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TEN SECOND BUZZ
- Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25March 31, 2025131 Comments
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- Report: Trump to Sign Department of Education Elimination Executive OrderMarch 19, 20253 Comments
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- From The New York Times Editorial Board: The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher EducationMarch 15, 202550 Comments
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Jaybird in reply to North on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25He is indeed assuming that... but I wondered if what he said about China was true. I mean, if he sta…
Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by l…
Dark Matter in reply to David TC on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25That would be why I totally ignored Telegraph/Yahoo after looking at it and did my own thing.
Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Ok, so I am not an administration apologist... Narrator: He is an administration apologist
Slade the Leveller on About Last Night: Voting Fun in Wisconsin and FloridaThe Dems ran a gun control activist for the House in Florida? They probably weren’t going to win any…
North in reply to Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25He's assuming an entire drawer full of can openers and also ignoring pretty much the entire field of…
Jaybird on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Yishan has an interesting take: Ok, so I am not an administration apologist but I have not heard any…
Chris in reply to Derek S on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Did you read the article you posted?
Derek S in reply to Chris on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25What does that have to do with this? Be accurate.
Dark Matter in reply to Saul Degraw on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Same.

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“Is it any crime to drink beer?” – this line is going to land differently in four years.Report
The fellers are all in evening dress! For a party with beer!Report
I’ve been mulling over this comic and now I’m in an overthinking mood.
So, my impression is that, at the time, billiard games were not that respectable. (reference: Ya Got Trouble from The Music Man, set in 1912). Now, for Briggs (and a lot of his contemporaries, and for that matter other eras), that’s one of the sources of humor – putting people in situations at the edge of respectability, and then seeing them trying to rationalize their way out of it. (usually to the ‘missus’)
But this…isn’t quite that. But it’s not..*not* that either. All these woman are seemingly, unfamiliar with kelly pool, and the joke definitely isn’t the ‘mansplaining.’ But also, no one in the comic is drawn as super young (except the actual kid), everyone seems to be in that ‘settled down’ stage of life.
So my conclusion is this is one of the most ‘feminist’ cartoons that Briggs has done. Woman are being introduced, as peers, into a social setting that is (and really would continue to be) virtually all male spaces.
(The other ‘feminist for the era’ tell is the comment about grapejuice and that middle class women of the era were *very* into temperance, as a rule.)Report
Next thing you know, they’ll be putting in a hotel!
I get the feeling that The Music Man was more making fun of the people at the edges who said such things… which is not to say that there weren’t people at the edges who said such things.
But the issue of respectability is also one of cost. Who could afford a billiard table? Well, Certain Establishments and households where they had evening wear in the closets.
Now, to compare this one to the half-dozen Kelly Pool strips we’ve seen before, it’s pretty established that these guys are on their absolute best behavior. The beer is a definite misstep. He’s thinking “we’re inviting the dames to see what we do down here!” and everybody else, even the dame herself, knows that… NO. They’re seeing the family-friendly version and selling it as the real thing.
She’s being a good wingman, she is. He doesn’t appreciate her enough.Report
That’s a very good point.Report