That’s what’s going on here with the word funk, or more accurately the two words funk(s): the “be in a bad mood” word derives from a Scottish and Northern English word of uncertain but possibly Flemish origin that means “become afraid,” whereas the “music to put you in good mood” word derives in slang from the sense (still in use today) of a funk as a bad smell, which in turn comes to English via French from the Latin verb for putting off smoke, fumigare. This is the sort of information I would convey to my baby, if I lived alone with my baby and had very little contact with the outside world and it drove me to a state of madness in which I believed that my baby’s incoherent babbling noises constituted meaningful attempts to communicate that only I could understand.
Andy Capp, 4/28/25
Nice try, Andy Capp. You think you can slip this kind of blatant falsehood past us because we’re dumb Americans who don’t know any better? We may be dumb but we do have access to Wikipedia, which informs us that the parliamentary constituency of Runcorn and Helsby has been vacant for nearly six weeks now. Sadly, the by-election to fill the seat is this Thursday, so it’s too late for Andy to throw his iconic hat into the ring. The sitting MP resigned because he got caught on camera repeatedly punching a man in the street, so it sounds like the locals would’ve been open to Andy’s whole vibe, frankly.
Crankshaft, 4/28/25
Remember “the burnings,” the apocalyptic event in the near-future of the Funkyverse that wiped out most printed literature? Well, it turns out Lilian invented them, as part of her cozy mystery series. And yet we know that her building-code-violating above-the-garage store survived them, which certainly is interesting in light of this new revelation, although we can at least take solace in the fact that she’ll eventually be replaced by a robot.
Heathcliff, 4/28/25
Heathcliff is finally starting a cult! And, you know what, good for him.
93 replies to “Unnecessarily erudite Monday”
Andy Capp: One can read further that the MP in question, Mike Amesbury, had ‘six or seven pints’ on the night of the recorded incident. There’s just more and more evidence that this is the job Capp was born to do!
Crankshaft: I personally would feel creepy and uncertain if I were in a line to visit an author and the author herself came down the line, burbling about how impressed she was with it, clearly having no idea why she was there or what it was all about. It just feels a little like the publisher was using a person with dementia as a prop.
RMMD:
“Gazing at this key in the way that Hamlet contemplated Yorick’s skull inspires me to wax rhapsodic, Summer: you look ‘fob‘ulous this morning!”
“Why, you hackneyed wordsmith, you.”
Crankshaft:
“By the way, are you the ‘Miss McKenzie’ that the MC5 sang about in Kick Out the Jams?”
“Human Statue” might be a good gig for Andy, if “passed out on your pub stool” can pass for a statue.
Heathcliff uses necessary caution when dealing with a man who has replaced the legs on his chairs with those spikey things over-the-road truckers put on the wheels.
Blondie: Does this mean Cookie is secretly a reader of yours, Josh?
BG&SS: If Lil’ Sparky gets lost like the Donner party or the Franklin Expedition, the damn duck can just fly home. Don’t listen; your “friend” can get you killed.
H&L: “Kids listening to music from before they were conceived” is a boomer media trope that will never die. I don’t remember teens being into Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller in the early 80s.
Is Andy devious though? He seems like a simple, straightforward guy: drink, punch, laze, gamble. Ok, now I’d vote for him.
“Those clowns in congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns”. [Note being passed] “Sorry, I meant those clowns in the House of Commons!”
Crankshaft – This strip is giving me exactly the same vibe as if it were set at a funeral and the dialog was “This is quite a turnout. I wonder who the stiff is?” with an eerily grinning woman repliying, “YOU ARE!” It’s official, Crankshaft creeps me out.
Andy Capp – “Human Statue” is such an unpopular job that the Job Centre has a large, permanent sign dedicated to trying to fill it. It’s not the standing still that’s so bad; it’s the pigeons.
Heathcliff – “How are we gonna defeat Speed Racer if we don’t wear our uniforms?”
