Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Magellan two-fer


Here's two rather strange references to Magellan, the first person to [lead a crew of men most of the way to] circumnavigate the globe [unless one believes that Zheng He did it 100 years earlier].

The first example is from Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley. It's from a story arc where Bucky's nemesis, Fungo the ferret, who lives next door (which Bucky the cat refers to as a weasel) cut his way into Bucky's closet and walled-off Bucky's closet on Bucky's side of the apartment, rendering it invisible. While Bucky didn't do anything in particular to deserve such a prank, it is still fair to say that due to Bucky's general demeanor, Bucky deserved it.  This reminds me of a prank that I read about that took place at Caltech where one student left for the weekend to visit his girlfriend.  While he was gone the other students in the hallway removed the guy's dorm room door, walled it off, painted it, and even installed a fully-functioning wall light that matched the lighting in the rest of the hallway where the door used to be. When the guy came back he was first, confused, then amused, and then angry as he asked what they'd done to his door... to which the perpetrators innocently responded, "Who are you?".  He found a hammer and started aggressively looking for his doorway, so the other students called the police.  He finally found his doorway and discovered that he couldn't open the door because the perpetrators had gone so far as to stuff the room so full of crumpled-up computer paper. As he tried pulling out enough of the paper to squeeze his way into the room the other students started putting the paper back into the room through other openings he had made. And yet this barely registers on the list of more epic Caltech pranks. Hijacking the 1961 Rose Bowl half-time show and "borrowing" an Air Force jet probably top that list.

The second example is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zach Weiner. I can't even begin to try to explain what the devil this means. But Mr. Weiner often goes for the absurdist punchline.That little black-and-white extra image is the extra comic Mr. Weiner tends to toss in for fun, or to get that extra little punchline jab.

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