Recent Comments

1. about 4 hours ago on Tarzan

   The quality of the search results results the quality of the question you ask. Type in a four letter word like bara and you’ll get a lot of useless results. Add “edgar rice burroughs” as I suggested and you get something helpful in understanding the strip. I try to put in precise questions and usually have my answer in the #1 spot.

2. about 4 hours ago on Tank McNamara

   You don’t have to be dishonest to be a jerk, but it does enhance his qualifications for the title.

3. about 5 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   Your origin of Judaism is off by several centuries. Assuming Abraham is an historical figure c. 1800 BCE isn’t a bad guess. But he wasn’t Jewish. His descendants call him a Hebrew, and place the origin of Judaism c. 1300 BCE with Moses (some fundies try and move Moses back a couple centuries, but place him before events in Exodus which Exodus claims happened later than 1500 BCE). But, assuming Moses is an historical figure, he simply got the people moving in a direction that eventually became Judaism. The Hebrews had a lot of different ideas / beliefs / practices with one recent Jewish scholar publishing a book arguing that what we today would identify as Talmudic / Rabbinic Judaism didn’t begin until the Hellenistic period (c. 300 BCE) and it was several centuries before it suppressed the other forms of Judaism (and a couple of them are still around in tiny minorities).

   Isn’t clear if Noah story is cribbed from the flood story in Gilgamesh. The flood story in Gilgamesh is cribbed from an even older flood story, Epic of Atrahasis. Heard a good paper a few years ago at the Society of Biblical Literature convention where presented proposed Genesis is cribbed directly from the Epic of Atrahasis without the Gilgamesh middleman. It’s possible, but Atrahasis is in rather fragmentary shape and the key passage that could have proved his thesis is not in a condition that can be read.

4. about 10 hours ago on Wallace the Brave

   My guess would be that back in the old country, years before every home had a fridge with a freezer (back in the days when you didn’t even have running water), boiling was the only option available for softening the leaves for stuffed cabbage. I am not 100% sure that freezing was the technique I heard that was supposed to be vastly easier, and I’ve never tried it so I can’t give an opinion on the taste, but it sounds a lot safer.

   But now that it’s just the spouse and I at home a big batch of cabbage – while still sounding delicious – sounds like a ton of leftovers.

5. about 11 hours ago on Heart of the City

   You did, I just felt like you were trying to generate sympathy for Speilberg. It is a bit of a philosophical question. Person X does something terrible. Person X realizes she / he has done something terrible and feels guilty about it. Do you charitably extend sympathy to X because of their feeling of guilt or reserve your sympathy for the victim? Or, is it a bogus question because it assumes only a finite amount of sympathy exists and must be apportioned appropriately?

6. about 13 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   Depending on the species 1 – 15 years in the wild, with the occasional up to 25 in captivity. Unless they know a Frenchman.

7. about 13 hours ago on La Cucaracha

   While the man is utterly disgusting, pardoning traitors and felons is not an impeachable offense. It is simply pandering to his cult.

8. about 13 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   The need for concise writing occurs at both ends of the story (and I’m not implying you disagree). We wouldn’t have so many d@mn questions here at the end of the story if there hadn’t been so many problems at the beginning. I am not asking for answers to all my questions ‘cause I don’t want to read something the length of War and Peace (and frankly, doubt it could be done), I’m suggesting if the introduction hadn’t had so many loose ends we wouldn’t be left with so many questions now.

9. about 14 hours ago on Heart of the City

   But let’s not put our emphasis on the guy who made millions by generating the fear and remember the actual victims.

10. about 14 hours ago on Dick Tracy

    John’s gospel appears to have originally ended with chapter 20, with a statement I paraphrase as “there is way more that could be said, but not enough space to do it.” And, sure enough, someone added chapter 21 to try and reconcile the difference between the Synoptics. The specifics are way off topic (sorry), my point simply being that sometimes you have to stop writing because there isn’t time to ask every question that could be asked or tell every detail which could be told.