Why did they replace the regular Job Centre guy with Jack from the Pig and Whistle?
Don Abundio, translated:
“Why does Don Abundio have so many costume parties?”
“He likes wearing costumes”
“He thinks they reveal his true self”
“But they really just display his pathetic delusions of what he imagines himself to be”
I assume Andy Capp is unqualified to be a human statue because he starts to get the DT shakes if he goes without beer for more than hour.
Daddy Daze:
“BA BOO BA BA BOO!”
“I never should have taken you to the Bing Crosby Museum!”
@Ettorre: “How do Goldsmith and Garnett keep up with the news like that?”
HEATHCLIFF: There must be an unseen fourth person; the one who attempted to put a jumpsuit on a cat and is now in the bathroom, using up all of the bandages.
Crankshaft: Isn’t her book about the time some people actually tried to burn her bookshop? I don’t think we need to reference the future “burnings” for that context.
FC: “Daddy, when I join little league, will I get a signing bonus?”
“Sorta. I pay the coach to take you off my hands…and why aren’t you at practice.”
Heathcliff: Y know, yellow shoes, black trousers, and a red cardigan kinda constitute their own uniform, and I’m good with that.
DD – And the funk coming off you makes me wanna gag….
AC – Don’t sell him short – also drunk and lazy….
Crank – It’s bigger than Lisa’s Story! Remainders of which are now jumping off the shelves at the Dollar Store….
Heathcliff – I hope it has that union suit trapdoor for…well, you know….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
DT: Nice twist, since most rental places have phased out stick shifts in the USA. We can all see where this is going but so far this has been a pleasant journey.
RMMD: clearly the writers follow the comments here – who noted immediately the logistical issues about handing over the truck
MW: you can lead a horse to water – now it is up to Dawn to listen to that reptilian part of her brainstem screaming “danger”.
I “work” for a “publisher” that’s really a glorified self-publishing outlet and where my “work” amounts to occasionally lending my relative computer expertise in exchange for continuing to live with my dad without getting a real job. Our covers are thrown together in either IngramSpark’s book-building tool or, if that doesn’t work for our purposes, Adobe Illustrator, despite our having no real experience with the latter (and not even really being able to afford the license). And yet I’m quite certain that we regularly put more effort into our covers than using a white background with fonts that have come with Windows since the 90s, certainly for what’s supposed to be a murder mystery, or putting the author’s name in such large type that we have to abbreviate her first name.
CS: Since all these people are apparently here to praise Lillian, it’s not at all surprising that Lillian herself would get in line.
Heathcliff: Listen, if you’re going to start a cat-uniform cult, you’re going to have to up your game.
@Bob Tice: Given that “Kick Out The Jams” came out 56 years ago…she could be.
AC: I just want to say that Andy Capp is from Hartlepool, which elected a football mascot wearing a monkey suit as its first and only ever mayor. The mascot is called H’Angus in memory of the time the Hartlepudlians found a shipwrecked monkey on the beach and hanged it because they thought it was a Frenchman. What I’m saying it, Andy Capp is if anything too staid and intellectual to become a politician.
Heathcliff: If you’re the kind of snobby high-brow whose idea of art is a framed square of neon pink, you deserve to be torn apart by a furry cult.
Daddy Daze: Eh, get back to me when Angus gets on the good foot. Or when the Mothership arrives to take his daddy away, that works too.
@Schroduck: Ah, a fellow “The Rest is History” listener! H’Angus is certainly history’s greatest monkey.
DD: I’ve never imagined a voice for the Daddy, but from now on it’s going to be Bootsy Collins’.
CSht: “You are…in the sense that we’re all authors of our own lives! Geez, how much longer can we wait for the bathroom…”
Crankshaft: Not remembering that you’ve been selected to do a book signing and almost walking past your table? Maybe consider writing less science-fiction-murder-mystery and more dementia-runs-in-my-family.
