Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for November 10, 2023

I think it would have been funnier if the answer was, “How would I know? I’m not dead yet.”

Now you know why he knows so much.

Once again, for mr. Pastis, three(yes, 3) comic strips in a week on the same storyline seems to be his limit!!!! Oh, and major props to basilbruce for breaking some sort of comment reply record yesterday!!!! You seem to have found the magic buzzword to anger EVERYBODY, kind sir!!!! Dan aka one “proud” fan!!!!

Turn it off, turn it off! C’mon, Pig. You can’t be that dull?

It’s time for some wise person to toss the phony “Wise A$$ on the Hill” off the hill….

Me just want to know the secret of Pig balancing sideways like that on mountain side.

I knew it! Put your phone under a pillow!

I live by myself. What is it going to hear? Re-runs of Match Game?

Well, if you use “Hey, Siri” or “Hey, Google,” it is always on.

I assume that the joke that Pastis is trying for here is that the mic is always on regardless, no matter what. And we only learn that after we die? I dunno…the joke doesn’t really work.

It is not on all on the time!

Aha! I knew it! I knew I was right never to buy one of those confounded things!

Only if you have an app like Siri or Alexa installed and you have to call it by name!

I ditched mine years ago.. I own nothing Apple and never will again.

If I did, I’d probably just use that bit of monitoring to totally mess with whomever is listening on the other end. Make up some bizarre conspiracy theory or tin foil hat garbage and make it sound so convincing it’ll keep ’em on their toes.

I mostly use my phone to look up words I don’t know. Since I read widely, if someone actually monitors my searches I bet it’s a real education for them. It certainly is for me. Sadly, there’s always that term that Google appears to know nothing about. I’ve been reading Sei Shonagon’s “The Pillow Book” and nowhere can I find any reference to “hare mallets”. At least not in English. Sadly, I don’t read Japanese.

You’re not going to learn anything once you’re dead, just as you learned nothing before you were born.

42

Big Brother is listening? !

Worse than Elf on the shelf. Or that guy who knows when you’ve been sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake.

How do you go about demanding more crocs and less Rat in this community! Riot? Demand a recount? Storm the capitol?

One thing we learn in the afterlife, is that our lives were really messed up.

Does this strip come from personal experience, Steph?

What we find disconcerting is that subjects I deal with online will pop up related ads on my husband’s phone.

That is actually pretty close to the truth…we’re going to watch re-runs of our life.

Just which part of omniscient and omnipresent didn’t you get?

(After you’re dead, what does it matter what anybody here overheard? The afterlife has an audience of one. Or doesn’t exist. One or the other.)

Pastis is not the best in cartoon drawing.

We already knew that!

Block the smart phone frequency?

Not too long ago I would think that some people are a bit paranoid about the ability of smart phones. But a few weeks ago I was talking with my wife at home and mentioned I needed to shop for some new shoes. The next day, I was using my iphone to read the news on CNN and ads popped up for shoe stores!! Coincidence???

I live alone. I will think about something and ads will come up about it on my iPad. I don’t remember discussing it out loud with myself. That is freaky to me.

Eh, I already knew that.

Agreed, but by now I wish he, and like most mountain peaks were under 30 feet of snow and ice.

…and the camera was always on too!

Isn’t it comforting to know that someone listens?

Of course the microphone on the smartphone is on the whole time. If it wasn’t it would be on the ground.

Relevant: https://xkcd.Com/525/

Which is why I’m glad my custom ROM lets me turn it off.

This discussion got me thinking about Siri. My new laptop has Siri built in. On the first day I turned it off. As I was setting things up a couple of days later I confirmed that it was turned off. While reading these comments I said, loudly, “Hey Siri”. As far as I can tell, nothing happened. We can cover the camera but we can’t muffle the mike.

Unfortunately, it’s a very sensitive one.