FoxTrot by Bill Amend for January 10, 2021

He is the gazillion

Are you kidding? Ghosts have better things to do than that like arranging letters in alphabet soup.

Anyone remembering the movie Muppets in Space where Gonzo really sees his Alpha-Bits cereal spelling a message (when it turned out to be his own kind communicating with him)? Or how about A Goofy Movie with the “Hi, Dad” alphabet soup Max had?

That Ouija brand cereal can be pretty creepy.

Today’s classic Sunday strip we’re missing:

https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1999/05/09

Must have one heck of an English assignment going on to be eating that much Alpha-bits.

“To be or not to be, that is the gezornenplat.”

She: “My Alfa-Bits are haunted! They keep spelling out OOOOO!”

He: “You’re eating Cheerios.”

He’s got an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters in his cereal bowl.

The mothership is calling! (Anyone else remember that muppets?)

Reminds me of the cereal Gonzo was eating in “Muppets From Space”.

Switch over to Ghost Toasties…

the normal, untampered with alphabet soup or cereal looks like a Trump sentence

Maybe, but don’t dismiss outright that supernatural thing…….

One of my jobs, I had to run a script that automatically configured network equipment. The script generated random passwords. The program running the script showed what was happening. One time, in the middle of a password was the “big F word.”

I haven’t eaten a bowl of Alpha-Bits since 1979. They still make it?

Scientific American actually address this exact kind of scenario today, in yet another odd coincidence:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/

I had a simular experience, I read a message in my cereal that read OOOOOO. Then I realized I was eating Cheerios.

My oatmeal rarely spells out anything coherent.

I don’t think they make Alpha Bits anymore. Can’t find them anywhere.

Better than “Buzz off Peter”

So he can expect it to happen about once a week then?

And that my friends is a keeper as a demonstration of both the principle of expected values and the idea of completeness in probability. (i.e. in order for the sum of probabilities to sum to 1, somethin MUST happen)

I thought it would turn out to be a Jason prank.

it should’ve said “stupid peter”

Oml i did it i read every single foxtrot comic! Now time to do it again!

I had “dog” spelled out spontaneously with the cereal once. Not as mind blowing.

merely a coincidence

cue x files theme

i saw this while listening to the empty bowl

I calculated it, and it’s roughly a 1 in 141,167,100,000,000 (about 150 trillion) chance. Since FoxTrot has been going since 1988, that’s 33 years, plus 15 years for before the strip (since he was one year old), so Peter eats roughly 2,940,981,300,000 (about 3 trillion) bowls of cereal per year. Divide that by the number of days in a year, and you get 8,051,967,967.15 (about eight billion) bowls of cereal per day. This means that he somehow eats 5,591,644.42163 (about six million) bowls of cereal per minute, or 93,194.0736938 bowls of cereal per second, 24/7.

Doctor octopus"hello Peter"