CS: No one with an actual personality would smile so politely when they see the book’s author stumbling into the line with a look of confusion and disbelief about the book they supposedly wrote. Lillian would be escorted to a nearby ambulance or avoided like the plague while being pushed out of line. Hopefully the latter.
MW: Well, we had a “riveting” week of Dawn having a boring conversation. Maybe we’ll have a week of Dawn going through her morning routine as slowly as possible to pad out the time while Belle politely waits with her current poison du jour.
@Schroduck: Weird things have been going on with the color palettes in the images on both comicskingdom and gocomics. Depending on what kind of browser you use, and whether you go to the “Buy a Print” link, etc., sometimes you get a version with a simplified palette. And some of the images Josh has been posting are like that.
My point is, in the version of Heathcliff that adheres to Gallagher & Gately’s original vision, that’s a framed square of muted pink.
The problem of populism is that it focuses on politicians being devious and untrustworthy while plenty of other power players are devious and untrustworthy — CEO, powerful lawyers, financiers, even petty bureaucrats — without even being checked by popular vote and continuous scrutiny. Check if your wallet is still there, Andy!
@Powers: Yeah, but when that happened it appeared to be Batiuk wrapping up what “the Burnings” were – one attempted torching of a bookstore to stop teens reading a supposedly-controversial book (which touches on none of the hot-button topics of the present), that could be permanently averted with a supportive crowd and a smarmy lecture about censorship.
You do have to wonder what the overlords in the Batiukverse future are trying to hide by dramatically rewriting history like that, or if it’s just that the AI robot apocalypse included absorbing website text from self-aggrandizing exaggerations Les Moore blogged, and that became the timeline taught to the next generation.
“Who is this beloved author? Wait, it was me!” This is the worst Tomato in the Mirror ever written!
MW: It’s good Dawn’s subconscious mind is warning her about Belle — her conscious mind sure isn’t up to the task.
@Morgan Wick re: Crankshaft: I’m mystified by the weird shadow in the book cover illustration. What’s that supposed to be? At first, it looked like one of those Fleischer Studios cartoon characters, but when I did an image search, what came up was a fraidy cat. And, by the way, if Lillian’s in the middle of the line for her own book, who’s at the table?
@ValdVin: They probably weren’t, but I was born in the ’90s, and I had a lot of friends who were into classic rock.
Dustin: WTH? Are these two trying to be Caulfield and Frazz? Because if they are, they’re worse at it than even Caulfield and Frazz are.
GT: Ha haaaa, and here we thought KERI AND GIL were screwed up.
JP: “Oh no, now we’ll have to work for a living.”
MW: And all this time we didn’t think Dawn’s hair could look any worse.
Murder at the Bookstore Burning? Isn’t that just ‘arson?’ Arson in the Addlepate’s Attic. That one’s for free.
Today in Blondie news: Alexander’s teacher is shockingly incompetent.
DtM: Gee, where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, right here.
FC: “No, because you suck.”
CS: Highly unlikely.
9CL: Note the proper etiquette of sitting with legs crossed as you watch your parents drown or fornicate.
BB: I’m not qualified to comment on Funk because, in the immortal words of the late Rick James: ‘I was born in a city they call Buffalo, zero degrees B-lo, too damn cold to get funky (pass the joint.)”
And so, sadly, I had to Give Up the Funk, and could not participate in Tearing the Roof Off the Sucker.
Crankshaft-Got to love a book festival where they don’t tell one of the main people involved that they are involved. Of course with this being Lilliane she probably doesn’t go anywhere without a table and a box of her books.
Crankshaft-In a twist we know who the arsonist is we just need to find out who was burned to death.
Slylock Fox-Slylock could have given Cassandra a pearl necklace. She didn’t need to steal one.
MW-It wasn’t a complete nightmare. We were denied Wilbur’s cameo in the shower.
(Anime Butterfly Meme)
-Josh openly discusses politics
-This comment section has a ban on discussing politics
“Is this a paradox?”
