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Shhhh, Dandontdare! For all you know the new bloke she's started seeing might be a fan of 2000ad and reading this right now!

If that's what he's doing right now, I'll be well chuffed, believe me!

A new idea for a comp, let me know what you think! I'm not sure how this should be organised really - do you think it should be  an ongoing open thread, where whoever guesses one then posts the next? Or a 5 or 10 picture quiz on a regular basis? If the latter, I'm happy to keep scanning and posting these till the cows come home, so let me know your views on what you'd all like. Also, are the examples below too easy, too hard or just right?

To kick off here's a five-pic Dredd-only quiz - simply identify the Judge Dredd story from the detail!
1....
2....
3....
4....
5....

Post your answers or simply brag about how many out of five you got!

PS - Comp title courtesy of  Satchmo!

Because my Saturday night just went down the shitter. Right now, I was supposed to be drinking cocktails in Chorlton to celebrate a good friend's birthday (who I fancy big time and who, apparently used to really fancy me - long story!) along with her sister and some young lesbians.

She texted me a short while ago to say that her sister and the lesbians have pulled out, she's in a bad mood and didn't think I'd enjoy an evening with just her and some new bloke she's started seeing (too right!). So not only has my Saturday night been cancelled, but my plans to get in her bed have suffered another fiendish setback.

So it's just me, the internet, the telly and some cans of Stella. Expect some rambling, pissed-off rants in a few hours!  

[cover]

Just got back from a horrible 8-1 Saturday shift to find a superior prog on the mat - luverly!  

First rate cover, first rate Droid Life, first rate Dredd, first rate Stront. 'Nuff said.

Marauder's enjoyable tosh, glad they've left it open for future development. Low Life is just a bit too knowing and overdone this time (especially the first episode with all that "text/subtext" and "don't patronise your audience" guff) but still excellent, top artwork.

86ers has never really appealed to me - I was amazed by the recap panel in part 1 just how much plot I'd managed to forget and how little I cared. This always seemed to be stretching a franchise too far - If it ain't Rogue, don't bodge it.

Apart from that one exception (and don't get me wrong, it's not completely unenjoyable) an absolute blinder of a prog!

me very happy subscriber!

//http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QgCfnBtF7M

Unless we studied philosophy, which would fuck you up for life!

No!  Philosophy graduates always struck me as the most balanced and genteel of correspondents!

hmmmm -  the ones I know tend to be the most stupid intelligent people I know, if you get my drift - plenty going on in the noggin, fuck all idea how to work a VCR. Lists of igneous rocks and reason why Cortes beat the Aztecs can be easily discarded, but once your mind has been opened to Big Concepts, you're metaphysically screwed! That whole Ecstasian Dredd story was just a metaphor for an undergraduate philosphy degree.

That's more like it!

Howzabout a comp along the lines of "identify the story from the blown-up detail" (though a catchier title is needed!) I'll put together a few examples at the weekend and see if floats anyone's boat.

They told me at University, that once exams had been passed, we could safely begin forgetting the large amounts of knowledge we'd learned. Unless we studied philosophy, which would fuck you up for life!

we spent a whole year on the French Revolution and there wasn't a single bastard essay question in the exam about it!

And on the subject of the Spanish conquistadores, I learnt a lot more about Pizarro vs the Incas last Summer in Peru. He was a right bastard - As well as the usual tactic of recruiting oppressed tribes to rise up against the empire and then shafting them anyway, he kidnapped the Inca king Atahualpa (who his people regarded as a God) and basically ransomed him for the entire Royal treasury. And then when the Incas had paid up, they executed him anyway. In a final attempt to save himself, Atahualpa agreed to convert to Christianity, which just meant that they strangled him rather than burned him.

the 3 teenage witches (in rags and Tina Turner wigs) were like something out of a sixth form play. remember that because I traced the letters spelling 'sixth form play' on my partner's leg with my finger while we were watching it.

Aaaah, that's so romantic!

10 reasons why Cortes beat the Aztecs

I'm intrigued: What are the ten reasons?

