Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for May 04, 2020

To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub…

With today’s language skills corrupted by social media, most individuals would have problems reading and understanding a half intelligent book.

In Goat’s nightmare, everyone is hoarding comic books!

A lot of people in these comments seem to think that “today’s kids” are illiterate. I have to say, that’s not true. If anything, most kids like to read more than their parents, and the emergence of ebooks has allowed people to get into new books even when libraries are closed down. You might be surprised how many teenagers are reading when they’re staring at their phones!

That’s why I love fiction… and insist that there be at least a neutral ending if not actually happy.

Jorge Luis Borges — “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

The library stacks in Newark New Jersey’s Main library on Broad Street, used to smell like urine all the time!

Yes. Yes, they are.

Books? People won’t read a half page email. If it can’t be tweeted, it’s too long.

This is like Randall Munroe’s “shibboleet” dream…

Apparently jigsaw puzzles are being sold out now.

Nothing wrong with the 3 R’s of education … Now to apply it ! … Croc Power !

Sorry, Goat, I prefer fiction.

Herd intelligence

Although public libraries are currently closed, across the nation, they’ve been doing a great job at continuing services through remote access. Some are even using their bookmobiles as wifi hotspots in communities without a great deal of connectivity.

I feel so bad for Goat.

What is an intelligent book? When I was in high school in the early ‘80s in Tampa it was determined by our English/literature teacher to be selected books on our reading list that she deemed relevant and probably was allowed to put it in the curriculum by the Hillsborough County School Board . A few were Camus “The Stranger”, Twain “Huck Finn”, Verne “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, Jack London “Call of the Wild”, Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter”, Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”, Huxley “Brave New World” and Orwell “1984” but others like “Catcher in the Rye” by Salinger, “Howl” by Ginsberg, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, Kurt Vonnegut, Naked Lunch by Bill Burroughs among numerous others were not allowed. I had the opportunity to read a lot of these in college along with many other class masterpieces in college. Yet, what I consider to be a great novel, someone else who say ’Mehh" or call it drivel. To each his own….

I collect memoirs of WWII pilots & aircrew, but I’ve had to stop since the pandemic, as the prices have gone up.

Oh, Paris, you should have KNOWN it was nothing but a dream!

You don’t see the Trump admin calling for the opening of book stores.

It’s not the despair. I can handle the despair. It’s the hope that is killing me.

Sadly, ‘Run Spot Run’ would raise the IQ of a lot of people.

Hear hear

PERFECTION!

Yeh from Rat’s experiences it seems to work fine for alcohol, but I’m not sure that being surrounded by intelligent books is enough to make us more intelligent. I mean, I could study sculpture at Saint Martin’s College, but wouldn’t expect to leave as the next Michelangelo :)

If that many books because horded, I would worry they were being collected to be burned. At some point the censors learned the best way to get a book removed from the library was to check it out and not return it.

Now that’s a Hope Spot right there if I ever saw one.

If IQ is the mean (the normal type of average as we see it) of all test scores, when the average person gets smarter the IQ rises by definition: and the average is now higher. In other words you can’t change a collective IQ because it moves up as our collective intelligence moves up. Badly phrased, I know, but the question is: can you raise a collective IQ? You can raise individual scores in comparison to the average…

No big city riots, who woulda thought.

I average 2 books a week. And, no, I am not counting comic books.

https://i2.wp.com/nothingbutgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/LEGOStarWars.jpg?fit=2048%2C2048&ssl=1

…they changed their party voting preferences forever!

Very true.

Yay for reading! Cartoonist’s 9th grade English teacher

Ever notice those idiotic armed protestors aren’t demanding that book stores, libraries, and museums open up?

Come to my house Goat, you’ll find plenty of books on science, history, nature, art, and music. There are also books on mythology/religions and fiction, mostly science fiction. Plenty of poetry, short stories and even some biographies. If you are looking for “train trash” though, I can’t help you.

I don’t think folks are thinking kids are the target of this comic….

There was a 1989 TV-movie in which the villain was manipulating the world’s weather in order to keep people trapped indoors and force them to read books, so they’d become smarter. Fittingly, the movie was titled, Get Smart, Again!

since when did goats care about IQ levels?

Dreams that are “too good” are the real nightmares….

We heard about two timely t-shirts in the last two days which somewhat reflect this topic:

1. Hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced white man

2. U.S. leading causes of death: Trump’s ego, intellectual laziness

I have not seen them anywhere so they must have been custom pieces. If any of you find where they are being sold, please…

Scratchy panels