Moving this back to the top because I just found a response from Jimmy Johnson his own self languishing in the Spam folder for a full week.
Comments going to Moderation for no good reason is common enough that I check the folder several times a day. I put on my Hazmat suit and venture into the Spam folder, well, once a week at most.
Comics I Don't Understand 
For those who don’t follow the strip, I think it is worth viewing the panel in context:
P.S. The words that Janice speaks in the first two panels are the beginning of the “Lorem ipsum” placeholder text, which I think is probably more well-known than Jimmy Johnson assumed. Personally, I think he should have had Arlo answer with the second line in the second panel.
P.P.S. The geezer variation would have been “etaoin shrdlu“.
I don’t think JJ is assuming that “Lorem ipsum” isn’t well known. The joke works fine (actually, better, I think), if you know what “Lorem ipsum” because, indeed, no one is going to understand what Janis means (since it has no meaning), even if they do understand where the words came from.
Oh…. It never occurred to me she’d be referring to *what* she is saying. I assumed she was saying no-one would understand why she was filling a speech bubble with apparent nonsense are what the nonsense was. And I was of Kilby’s opinion it’d actually be fairly well known.
The beauty of what Jimmy’s done here is that it doesn’t matter if you know about lorem ipsum or not. If you know enough about it to know it’s meaningless, then it works like WW points out. If you don’t, then it looks like gibberish or maybe for some people Latin, but it still doesn’t mean anything. Either way, the punchline works. Also note that Arlo is far, far from being really awake. Kudos all around, Mr. Johnson.
I agree with DemetriosX and Winter Wallaby. I
I thought “Etaoin Shrdlu” was how you sent Mr. Uldrhs Nioate back to the Fifth Dimension.
His cousin is Qwert Yuiop.
“I thought “Etaoin Shrdlu” was how you sent Mr. Uldrhs Nioate back to the Fifth Dimension.”
Please don’t.
I’m pretty sure he’s the one responsible for the abomination that is “Up, Up, and Away”….
The fourth panel is a fourth-wall break message from Mr. Johnson.
The cartoon is about how Arlo is aware that Janis is talking, but has no interest at all in what she has to say at this particular moment. Which is why the text is lorem Ipsem. Which is well-known in the print-media professions but not so much elsewhere. Animation tends to just use squiggly lines to represent text, and movies actually have a professionally-designed newspaper that is used as a prop in lots and lots of movies… the exact same newspaper in every one. (Then they switch to a closeup if they actually need you to know what the newspaper actually says to understand how it affects the characters.)
I suspect that Jimmy Johnson has noticed that you’re his biggest fan.
This 4th panel is a present. Take it.
It’s not *quite* meaningless; it’s a badly corrupted version of some lines from an essay on comparative religions by Cicero, which at some point was adapted to stand in for “meaninglessness.” Which is why when it came up on another of my lists today, I posted:
“Arlo and Janis: This is what you do when you can’t think of a joke.”
(reply)
Well, that was Cicero’s theory. (Though he was a bit drunk at the time, and botched both the build-up and the punch line. And nobody laughed. Even back then, he should have remembered “Philosophy is easy, comedy is hard” and that “Philosophy is what closes on Saturday night in Ostia.”)
Downpuppy, while you might be correct, I tend to wait until I’m TOLD something’s a present.
Darn! His website is closed up at the moment. I was going to ask him.
Back in the 40s and 50s, several science fiction authors would use “etaoin shrdlu” to stand in for swearing.”Qwert yuiop” would get thrown in for a spate of really inspired swearing.
IIRC, Pogo had an appearance of a bookworm by the name of Mr. Etaoin Shrdlu.
I seem to recall that “etaoin shrdlu” was the top line of letters on some typesetting machine many decades ago.
Yes, because it’s the twelve most-commonly-used letters of the English alphabet.
@ James – Your memory is definitely correct (I have a paperback copy of “Pogo”, vintage 1951, pages 49-51). His name was revealed just after he complained about the “bad spelling” in a book, which turned out to be a copy of “Webster’s Dictionary”. In the next strip, Howland Owl warned him that “bait is scarce”.
P.S. @ beckoningchasm – Technically, it’s not the “top” two lines on the Linotype machine, but the two leftmost columns of the lowercase set of letters.
Etaoin Shrdlu was often set to mark the end of a large block of text. Or that’s what I was taught when I was learning to run a Linotype back in the dark ages. I watched the “You will never replace hot lead for quality printing” move to “This laser printer thing will never replace phototype for quality printing.” I think in my career there were more changes in printing than in the 5 or 6 hundred years since Gutenberg. I learned to set type on a Lino Type, Then a Compugraphic, then finally PageMaker and InDesign. If you know any of those names you are probaly in printing and damned old.
I had a brief interlude as a print designer. We used to do rough mockups at 300 on the laser printer in the office, but final proof and production would be printed on a linotronic… located across the lake, at a service bureau. It took too long to send the files over by modem (at 9600bps) so it was actually faster to copy it to a Syquest drive, drive over the lake, in rush-hour, and drop it off.
“. . . drive over the lake, . . .”
I’ve heard the myth of someone who walks on water, but never one about someone who DRIVES on water . . . maybe just an updated version?
@Andréa : I suspect he cheats and uses one of them-there “bridge” thingees. (He’s High Tech!)
Andréa, I don’t want to search for it, but Mythbusters tried driving a motorcycle across wide, deep water. They succeeded.
Au contraire, Bill! If you’re serious, I’d be honored. (I might as well be your logo!)
About a week huh? I wonder if…
@James Pollock: “It took too long to send the files over by modem (at 9600bps) so it was actually faster to copy it to a Syquest drive, drive over the lake, in rush-hour, and drop it off.”
Thus illustrating one of the sayings of Andrew S. Tanenbaum, one of our authors when I worked at Prentice Hall – “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) circa 1985)
Wow! That’s pretty impressive that Johnson gave permission to use his art on your site.If you’re looking for confirmation that you’re relevant, this is it. Well done!
Fan-dang-go!
Well, I first heard of this site when Scott “Dilbert” Adams recommended it on his blog. That was way back before he got all Trumpified.
James Pollock wrote: “It took too long to send the files over by modem (at 9600bps) so it was actually faster to copy it to a Syquest drive, drive over the lake, in rush-hour, and drop it off.”
Andrew Tanenbaum wrote (circa 1985): “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
Here’s a pic with me and my colleague Odette with Tanenbaum on the Prentice Hall stand at some computer fair in London, probably at Earls Court, some time in the early-mid 80s I guess.
“I’ve heard the myth of someone who walks on water, but never one about someone who DRIVES on water”
The bridge over the lake floats on it.
I actually found CIDU from a comment made in an Arlo strip when I read the strip on his website.
So Bill — are we just ignoring the purported Jimmy Johnson on this thread?? I know somewhere on the FAQ it says you prefer authors not to explain their own work. but I think we’re taking that shunning to extremes here… (Unless you were able to determine from the email that this is an imposter?)
@ larK – Bill must have been confident that it was legitimate, otherwise he would never have rescued the comment from the spam folder. As for “shunning”, I don’t think the collective silence was that at all: it’s more like standing in awe, not knowing what to say.
I suppose there wasn’t much reaction because by the time I rescued the comment, it was ancient. I also haven’t gotten around to using the panel, which — it might be legitimately argued — was quite rude of me. In my defense, I’m currently dealing with two separate house disasters: a flooded kitchen that put both the kitchen and basement out of commission, and — while we were still fighting with the insurance company over funds to get out personal Dresden repaired — a tree coming down on our roof and deck that makes me want to tell Ted Forth “You call that damage? THIS is damage!”