Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for November 08, 2023

It’s still steaming.

This comic was my first introduction to cow pie as a slang for cow dung when I was a kid. At first I thought it was just a beef pie until my older brother explained it to me.

I would tell Calvin’s parents to not have a cow, but I think it’s a little late for that.

How did that equation go? Pie R….

That joke stinks, Calvin!

In the UK it’s just a mince pie.

Or it’s a chocolate pie

Reminds me of a story I heard years ago, Moose tur’d pie.

Susie takes the bait, hook, line and sinker. Attaboy, Calvin.

Growing up on a dairy farm, I was quite familiar with those as a kid.

There actually is a Camp Cowpie connected with the Scouts.

Bill Watterson obviously never read Desperate Dan when he was growing up. >

Over here the advice is not to stand behind a cow as you might get a pat on the head…..

In the Norwegian translation, pie was changed to “pærer” (pears), with the punchline being that Calvin actually meant “hestepærer” (meaning “horse pears”, and from the context, you can probably guess where they come from)

Well Calvin you got Suzi good this time, but you’re going to have to pay for that. LOL

Pass. Do you have a meadow muffin?

That left Suzie in a bad moood! I know that quip is udderly awful, but I can’t resist milking it for all it’s worth. These cheesy jokes hoof to stop now! Curd you all please forgive me?

A Savannah, Georgia chocolate factory once sold chocolate ‘cow pies’ boxed with straw underneath. Their slogan: “Like Mother Used To Make”. The Wisconsin variety used to have Disney’s Clarabelle Cow on the box, until Disney sued them.

Not as fresh as you.

How did the luckless Miss Wormwood get stuck with the job of lunchroom attendant??

Plenty for seconds, and even thirds.

From a grass-fed cow!

Yippee Ki yay, Cow Pattie

Susie, Susie, Susie… Why do you keep sitting next to Calvin? You know he’s gonna keep doing this!

In tomorrow’s lunch bag, road apples!

Ratting him out are you?

Calvin is so generous. No wonder we all ❤️ Calvin. :)

When she’s on her game, Susie recognizes a setup, but she missed this one.

I laughed so loud at this I scared the dog!

Calvin suffers greatly for his art, as does the rest of his lunch.

I never realized that Miss Wormwood was a “Miss”. I always assumed she was “Mrs” for some reason.

There exists somewhere a picture from a Boy Scout campout of my hometown’s future police & fire chiefs, plus, I believe, a bio professor, engaged in a wide-ranging cow-pie fight.

I know why Calvin never gets out of first grade, but how come Susie never moves on?

Mrs. Wormwood: “There goes my ulcer.”

Well then, how about a Horse Apple instead?

Just don’t light a match near the fumes

They are used as fuel in India, and other places.

It can’t be fresh. No flies came out when he opened his bag!

Accompanied, of course, by buffalo chips!

As someone who occasionally tries to set up elaborate conversational gags like this, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a natural straight man like Susie.

Yaay mom! :-D

One wonders what it really is. Chocolate pie? What kid hates chocolate? Calvin is weird.

Susie can only blame herself for this one. She stepped into it (figuratively)

Jee, Susie, mellow out a bit. He doesn’t really have a cowpie

Hmm, not Mrs. Wormwood !?

LOL… gotta love Calvin sometimes…

He’s a little sh**

It seems that no-one has been to Mad O’Rourkes in the Black Country (UK), or read the Britsh Comic “The Dandy” in which Desparate Dan eats Cow Pie. Cow Pie is a pie containing a lot of a cow. Cow Pie is a real thing not a metaphor for a cow platt.

http:// www. madorourkes. com/ and remove the spaces.

We also eat f*gg*ts. No, seriously, we do. Just not what you think. The most famous are Brains f*gg* ts. https:// /wiki /F*gg*t_(food) . You Yanks don’t know that f*gg*t is also a clump of fire wood and a kind of meatball. So it’s on the banned list. Grow up.

Social services on speed dial in the school.

1/2My sister and I grew up on a farm, and one of the less attractive fall chores was the annual chicken and duck slaughter…we’d get chicks and ducklings in the spring, raise them for the summer and then butcher in the fall to fill our freezers. It was just one more normal farm chore, hard work and vaguely unpleasant, and nobody enjoyed it, despite the obvious benefits and necessity. One year, when I was in Senior High and my sister was still in Junior High (different schools) she was able, for some cosmically unjust reason, to beg off the chore…I swear to this day that she planned that and purposely lollygagged on her school project so she’d have an excuse for that weekend, but I couldn’t prove it, alas.

So she sat inside while my parents and I and a neighbour dealt with 100 or so birds…and my overly active imagination formulated revenge. I hid away my treasure…

As an aside, nothing went to waste…our neigbhour was a wonderful, very elderly Ukrainian woman (she had, miraculously, survived the Russian Revolution and attack by the Bolsheviks) who would gleefully siezed each and every severed head and foot and giblet. She then took everything home and then return the following day with an offering of absolutely amazing headcheese and fresh baked bread.

The division of chores in our household saw my Mum make our lunches for school, while my sister and I dealt with evening feeding and watering of the various critters. In the 70s in northern British Columbia, Saran Wrap was still a relatively new thing and it was fiendishly expensive, so my Mum wrapped our sandwiches and what not with wax paper, which was pretty much opaque, such that opening each lunch offering was often a surprise. This worked for my plan…

After my Mum had finished the lunches and everyone was otherwise occupied, I retrieved the item in question, carefully wrapped it – mimicing my Mum’s nearly artistic efforts – and placed it in my sister’s lunchbag in the fridge.

2/2Next morning, we went about our business and headed off to school, me on my bus, my sister on hers.

I got home a bit later than my sister and was greeted by the shrieking of a livid teenage girl.

My sister had sat down at her lunch table with a dozen or so friends for lunch…apparently she looked in her lunch bag and thought “oh, something extra, what a nice surprise from Mum….”

The opening of the little wax paper packet cleared her table and the ones on either side, and resulted in a telephone call from the vice-principal to my Mum.

Apparently the lifeless chicken head was not a hit, coming as it did not so many years after ‘The Godfather’.

I bumped into the vice-principal some years later and that was his first topic of discussion…seems that despite his requirement to remain professional and be the bad guy in the moment, the story of my sister’s lunch provided a great deal of entertainment for the teachers for some years.

My sister and her husband, now grandparents, are coming for dinner tonight. I went for a hike and was able to bag a grouse yesterday…maybe I’ll retrieve the head and give my sister a gift this evening.

I didn’t have a stuffed tiger, i had (and still have it) a hand-me-down 50s era, really ugly stuffed monkey as my childhood confidente…but I have always admired Calvin and truly appreciated Mr. Watterson’s brilliance…