After years of trying to gaslight us into believing that people think Les Moore is talented and interesting, if Batiuk wants us to believe yet another of his characters has become a successful and popular author then he’s going to have provide us examples of their work.
RMMD: Augie tells Summer; “[re truck]…I don’t even know if I want it.”
Bah! I should have realized the whole point of this stalker story is Rex getting a free, new truck. Somewhere Beatty is smirking; “Didn’t see that one coming. Did ya? snarker boy.”
CS: The ironic part is that they’re all lining up to buy Lillian’s book just so they can burn it.
C’shaft: I like how somebody trolled Lilian by posting a sign that says YOUR SHIT BOOK right there on the wall!
@astroboy:
I’m not qualified to comment on Funk because, in the immortal words of the late Rick James: ‘I was born in a city they call Buffalo, zero degrees B-lo, too damn cold to get funky (pass the joint.)” And so, sadly, I had to Give Up the Funk, and could not participate in Tearing the Roof Off the Sucker.
Yeah, but you can still table slam, and that’s a pretty good trade-off.
Daddy Daze – When Calvin’s Dad had to make up answers to Calvin’s questions, at least they were creative and entertaining, with a sense of whimsy. Daddy Daze Daddy is just sad and pathetic.
Andy Capp – Andy lacks the drive to sell crypto, another area where his skills would thrive.
Crankshaft – Sadly for Lillian, most of these people aren’t fans. Instead of signing the books with a Bic pen, they are going to ask her to light up the worst book they have ever read with a Bic lighters, and make her watch her work burn before her eyes.
Heathcliff – Heathcliff is upping his war against Garfield to greater levels in new avant-garde ways. The
millions, tens of thousands of people still reading newspaper comics with their “I Hate Mondays” Garfield coffee mugs will be forced to face the fact that they are part of another orange cat cult, not the free thinkers they image themselves to be.“Listen, we have tons of mystery novels about murders. What about arson?”
“I like the arson angle, but we do not want to risk too much by changing the established formula. Let’s do ‘Murder at the bookstore burning’!”
@Cleveland Mocks: Lillian: “Joke on you, I still got your money anyway!”
@ValdVin: No, but the early ’90s did see a swing music revival, brought on by the likes of Squirrel Nut Zippers and Brian Setzer. (Weirdly, there was also a Gregorian chant fad around the same time, although that was less the younger generation and more middle-aged moms who bought the CDs advertised on cable.)
DD –
“Ba ba!”
“Fleet is a number of vehicles operating together under the same ownership and also means swift or fast.”
“Ba ba ba!”
“Race can mean a speed competition or a group of humans that…you know what. We’re done here.”
AC: I kind of want to know what the human statue posting is like. “WANTED: Street performer needed immediately to pose for long periods in public venue for photographs and tips. Ability to stand very still, shift position slowly, and get kicked in the shins by small children without flinching required. Must provide own toga and white greasepaint.”
C’shaft: I’ve done enough vendor fairs to know that the booths start setting up an hour or two before the doors open, and that exhibitors are responsible for getting their own space ready. I’m not surprised that Lillian would be lazy and selfish enough to sleep in while her twin groupies do all the hard prep work for her, but walking in well after the event has started and guests are waiting (while going “Oh my, all this fuss for little ol’ me?”) is real prima donna behavior.
“Our last human statue got painted over by Banksy and was sold to Tate Modern for eight million quid. Poor bastard’s still there, next to a shark preserved in Jell-O and a wall of pinned butterflies.”
Dustin: It’s a pity Dustin’s father isn’t around. Nothing would make him prouder than to her his boy utter something so utterly joyless and pessimistic as “the sun is a carcinogen.”
GT: Good call, Marty, nothing will endear you to your estranged teenage daughter more than trying to force physical contact on her.
JP: Reena, you do know Sophie is just going to bring her drama with her when you move to Norway, don’t you?
Luann: Yes, very savvy. You bought for jars of jelly, two of which you’ll open and use maybe twice before they’re left to take up space in the back of the fridge.
