STW Calendar Revisited, Part III
January 13-21
More pages ripped off…
Ok, I really enjoyed this comic! There’s plenty of times going back through STW that I cringe to read what I wrote, but there’s a lot of good in this one. I think ‘half-defective cloning factory’ is REALLY good (is your child a half-accurate clone or half-defective clone? this is a better optimist or pessimist comparison than is the glass half-full or half-empty) but I don’t think there’s a loser in the bunch, here!
The day’s soundtrack song, Semisonic’s ‘Closing Time’, might seem like a weird choice from one of my favorite bands but the song was actually about pregnancy, so hey there you go.
And then yeah, this one isn’t great. Oh well! I can guess that the holiday is about Benedict Arnold pretty easily there. The soundtrack song, “Peaches” by Presidents of the United States of America, remains a great, great song, so at least this page has that going for it.
This one really hits the grievance nail on the head, doesn’t it? As with most messages like this, though, the people that need to hear it most are the ones that are most likely to avoid it or have it go over their heads. And very likely those same people didn’t have this calendar, anyway.
It’s Sprite the cat! She was such a good cat, probably the best cat I’ll ever have. The number of times she would let me stuff her into a labcoat for STW was kind of ridiculous. We had a core of the same five pets for nearly the entire run of STW - almost a decade together, which is kind of unheard of - and their presence infused a lot of the comics content. The last of those pets just passed away in December, which partly felt like the true end of STW, even though the comic had ended six years previously, if that makes sense. Anyway, if I didn’t think the cats would murder me, I probably would have worn a cat baby bjorn all the time.
I think the only one I made up is ‘sporf’ and I bet that exists by now in some form, too. Q was a difficult list of names and words to come up with - so was X - especially when trying to stay in theme.
I can guarantee that this comic was inspired by either hitting ‘random article’ on Wikipedia until something interesting came up, or by going to the list of ‘weird articles’ on Wikipedia. Sometimes inspiration was hard.
During one snowstorm at Cornell my first year, when we needed a break from long problem sets, we realized the windows to the roof in the grad student lounge were unlocked, and so we went out there and tried unsuccessfully to throw snowballs at passersby. Which inspired us calling down to ask people to get closer so we could hit them. I don’t know if that lounge exists anymore but it’s where I got very very good at playing foosball. Anyway!
The holiday here is about the song Jolene, which is a hell of a intellectual reach to figure out. The soundtrack song, Weakerthans’ “Civil Twilight”, is a solid snowy-and-grey-skies kind of song.
This feels delightfully blasphemous to my Catholic upbringing and years of Catholic schooling! I wonder what Sister Mary Loretto would think of this one and if she would appreciate the humor at all.
The soundtrack song, The Thermals’ “Pillar of Salt”, is nice and loud. Looking up details about the band right now, it says, hmmmm, that the album this song is from “tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians”. (tugs at collar uncomfortably)
It’s the comic from the cover! I don’t think I would have chosen this for cover but it works better than the more wordy options, so Malki! knew what he was doing, as always. I distinctly remember the guy who made this joke when I was on a trip to D.C. in 2002 and clearly I saved it in my memory until making this comic years later. I saw a Martin McDonagh play that night in 2002. I haven’t seen the guy in over 20 years and I remember he and I had different political views so I’m just not going to look him up and see if he went farther down that path or not!
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