i liked it!

The fortune cookie shark rodeo episode, one of my all time favorites.

If you knew that your existence, and that of everyone and everything you ever knew, were to be snuffed out in a few weeks, how would you spend your time "wisely"? Wouldn't that term be a little, shall we say, passe under such circumstances?

I remember the scene in "The Day After Tomorrow," in which the members of a British meteorological team were faced with certain doom due to a rather abrupt change in climate. One of the members found a bottle of 12 year old Scotch and suggested they burn it to keep the generators going. The leader of the group poured it into glasses instead, toasting "to England."

Wisely? Who's to judge what that would mean, and would it matter? I say not.

Maybe I'm a little slow this morning, but it took me two readings to get the irony that the astronomer -- knowing the fate of the Earth but refusing to give humanity its freedom of choice by denying it that knowledge -- states that *he* would choose not to know about his impending death. The butler merely gives him what he (perhaps falsely) claims he would desire if he was faced with imminent death. The fact that Lay adroitly places the pair in a well-provisioned rocket ship means that they do not face Earth's imminent demise. In a sense, the butler becomes the scientist one step in remove by delivering (albeit more actively) the unexpected fate that the obviously detatched scientist sees for Earth. We can also conjecture that the servant is using the occassion to do something that he has long wanted to do. It's subtlety like this that makes me wonder if I've possibly missed the point of some of Carol's more esoteric/absurdist strips. Maybe not, but still one of Ms Lay's stronger efforts.

Well, I think wisely would certainly change. Spending the last couple days of existence shagging everything in sight might be considered "wise" in that situation.

Carefully considering 401K investment funds - not so much.