-Bouwel-

I can't remember them all, but the major ones I think were superior technology and tactics, assisted by introduced diseases like cholera that were spreading like plague through Aztec civilization. The ones that stick in my mind however are the lesser and more bizarre contributing factors - such as the Aztecs had never seen horses and were freaked out by these 4 legged creatures with men's torsos growing from their backs, or that the king's team had just lost a significant sporting contest (a kind of basketball or pelota I think) and this was a terrible omen that demoralised them. It was an impressive (and horrible) achievement that a couple of hundred men could destroy an entire civilization

shucks, thanks

And to drag things vaguely back to the topic, we had many great theatre trips from school, including Derek Jacobi in both the Tempest and King Lear, Robert Lindsay as Hamlet and Derek Griffiths (!) in Gogol's Government Inspector, but one that stuck in my mind was Macbeth at the Contact (University) theatre in Manchester around 83. The witches were young, sexy and resembled a kind of goth Bananarama. They delivered their lines to Macbeth while writhing around him and caressing him seductively. As we were on the front row, it was clear that the young lead genuinely appreciated their efforts and no amount of tugging his tunic down could hide his obvious excitement for the rest of the scene. We also saw a version of the Elephant Man there that included full male and female nudity. You'd never get away with school trips like that these days!

However, though I consider myself to have had a very good education (private grammar) it was just as much an exam factory as today - we were taught how to pass O levels, moved on quickly from one topic to the next, learned 'lists' of relevant facts (eg 10 reasons why Cortes beat the Aztecs), so I think some contributors to this debate have a rather rosy nostalgic view of education in times past. The main difference is we actually had to learn everything to regurgitate in the exams, whilst with course work you only need to have a present understanding of it. I think this is how many people operate these days - why learn lots of facts and knowl;edge when you can instantly google or wiki what you need? The internet has made people very lazy about committing knowledge to memory. Or maybe we're just dinosaurs and the youth of today have evolved different and superior 21st century thinking models...... Nah, they're just lazy gits!

Wit great respect DanDD, unless the person in question doesn't have English as a first language you have to expect a certain level of familiarity with the common names of the limited numbers of cute mammals in your own country... and thus my not-yet-3-year-old son would find that joke funny. Not hilarious (sorry, Jim), but he'd certainly understand that a cow wasn't the same as a porpoise. In fact, I think I'll try him out tomorrow. I might get bemusement, but I'm damn sure he knows roughly what a cow and a porpoise look like. Lord knows he's quick enough to take me to task on the chimp/monkey divide.

Hell, I'll be the first to bemoan the lack of vocabulary amongst a lot of people these days (and often do - and don't get me started about not knowing where things are on a map of the fucking world!) but my objection was purely about the semantics of the joke and JC's assertion that you don't need to know the word to make it work.

Jokes are weird and powerful things. I'm fascinated by how a specific series of words can lead your brain down a logical path that if done correctly, ultimately ends with an uncontrollable eruption of emotion. That's a bizarre and powerful thing if you think about it. It's why some people can't tell jokes and some can - the order of the words, the way one bit of information directly follows the last, the stresses and pauses, these are often as important as the gist of the story and the punchline.

one of my favourites, easily ruined by bad telling (and best if read aloud):
A mouse walks into a music shop and hops up on the counter.
The mouse says "I'd like a mouse organ please"
Shopkeeper says "you what?"
Mouse says "I'd like a mouse organ please"
Shopkeeper says "that's funny, I had a mouse in here yesterday asking for a mouse organ"
"Ah yes," says the mouse, "that'd be our Monica"

I should add that the "uncontrollable eruption of emotion" that joke elicits has often been a desire to punch me!

Is the Pat Mills-created character fan-fiction embargo still in force?

[Jim Campbell wrote:]

Jim Campbell wrote:
WTF? You don't need to know what a porpoise is, because the other thing in the picture is a fucking cow. It is clearly not native to a marine environment. There are two things, they are not the same and one is comically incongruous.

There is no part of this joke that requires you to know what a porpoise is in order to understand it.

Nah. sorry Jim that's absolute tosh. The joke doesn't work at all if you don't know what a porpoise is. If you've never heard the word, or wrongly think it means something completely different, then the joke makes no sense - the 'other' thing may obviously be a cow, but the other other thing is obviously a dolphin, so why would you see two thingamajigs? Try imagining seeing the joke for the first time (almost impossible in reality, as humour is a weird spontaneous reaction) but replacing porpoises with a random made up word, or a word like giraffes - meaningless!

(the fact that it didn't occur to her to look the damn word up so she would GET the joke and forever increase her knowledge however....   )