Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for December 29, 2024

Ain’t that the truth

365 days?

Another trip around the solar park, driver.

Well Einstein said it best: “We cannot solve the significant problems of the world today at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

This certainly shined a light year on our lives.

‘A man said the universe…’

I lost a lot of my interest in the origins and nature of the universe a decade or two ago. The central issue seems to be that time – a factor in most denominators in physics – is not what we think it is. I suspect the most certain statement we can make about time in this sense is that it is a human concept.

This year will measure up badly.

The universe cares not a whit about the human race but vice versa. If humans were to go extinct, there would be no one to think about the universe anymore.

Actually, the year DOES measure something significant it you live on earth.

We had LOTS of people help us this year—and we got to help others. I’m so grateful—and grateful for A&J, too! It’s a very bright spot! Many good things this year . .

Sorry to see you’re down Jimmy. Here’s hoping 2025 will be better for you.

Five stars…

Aw, distinctly sardonic and cynical, especially for a comic strip.

Actually, this year has been very good for me. I guess it depends on circumstance. I look forward to 2025!

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you’ve had quite enough….

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving, And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power, The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’

Is that a stiff??!!

And there’s a ton of them this year.

“Bones of a sky long ago” Wow, what an incredible line. It truly sets the mood for the comic today.

I would love to see this developed into a longer piece. It must be incredibly difficult to work in the text around the limits of the panels in a Sunday comic. And the art is exceptional as well.

It needs a narrator. I can almost hear the narrators voice, and a soft,symphonic sound track in the background. Imagine this in Nimoy’s voice. Too bad he’s gone.

Well done Mr. Johnson. Happy New Year!

Mr. Johnson, think of the next several years as passing a Kidney Stone. Very painful but necessary. After it is over like a patient, we will need someone to help up heal. You can be one of those people, be a Beacon of Hope to lead people out of the darkness and into the light of Compassion. Keep you lamp lit.

My question is why we decided on January 1 as the new year.

I would think a solstice, or equinox should be the turning point of a new year.

With the New Year near,Join me in a beer…

“♫ You’ve got to throw away your wristwatch/You’ve got to understand/That the time it seems to measure/Is just the movements of its hands ♪”

Bob Weir & John Perry Barlow

Viewing JJ’s poem on the personal level for what I assume to be most humans: The longer we live, the more griefs we accumulate.

We are but bubbles in the stream of life.

We only have one planet to live on while 17 million people a year starve to death around the world and the world of plenty hordes it upward while people are slaughtered by violence machines

“New messes we’ve wrought”? You ain’t kidding pal. Good luck.

The universe creates. Man alters.

Wonderful!

With cancer nipping at my heels time, for me, is significant indeed. But I was aware of that in my younger days. Time, and what I did with it was the only commodity which I had a limited supply and I couldn’t buy more at any price. In the end my relationships with my fellow humans turned out to be the most significant use of time I had available. So I gaze at the stars knowing that others gaze at the same sky and are under the exact same time constraints as I am. Little within my philosophy is larger than any others view and thus be kind, love well and cleave to hope as it is like prayer, useful for a calm heart.

And let me echo the wonderful optimism of the Cratchits, especially that of Tim:

“Then Bob proposed:

" "A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!’

“Which all the family re-echoed.

" ‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all."

Or even, maybe, as St. James put it: “Religion that pleases God: . . . You must help needy orphans and widows and not let this world make you evil.” At least Ebenezer Scrooge learned, didn’t he?

Men make plans, and God laughs!!

Well isn’t this cheery ? )-;