MT: “Tree-hugger”? That is so twentieth century. Try “woke soyboy” or “NPC beta loser.”
MW: “I dreamed I was in a well-crafted, suspenseful narrative with fully developed and compelling characters!”
Pluggers create messes for underpaid and overworked service personnel to deal with.
RMMD: Augie is more distressed by being gifted a vehicle he doesn’t want or need than he was about being suspected of murder.
Andy Capp: Andy walking away mid-conversation the second he realizes that the job centre guy is just setting up a newspaper comic-standard dumb joke is the most relatable thing the character has ever done.
Crankshaft: I’m not even gonna pretend to understand the chronology of the Crankshaft/Funky universe.
Lillian not being up front to greet the line-up, meaning that the line isn’t moving (which is why its so long)
She probably still won’t have the common sense to move to the front. Trapping her in a sort of limbo forever.
@TheDiva: There was a joke, in an old Discworld computer game, where a group of monks are summoning Death.
It starts off like a Gregorian chant “Day….o Day…..o” then immediately shifts into them singing the Banana Boat Song.
Crankshaft-“I’ve got to get a new agent.”
Luann-You don’t buy four jars of jelly. You only buy two. Grape for sandwiches and some other type for toast.
I guess you weren’t following Crankshaft last year because there was a multi-week storyline about book bannings and Lilian’s bookstore being vandalized (and I think burned?) I forgot the details, but I remember some cheesy stand-off between her and an angry mob out to trash her bookstore for some reason. Because woke, I think.Wild times in the Funkyverse but hey, Lilian at least got a book deal out of it!
Look, Gramps, Heathcliff is never going to break into Garfield’s share of orange cat merchandising unless you get with the program and start pushing these orange jumpsuits his father stole from the prison laundry and he painted black stripes on.
@Powers: yes, someone else was following Cranlshaft last year. I think Josh stopped reading it in 2024 because I guarantee he would’ve posted at least once about the bookstore burning story had he been reading it lol
*Crankshaft oops lol
Somehow I missed Josh’s coverage of the End of Funky Winkerbean in 2022. Batiuk sucks. What a dumb way to end a strip. We know Calvin and Hobbes’ ending will never be equaled, Peanuts ending was only decent, but heck, even FOOB’s ending was better than Funky Winkerbean’s.
@Doc Wonmug: Calvin and Hobbes ended in a way that was both open ended and optimistic with the boys happily going on another adventure together on their sled in the perfect snowy day. You can’t get any better than that and to be honest, I wouldn’t want it to end any other way.
As someone who has not been keeping up on Crankshaft, I love how this singular strip can either be read as “Lillian finds out her newest book went viral” or “Lillian completely forgot she has a book signing today, likely due to dementia!”
I’m assuming the latter, but it’s kind of nice to live in this liminal space right now where it could be either.
Heathcliff-He must be sacrificed to Heathcliff.
Crankshaft: Lilian is so disconnected from the sales and promotion of her book — and the literary world in general — that she doesn’t even know there’s a booth for it at a popular festival? She turned into Thomas Pynchon so gradually, we didn’t even notice.
Daddy Daze: How would the differing meanings of the word “funk” come up in a news article? I’m pretty sure those aren’t even newspapers — just large, blank pages in which Daddy has been obsessively scrawling squiggly lines day after day. I’d say his delusions are getting out of control, but it’s still remarkable that he manages to do the crossword puzzle every morning.
Heathcliff: “I still don’t know why Garfield stole one of our uniforms. It’s like a hat on a hat, for him.”
Andy Capp-This guy treats Andy better than Dustin’s caseworker treats Dustin.
@Chance:
Has….has anyone seen Amesbury and Andy in the same room at the same time?
Luann – Pass me some of that Kentucky Jelly – I’m seeing Phil later.
@BeetleGuy: Yeah, some of “the burnings = Lillian’s store is threatened” stuff is in the joshreads Crankshaft archives because uncle Lumpy posted about it during a September break for Josh.
