It takes two to make a pear

It's good to see that, while adding some depth to Sally Forth lately, Ces hasn't completely abandoned Ted's insanity.

I never got up to 144 nights, but I often exceeded 23, because I would sing the song to a very young infant son while trying to get him to sleep.

The combination of a tempo to which you could walk up and down the hall, with a length and repetition that would eventually induce sleep was attractive, but not always effective.

So if I got to the Twelfth Night of Christmas and the kid was still awake, I'd simply back off to the Eleventh Night and head that direction. He'd usually be asleep before I had retreated all the way to the First.

This time of year, we usually see articles about what "my true love" would have to spend to give these gifts today, which runs into the issue of whether the gifts repeat. 

It seems rather plain to me that, on the Second Day of Christmas, the UPS guy showed up with another partridge in another pear tree, plus two turtledoves, and that, by the Twelfth Day, she had a dozen partridges, a dozen pear trees and so forth.

Others, however, assume that each day's gift is separate and that, having named it, she's simply then reciting the list of previous gifts.

Which ignores the fact that each verse is a single sentence that includes "and" before the final gift listed.

Not "in addition to the aforementioned."

"And."

The people who do these calculations not only fail to agree on that, but, however they calculate things, rarely think to price the pear tree with the knowledge that it can't be a little sapling but has to be large enough to support a partridge, which, after all, weighs (google, google) about a pound, depending on the species.

Nor do they take into consideration the fact that a ground-nesting bird is not going to quietly sit in a tree. Given that you'll likely have to fasten it up there and expect some struggling, that pear tree is going to have be pretty sturdy.

That'll cost a lot more than a sapling from the local nursery, plus you'll need heavy equipment to transport and plant it.

Anyway, I think it's funny the way Ted overthinks everything. What a nut!

 

First, of course, you have to find your true love ...

... and wouldn't it be great if finding true love were as simple as portrayed in Pearls Before Swine?

Bam! Eliminated! Next?

I did have one girlfriend who declined to eat pizza with, as she put it, "little hairy fish" on it, until I took her to a place that had the culinary sense to put them under, instead of on top of, the cheese, whereupon the hairiness melted into the cheese as God intended and she became a fan.

Other things intervened, alas, but she had passed the "adventurous" test and then, later in life, I  learned she had more than surpassed it, as an RN who walked away from conventional hospital work and traveled to learn folk medicine from the actual native practitioners in Africa and Tibet.

She's on a thankfully short list of "What the hell was I thinking?" but I console myself with the thought that, had we stayed together, our single road would not have contained the adventures we found separately.

Which is the sort of deep, thoughtful consolation one might expect from a philosopher, like, say ...

... Immanuel Kant, who, in the current Existential Comics (of which this is but a snippet), is a 40-year-old Virgin, a condition which his friends David Hume and Albert Camus are hoping to remedy. 

With limited success.

You should go read the whole thing, and always click on the "Didn't get the joke?" button at the bottom because he knows more about it than you do and explains things like who Elizabeth of Bohemia was.

One could, of course, argue that she died before "Robinson Crusoe" was published, but, then, getting her and Hume and Camus and Kant into a bar on the same night also requires some time shifting, so this argument would put you in the category of people who ask how the sharks in Sherman's Lagoon can have lit candles on their dinner tables underwater, but don't question the tables themselves.

 

In any case, some people, reading the whole comic, will be reminded of
"My Night At Maud's."

 

Others will channel Monty Python.

The true Philosopher King will think of both.

And perhaps sigh a bit.

I used to have lunch several times a week with one of the women in this 
song, and her husband, whom she left as she had Webb. He's
written several books since, but never mentioned her. I hope
her separate road also went somewhere interesting.

 

Comments

[Brian Fies]

Is that for an African or a European partridge?

[Boise Ed]

Your Existential Comics is in serious need of an editor!