Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for April 10, 2015

Neither are The Flintstones cartoons. The people who seem to think that The Flintstones are accurate “creation science” are also no smarter than Pig.

Paris Goat left between panels 1 and 2 because he couldn’t stand to watch what Porkus Idioticus was doing.

Henry Jones, Jr. you’re not, Pig. It took him a leap of faith.

Obviously Pig studied law.

Let’s see who gets the reference.

I’m shocked; shocked, I say, to learn that Roadrunner cartoons are not to be considered a valid scientific source! What, next you’ll be telling me Superman can’t fly in Real Life!

But psychologically spot on:

I remembered an incident at school, and moreover one in which I had had a starring role. You see in Gym we had, on a time, to run an obstacle course; you know the sort of thing climbing up ropes and across bars and the like, and at one stage we were required to jump from a beam to a rope and then shimmy down the rope and off to points unremembered (for reasons which will probably emerge shortly).

Our story being set in those halcyon days of child safety, when nothing was expected to hurt us but the cane (not even those fascinating blobs of mercury we were always playing with on the physics lab benches), the beam was of course set well above head height; something that would never be allowed in the more cynical and lawyerly times of today. … So …So we boys proceeded along the beam indian file (not that we had much choice in that really) prompted towards simulacrum of alacrity by our mad sports master.

Now I have always had a bit of a tendency to be rather more enthusiastic than good at sports; and so maybe I was following a bit too closely on the guy in front of me, or perhaps I had annoyed him so that he pulled the rope a bit more than necessary as he left it, or it was just that a two inch wide climbing rope was just beyond my visual acuity, but as I launched myself from that beam I was aiming for a point that was at the end of the up-swing of the rope and as I approached it, it was moving away from me and we never did meet.

Have you ever watched those, I think they are traditionally Saturday morning, cartoons? The ones where, say, a coyote runs off a cliff? How, amusingly, he runs straight out legs aspinning, gravity defying; then suddenly noticing some slight difference in his situation he looks down and immediately realising the untenability of his position he makes an instantaneous right-angled turn downwards, ignoring inertia just as completely as he had earlier ignored gravity? Have you seen that? Well whoever it was first started that convention must have had the most brilliant psychological insight—-well either that or had actually done exactly what I did.

So, to get back to our story having left me hanging in the air and just about to miss my rope for the last few seconds, that was exactly how it felt. My perceptions of the event were exactly the coyote’s: that I went straight out hung for a moment with my hands flapping about vainly for a rope that had left me and moved on with its life; and then, because I foolishly glanced below, I dropped straight down to the hard hardwood floor, where I broke both wrists and sprained an elbow.

My brain being somewhat faster than my body, somewhere on the way down I had assessed the situation and had what I like to think of as the ‘coyote syndrome’ firmly fixed in my mind so that I was laughing heartily by the time I hit and continued to do so—-though perhaps it would be more accurate to say the laughter was hysterical rather than hearty by then. Because of that it took absolute ages for me to convince the rest of the class that I was actually somewhat in need of a visit to the emergency department.

isn’t that the lemmings’ cliff? if pig can survive, the lemmings are not dead..

I am a creationist. I notice that people who do not believe in Something will believe anything. Those who march lockstep behind “The Descent of Man” – without having any idea what it really says – tend to be global warmists and pc police, attempting to regiment society because of their belief in original sin?

Soooo what did Pig run into at the bottom ? Pig is injured, but he came through :-)

@ Bluebottle, actually, he spoke all through one. It had two kids watching TV wondering why the Coyote wanted to chase and eat the Roadrunner.

There goes my childhood.

Pig finally realized the gravity of his situation.

so which ‘cartoon’ character IS more accurate??wile e. or pig?hmmmmm let the debate begin!!!!!!

Well, apart from the pointless highjack for somebody to talk about his pet obsession rather than the actual point of the comic…

Toons! Gets ’em every time.

Hey, I wish there was a Roadrunner cartoon strip I could add to my daily entertainment.

And there is a middle ground to evolution and creationism: intelligent design by our creator and a plan that had taken billions of years to come together. To think that any one of our body’s many organs came about by random chance is ludicrous. Just think about the complexities of how our eye can see in better than ultra HD. I believe in science and God.

Oh, please, somebody include a Goofy holler between panels two and three!!

On the hill we viewed the silence of the valleyCalled to witness cycles only of the pastAnd we reach all this with movements in between the said remark

Close to the edge, round by the cornerDown at the end, round by the riverSeasons will pass you byNow when it’s all over and doneCalled to the seed, right to the sunNow that you find, now that you’re whole

Pig’s idea will work when pigs fly.

I was going to comment on cartoon physics and why it’s funny but the anti-science-religious-nut comments have totally taken the fun out

Yet another thought experiment: Schrodinger’s Coyote.

I love this cartoon.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance…logic can be happily tossed out the window

Wait a minute. Humans didn’t co-exist with dinosaurs???

I can’t take all this discourse on this subject so I am going to jump off the garage roof with sheet on my back where I will float gently to the ground like a falling leaf! Don’t laugh, I have seen Calvin do it.

No, I’m going to leave it so that in a million years, creationists can say "See, we know that six thousand years ago man and dinosaurs coexisted. "

I want to give Pig a hug right now.

Don’t ask me why because I have no idea!

xxx

Didn’t Acme Looniversity teach you anything?

pig can believe in wily coyote. i believe people of different religions may someday learn to get along and not want to kill each other. it is even more illogical than pig’s belief but i still cling to it.on a different note i am now nostalgic for the survival course of my youth in gym class. loved rope climbing. only part of gym i was good at. now i’d be a total failure instead of almost total. sigh

Roadrunners have a top speed of about 20 mph.Coyotes can run at about 43 mph.My entire childhood was a LIE!!!

Put out the question what did Pig hit at the bottom, nobody wants to give a thought as to what was at the bottom. Everyone just wants to try to figure out what came first the chicken or the egg………try to have fun people ! Stop arguing over theory……………..

You can also run forever; although the scenery repeats.

Sorry! I am but a weak and sinful person (although I rather enjoy it…), and just couldn’t help myself. Such temptation, and such fun! I of course knew I was kicking an ant-hill, but I have a demanding day-job and a life, and thus have been unable to participate. (Nor would I want to – see my second comment above.) But Gaijinrabbit has been doing yeoman’s service in defense of rationality, and Scoonz understands my point precisely. A tip of the hat to several other friends of science as well. As for the resolute defenders of creationist Flintstone “science”, with their bits of cherry-picked facts dressed up in fancy sciencey language, bald nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, too, when such people endeavor to force the world to fit a Procrustean bed matching their profoundly flawed notions. Moreover, the entire, and thus-far utterly unfulfilled, burden of proof lies with those asserting that there is some sort of necessary “first cause” or God-of-the-Gaps. Philosophical ruminations don’t cut it. And in any case, such ideas still fail to confer any validity or necessity to conventional religious notions beyond Deism.Top of the evening to all.

Pig needs a new cartoonist. One who has studied the law (of cartoons). 1. You can be suspended in the air, or even walk on air, until you become aware that there is nothing beneath your feet.2. You have to scream YAHAhahahahoooie all the way down.

The observer effect of quantum physics. But hey, Pig look down in panel 2, and reality of open space formed…

i miss louny touns

The trick is not realizing you’ve stepped off the cliff. If you look down… splat!