23May/1232

Bel-Air

by Jeff

Image text: Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.

This comic is a take on the 90s TV series "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and its much parodied and repeated theme song. Consequently, the song coming out of Cueball's TV right now is a take on that song.  Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value or a comic verse of irregular measure.  And obviously, the song is update with an Adele reference who is a very popular singer over the last year or so.

Filed under: Television 32 Comments
27Apr/1240

Emotion

by Jeff

Image text: Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

Here's the link referenced in the image text, which is a blog post from 2011 regarding his fiancee's breast cancer.

As you can read at that link, that is what he's referring too.

The only other reference in this comic is Joss Whedon, who (per Wikipedia so I didn't miss anything) is best known as the creator and showrunner of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004), Firefly (2002) and Dollhouse (2009–2010).

The 2006-2007 timeline does not mesh with any of the airdates of the above shows.  It is possible Randall caught up with Firefly or Buffy at a later date, like most of us.

23Apr/1240

Skynet

by Jeff

Image text: 'YOUR CLOTHES. GIVE THEM TO ME.' 'Shit, uh ... you are now breathing manually!' 'I AM ALWAYS BREATHING MANUALLY.'

This comic's use of Skynet is a reference to the main antagonist in the Terminator franchise, Skynet is a fictional artificial intelligence system which becomes self-aware and decides to terminate humanity, its creators. Skynet is rarely seen onscreen, with its actions often performed via robots, cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems.

The final frame is a reference to that strange time when you say or think about a word too much, it stops sounding like a real word and instead starts sounding like nonsense.  As it continues Skynet appears to come to self-aware realizations that usually are the result of drug usage.

29Feb/1249

Late-Night PBS

by Jeff

Image text: Then it switched to these old black-and-white tapes of Bob Ross slumped against the wall of an empty room, painting the least happy trees you've ever seen. Either PBS needs to beef up studio security or I need to stop using Ambien to sleep.

Here's what you need to know to understand this one:

PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service and is a American TV channel that is (somewhat) supported by the viewers themselves through pledge drives.

"Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego" was a computer game series in the mid-80s.  The series moved to a game-show TV series in the early from around 1990 to 1995.  The point of the series was to learn about geography and the world while playing a game or watching a game show.  Carmen Sandiego was a mysterious character that you tracked around the globe, attempting to find clues and find out where she was headed to next.

Mogadishu is a battle-torn city in Somalia, where there was the aptly named "Battle of Mogadishu" in 1993, which would coincide with the airdates of "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego" game show.

The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970-1975).

The reference to "A Bookshelf in a Dutch Apartment" is a reference to Anne Frank, who was a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis in a Secret Annex hidden behind a bookshelf in an apartment in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  She wrote the famous novel, Diary of Anne Frank.

Good lord, I hate acapella, but Rockapella was the acapella (keeping up the tradition of punny names for Acapella groups) group which sang the theme song to "Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego".

And lastly, in the image text there is a reference to Bob Ross, who is the famous painter who had a painting show on PBS called "The Joy Of Painting" that amazingly ran for 12 years.

Anything I missed?  Did that help explain it for people who missed the references?

27Jan/1229

Sigh

by Jeff

Image text: If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

Ok, here's the information you need to understand this one:

Cueball is mispronouncing the name of the British TV show, that is also currently show in the US, which is DownTON Abbey (emphasis mine). I had that same problem with the name of the show for almost a whole year.

I'm no LMFAO expert, but they are ubiquitous group in the US on radio, TV and even strange commercials with rodents riding in cars with their infectious ear worm, Party Rock Anthem.  However, this comic is a reference to another one of their songs, "Sexy And I Know It" (Trust me, you don't have to get too far into it before the referenced part in the comic.)

Filed under: Music, Television 29 Comments
9Jan/1224

AAAAAA

by Jeff

Image text: 'ARE YOU TURNED ON YET?' 'I DON'T THINK SO--ARE YOU?' 'MAYBE A LITTLE!' 'OK, FIVE MORE MINUTES.'

Ok, in this comic, Megan and Cueball find out that "this guy's mansion" has a rotating bed (in the last frame, which is a flashback).  So, they decide to build one and it appears to be going far too fast as both are holding on for dear life on each side of the bed.

The rotating bed is supposed to be a sexy device, but it appears from the comic that Cueball and Megan have made it rotate a little to fast to be appealing.  However, the image text maybe makes us think otherwise.

Filed under: Television, sex 24 Comments
4Nov/1133

MTV Generation

by Jeff

Image text: If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

This one is pretty straightfoward, so let's just do some definitions.

MTV is Music Television, it is a TV channel is the US and elsewhere that when it started in the 1980s used to show music videos.  Now it only shows crappy reality TV.

The Breakfast Club is an iconic movie from 1985 in which 5 very different teenagers spend a Saturday detention together at the school.  Principal Vernon was obviously, the principal in the movie and was the overseer of the detention.

This comic is one of the rare appearances of the White Hat character, who is seen much less than the Black Hat character.

17Oct/1146

Elements

by Jeff

Image text: Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propoganda.

The character on the left is a reference to the TV cartoon and live action movie by the name of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  The character in question is named Aang.  He is master of the four elements, earth, water, fire and air.

On the right is Dmitri Mendeleev, who is credited with the creation of the periodic table of elements, which is why he is the master of all 118 plus elements.  Polonium is the radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie (as referenced in previous xkcds).  Just as Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning, that is the attack that Dmitri uses with polonium.

In the image text, ununoctium is the element with atomic number 118 and it has no other use besides basic scientific research.

Xenon is a colorless gas, that emits a blue or lavenderish glow when the gas is excited by electrical discharge

23May/1131

Darmok and Jalad

by Jeff

Image text: I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.

This comic is a reference to the Star Trek episode "Darmok" in which Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew come upon a Tamarian ship and Tamarian planet in which they can translate the words, but because the language is based on metaphors, they cannot understand what the words mean.  The famous line from the episode: "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is parodied in the first frame of the comic.

Picard is eventually able to decipher the line to discover that it was a story of two warriors that work together to defeat a common foe.  In the comic, the computer instead deciphers the "Darmok and Jalad at Kalenda's" phrase.

Can any Star Trek fans add more to this explanation in the comments?

13May/118

Chain of Command

by Jeff

Image text: Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

Themistocles was an Ancient Greek politician and this comic and image text are about uncommon chains of command.

The President of the United States is at the top of the US Nuclear Chain of Command, but the Engineer is technically above him because the button would not work without the Engineer and the Engineer is in charge of configuring how the button works.  Just in case you are not familiar with movie and TV depictions, the "Red Button" is usually a worst case scenario as it launches all nuclear capabilities.

In the image text is a similar joke placed at the top of the chain of command, this time in Ancient Greece.  Since Themistocles' infant son ruled all of Greece, where did his infant son get any ideas?  If this were current day, the infant son would get his ideas from advertisements shown on the show Dora the Explorer.  Dora the Explorer is a very popular animated television series shown on the Nickelodeon networks staring a child named Dora who explores. (Hence the name.)

Filed under: History, Television 8 Comments

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