Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer for January 29, 2021

A local craft distillery tried to refine rancid beer and got rancid spirits. They upped the proof one more time and made it into rancid hand sanitizer.

Hand sanitizer kills germs, which means the survivors are less likely to be killed by hand sanitizer, so when they multiply their “descendants” will carry the genes that protected them (at least a little bit) from the hand sanitizer.

Soap and water, on the other hand, just wash the germs away. They don’t die, so whatever germs remain behind on the hands do not have a genetic advantage that will allow them to “evolve the species” in a way that will protect them against soap and water.

Wooo. Adult cooties…

Maybe Jenkins is patient zero.

Well this didn’t age particularly well. ;-)

2014? Scott, you’re a prophet, I tell ya!

Well, at least Jenkins is completely devoid of RJ-17… ☺

I was watching a comedian once who was making the point that knowledge destroys humor. That basically once you know more about the subject it is harder to make a joke about it. The example was a joke about men and women not understanding each other, woman says, “I have a run in my nylon, does anyone have any fingernail polish?”, men are confused – you never hear men say, “Hey I have a flat tire – got a ham sandwich?” Which is kind of funny (if you have better delivery than mine) until you realize that nylons are/were actually made of nylon and fingernail polish is a form of acrylate dissolved in alcohol or other volatile liquid, so it makes sense that it would work as a bonding material to stop a run which is a form of crack propagating though the nylon mesh. So, the first statement makes sense, but the second one doesn’t – unless you’re hungry while changing the tire I suppose. So … relating that to this strip – washing your hands in hot soapy water does nothing to change the resistance of bacteria or viruses. The mechanic of how washing your hands cleans them is that the soap acts on the oils in your hands to convert them from a simple lipid to a closed lipid (I may not have that term exactly right) and gets them to rise up off of your skin so they can be rinsed away. In the process of changing the oils it cause them to “capture” stuff that is attached to it – like bacteria and viruses – and carries them off without doing anything to them per say. Thus, the need to say the alphabet or something like that when you wash your hands because it takes a bit for all of this to work. Thus, when your hands are properly washed they should “feel” dry and squeak when rubbed on something else that is oil free like a mirror. Hand sanitizer is doing something different in that it is actively attacking bacteria and viruses using a number of means – mostly around trying to physically rip them apart by attacking ionic bonding sites. So, now the joke doesn’t quite work as well.

Re panel #2, first speech balloon: when a kid in the fourties it was almost encouraged to roll around in the dirt, pick up insects, dig holes in empty lots, kick dead animals and such. I now have a kick-ass immune system. If you’re worried about COVID… and we all should be… go out and dig some holes before it’s too late.

I’d love to see the photographs Meyer used to provide models for the characters, as I understand he did. Couldn’t draw, so photoshopped in (? Probably a different process?) the people. The woman in panel #1 must be hilarious.

Was that touch a punch, by any chance?

Whether it be soap or hand sanitizer, you ain’t gonna git yer hands clean unless you ’warsh’em’.

So, I’ve never been able to figure this out, not that it much matters, but is the person with whom Scott is interacting here supposed to be male or female. Or is it simply that obesity is androgynous?