Mark Trail – it’s funny because it implies that Mark is a marijuana smoker!
GT: Hey Marty, maybe if you wore a different outfit occasionally and trimmed that nasty beard your daughter might be more comfortable hugging you in public. Have you ever considered that? Christ, that denim must REEK by now.
MW: My lady and I were talking last night about how much better MW would be if Moy just started lifting plots from “Nancy Drew” or “Murder, She Wrote.” It would certainly be better than this half-conceived garbage.
FC – Maybe, but they’ll soon send him back to the minors and then trade him at the first opportunity.
Frazz – They were being civil toward Mrs. Olsen for a while, and we can’t have that. Time to pile on her again.
9CL – Same dreck, different day. This time with backgrounds.
Looks Good On Paper – It’s Emmitt Pissmire!
Crankshaft – Loathsome Lillian is putting on the Aw, shucks! fake modesty, and it will never work. She was, is, and always will be a loathsome old bat.
She’ll probably win a Pulitzer for her crappy book.
CS: As someone who worked in the book publishing industry for many years acquiring, editing, and publishing crime, and mystery novels, I am pleased to report that the number of times a little old lady writing narrowly-focused cozy mysteries accumulated an Elmore Leonard-length autograph line was NEVER.
Luann: Anyone who buys four jars of jelly owns four jars of jelly too many. Preserves or GTFO, kid. Blackberry preserves.
9CL: You know what would bring a breath of fresh air to this strip? If all three of the USA generations and their various thralls and hangers-on took a nice long vacation to Austria, to watch Gran and her Nazi fuck.
@brendancalling: Re MW – We’ll know for sure if Dawn starts driving around in a snappy little roadster with Ned Nickerson.
@Ettorre: This petty bureaucrat lives with the reality that his clients’ wallets are not worth stealing.
@Ukulele Ike: I might stand in a line to buy your memoir, but Lillian’s book, no way.
@Ukulele Ike: 9CL: You know what would bring a breath of fresh air to this strip? If all three of the USA generations and their various thralls and hangers-on took a nice long vacation to Austria, to watch Gran and her Nazi fuck.
Bold of you to assume Gran is even still alive, considering she’d be like 120 years old at this point. Keep in mind she disappeared from the strip altogether soon after the twins were born.
DADDY DAZ: Josh’s comment was erudite and interesting and also, um, funky! However, do we actually know whether Daddy believes that his child’s babbling can be understood only by himself, or whether he believes that everyone understands the babbling, or could if they tried a little harder? Would the latter indicate a higher level of madness than the former? I’d say “discuss,” but it’s bad enough that I’m thinking about it.
@Bryan: Of course Gran is still alive and well. The only question is whether she’s been aging like Crankshaft, or Walt Wallet. Both of whom are also 120 years old.
Brooke sent Gran and Captain Anschluss to the other side of the world like Charles Dickens did with the Micawbers, Little Em’ly, and all the other inconvenient David Copperfield characters. It’s the only thing Brooke and Dickens have in common.
JP: “I said ‘oh no’ because I thought we were gonna have a new Mercedes to drive in Norway, but it turns out we’ll only be given a 2024 model. Shit.”
RxMD: So, in a world where a stalker can cause a victim to die, and the police and law can do nothing, the solution is for a dying man to commit murder…. and give his truck away.
FLASH! AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Plot moving at the speed of light, even in the Sunday recap. Other strips still moping about to take note.
MW: To Dawn’s Subconscious — I can understand the frustration of being the only part of Dawn’s brain that is fully functional while the rest of her brain is comatose. But you really are gonna have to get her to sleepwalk and scribble a message (“Leave Condo Belle Wants To Kill You”) on her bathroom mirror with lipstick. You are being way too subtle.
@Tom: Oh, certainly, but I was going on the time jump from now back to Amadeus, which is the same from Amadeus back to the swing era.