Reader Mailbag: Sorry, Pennsylvania
Shaenon: Jeff answered this mailbag question, so all I had to do was draw a bunch of Jeffs.
Channing: You know what’s best in life? Composing a long, rambling e-mail to Shaenon and seeing Long, Rambling E-mail: The Graphic Novel like a week later. That, my friends, is best in life. Crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you ain’t got nothing on that.
Why Ohio?
So that the Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati would have an encore pethaps? 🙂
The Eggplant that Ate Chicago should make an appearance…
The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, classic board game from 1979
“The Cockroach that ate CinCinnati” FTW!
Corn.
Q: Why doesn’t Lake Erie overflow?
A: Because Ohio sucks.
Don’t blame me for that one. It’s part of an entire book of Ohio jokes. I read it when I was a kid, and some of them stuck with me. For an encore:
A guy from Michigan (or pick any state that borders Ohio) and a guy from Ohio were both using a public restroom. They both finish their business, and the guy from Michigan heads for the door. The guy from Ohio says “In Ohio, they teach us to wash our hands after we use the restroom.” The guy from Michigan says “In Michigan, they teach us not to pee on our hands.”
At Yale, that joke is told with a Cantab (Harvard student) delivering the setup.
Yeah, they’re pretty universal.
I think the first time I heard it, it was Air Force and Marine.
As a native of Ohio, I endorse these jokes. I laughed.
I’m much the same way with Polack jokes, as I am Polish. I figure you might as well laugh at yourself, because if you don’t, someone else will.
Public Pubic Service Announcement:
Yo. The reason why we wash our hands is because our butt is home to bacteria. Butt sweat soaks our underwear / innermost layer of clothing, so bacteria swarms from our butt to our genitalia. Therefore we wash after skin to skin contact, regardless of apparent moisture levels.
‘Cause it’s high in the middle and round at the ends.
Pennsylvania is soft in the middle, and crunchy at both ends..!
With sprinkles ??
My, my, my Ohio
Why, why, why Ohio?
So before they come to fight the New War,
Forgive me Ohio I just couldn’t eat anymore.
Shaenon’s just mad because the Browns and Bengals are both better than the Steelers this year. I assume Andrew agrees with me.
This is Skin Horse’s Narbonicola, one hopes… A better Present may be one trip to the Past away. Or one of Dave’s Narbonicola explanations…!
Ohio, Pennsylvania, as long as they don’t try to eat Indiana. Nobody has ever died in Indiana.
http://moelane.com/2014/07/31/ha-my-secret-map-made-the-tor-com-blog-tordotcom/
Lol! The map is worthy! I’m a Texan, and I approve of dinosaur rodeos.
I’m from Oklahoma, and only now do I understand about Rattlesnake Roundups.
It’s population control.
tbf, “THEY” have done a really TERRIBLE job keeping the Florida cause-of-death secret.
Not that anyone can prove. However, tons of people go missing, here in Indiana. Especially before the corn harvest. So, stay out of the cornfields.
Dang, I find out I could have died from trolls?!? Why did I move to Montana
As someone who lives near the border of Ohio, I can confirm that I would rather Ohio be eaten. xD Or West Virginia, my state. All hail our biomass overlord. (I kid of course)
I’m enjoying the return of the Skin Horse mail bag. I generally enjoy the Sunday filler anyway, but it’s always interesting to get a look into the “behind the scenes” goings on in the strip that fan questions inevitably bring out, and Shaenon’s drawings, as always, really bring things to life. I also don’t really believe Jeff is Lawful Good. This is clearly a “good cop/bad cop ruse”, and I’m not falling for it.
Gerbilfly! Yay, it’s been ages since we’ve seen one!
“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that the world is exponentially weirder than most of us believe and we don’t perceive it.”
You have been channeling J B S Haldane who was often quoted as saying, “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
Something physicists have been living with for a long time.
Both Einstein and Hawking died trying to square Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, and we may not see their like in another 500 years.
What does your study of biology tell you about the Creator?
“He has an inordinate fondness for beetles”
Also J. B. S. Haldane
This is the quote on the dedication plaque of my Star Trek Online character from Science branch, who has (have) the unenviable task of trying to make coherent, consistent sense of a universe written by hundreds of people across five decades, most of them with a C-grade grasp of real (not made-up) science at best.
One upside of the impending Grand Finale is the possibility of Jeff moving on to some solo project as ambitious and off the wall as Mundementia One was, but with Current Jeff’s skills as a writer.
I dearly hope so.
Texas or Florida (after you let me evacuate my relatives) would be nice choices, but even a Biomass can choke– I mean, would YOU want to absorb all that high-octane crazy? Ugh, so high in preservatives, too!
REAL Floridians would welcome the Biomass.
The Everglades are hungry.
If you ate Ohio, would anyone notice?
Did they really eat all Pennsylvania? Or is it just megalomania? The comic strip chefs, both Shaennon and Jeff, are writing this to entertain ya.
Indeed.
You can eat any US state you want, it will always leave you Hungary.
I’m out.
The Biomass wouldn’t even have to eat all of Pennsylvania to effect a big improvement. All it would have to eat is Harrisburg, and then the rest of the state would be much better off. (I suspected this before I lived in Pennsylvania, and I am convinced of it now that I do live in Pennsylvania.)
I always enjoyed Mundementia One and GURPS IOU both, the Mundanity trait was always interesting
Just leave Lancaster alone! (Great answer, very in-depth 😀 )
Didn’t the Marvel New Universe do something similar to Pennsylvania? At least, they turned Pittsburgh into a big crater, as I recall. So your plot point was drastic, yes, but not without precedent.
I feel much more comfortable about the core of cruelty to Narbonic than to Skin Horse, because Narbonic doesn’t ask me to root for the protagonists winning – each arc usually ends with the evil plan, whoever’s evil plan it was, self-destructing, and all I need to root for is their survival – than I do in Skin Horse, which really feels to me like ‘100% evil’ versus ‘100% evil’ versus ‘99% evil’ and we’re just rooting for that last group.