Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for August 30, 2014

Let’s hope, he’s artistic.

A “better student” and “Calvin” are mutually exclusive! ;)

He’s uninterested in sports anyway. His imagination and curiosity are too active to endure the boredom and repetition involved in sports.

About the only thing Calvin’s good at – and ever will be good at, is getting into trouble.

Possibly Calvin’s dad’s greatest insight ever.

It’s really hard to hit the ball if you swing the bat with your eyes closed.Today’s strip is from 1990. A year later, Calvin was still swinging with his eyes closed, but he found a creative solution:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (April 20, 1991)Here is another strip where Bill Watterson used mirror imaging freely, depending on what he thought looked best in any particular panel. The glove in panels 1 and 4 fits on Calvin’s left hand. The glove in panels 3 and 5 fits on Calvin’s right hand:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (May 15, 1992)Click here: Peanuts (July 14, 1962)Click here: Peanuts (March 8, 1967)

Calvins major imagination would make a great writer. Sci-fi of course!

He’ll either be an astronaut or time traveler.

Fungo fumbler

A few days ago someone commented that Calvin’s father doesn’t play sports with him; this proves that he does.

He’s ready for Charlie Brown’s team.

I think grown-up Calvin could be a great cartoonist, artist, writer, or graphic designer. He might even be able to channel that great imagination into advertising. I think Calvin will major in Art, if he gets it together in high school enough to qualify for college. He needs for his parents or a good teacher somewhere along the way to understand him and to help him focus his gifts in the right direction. His problem will always be finding the self-discipline to pass the many courses he will have to take that bore him.

If Dad had been a better student, he would have said: “…IF HE WERE A BETTER STUDENT.”

Hi @Rick Since comic strips are informal and entertaining, the cartoonist often has to decide whether to use perfect grammar or to have the characters use the everyday speech that most of us use. Bill Watterson is a well-educated cartoonist, and it is likely that he consciously made the choice to use the word “was” instead of “were” in the last panel.I look at this forum in the same way, and I assume that most readers would enjoy having the postings be informal and entertaining. Here is an example:In my posting above, I began with the sentence, “It’s really hard to hit the ball if you swing the bat with your eyes closed.” As I was writing it, I was thinking that I really should be saying, “It is extremely difficult for one to hit the ball if one swings one’s bat with one’s eyes closed.” But I thought the readers would enjoy reading it the way I wrote it.(That is, “However, I thought that the readers would enjoy reading it in the manner in which I chose to write it.”)

The way Calvin throws the ball up reminds me of Maria Sharapova when she serves a tennis ball except that she throws it more or less straight up. She’s somewhat taller than Calvin, also.

@Rick,If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were my son Rick, the grammarist. It might be ‘a statement contrary to fact’ to you, if you prefer to be called a grammarian. Go for it!

@Rick,By the way, my guess is that you were not criticizing the cartoonist, but were criticizing Dad.

Calvin makes a good bat man.

Hmm sorta of a good point.

I played baseball a bit while in high school. Although I was a good hitter when I was at bat, I wasn’t very good at much else..As a result, I pretty much played “left out”…

I see Calvin as a black hat hacker in about 20 years, taking down the CIA…

“Einstein flunked fourth-grade math.”

Please stop with this ridiculous notion that Einstein ever failed at math. He was a mathematical genius. In his own words, “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” In primary school, he was at the top of his class and “far above the school requirements” in math. By age 12, his sister recalled, “he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic,” and he decided to see if he could jump ahead by learning geometry and algebra on his own. His parents bought him the textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation. Not only did he learn the proofs in the books, he also tackled the new theories by trying to prove them on his own. He even came up on his own with a way to prove the Pythagorean theory.

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1936731_1936743_1936758,00.html