Recent Comments

1. 10 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Walt received two letters on the same day. The first was for Christmas lights (strip from 1-08) The second was about the tree (strip from 1-09). I don’t see a continuity error.

2. 22 days ago on Peanuts Begins

   It already happened. According to the Peanuts Wiki, Violet called Charlie a blockhead on August 16, 1951, about 5 months before this strip.

3. 23 days ago on Frazz

   Axial tilt is not relevant to the phenomenon. Imagine that earth had a perfectly circular orbit 0f 360 days with no axial tilt and that you are on the equator at the spot where the sun is directly overhead at noon as measured by a clock. If the earth turned 361 degrees each day (24 hours), then you would see the sun directly overhead at noon the next day and every day. During that day, the earth would have traveled through one degree of arc around the sun.

   However, if the orbit is an ellipse, the earth would travel through more than one degree of arc when it is close to the sun and less when it is farther away. So when closer to the sun, as we are around the time of the winter solstice, it would travel through more than one degree of arc each day (24 hours as measured by a clock) meaning that the spot where you are standing does not quite reach the point where the sun is directly overhead at noon as measured by that clock. “Solar noon” would occur slightly later, as would sunrise and sunset.

4. 24 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   That’s his general outlook, but this particular strip does not reflect misanthropy by Watterson in any way I can see.

5. 24 days ago on Frazz

   The earth rotates through 360 degrees at a constant rate. If the earth had a perfectly circular orbit, solar noon would occur at the same time every day. But earth’s orbit is an ellipse. We are closest to the sun and moving faster at about the time of the winter solstice. This means that 24 hours is not quite enough time for the earth to turn and show the same face to the sun. So sunset, solar noon, and sunrise all drift later. If you go to sunrisesunset(dot)com, you can create a calendar for your location.

6. 25 days ago on Frazz

   Depending on where you live in the continental US, sunsets start getting later around December 10, a week and a half before the solstice.

7. about 1 month ago on Red and Rover

   Regardless of the biblical words, this is an error of word order – like a misplaced modifier. If they had followed a star in the east, the wise men would have been heading the wrong way to find Bethlehem.

8. about 1 month ago on Red and Rover

   “They, in the east, saw his star.” They saw the star in the western sky. The wise men were east of Bethlehem.

9. about 1 month ago on Peanuts Begins

   That is one of the few pieces I can identify at a glance. Peter Schickele did a nice play on this that purported to show that PDQ Bach invented minimalism. It consisted of the Bach Prelude where each chord was played over and over again until you cried out for relief.

10. about 1 month ago on Peanuts Begins

    Earnestly Frank is missing the point. I think your question is an interesting one. I suspect that if reading music without reading words were possible, it would be vanishingly rare simply because the two are so linked to education.