4 engines, but not a 747? What year was this cartoon drawn?

not funny, never funny, every other cartoon on this site funny / insightful, why is this strip still here?...does this actually appeal to anyone?

...if you want funny-ha-ha, stick to Family Circus.

Carol Lay is a very thoughtful cartoonist. Humorous, not watch-Billy-fall-into-a-pile-of-dung funny.

Now if you want to see a useless cartoon, look for Tom Tomorrow (or Yonnie Yesterday, as I think of him) for egotistical political rants - not left or right, just anti-Anyone-Who-Disagrees-That-Tom-Tomorrow-Is-God.

Who says cartoons have to be funny?

You are the last staffer at Salon with a soul. Get out while you still can.

@anonymous - not that I think Carol was trying to draw an aircraft in particular, but the Airbus A340 has a single passenger deck but with four engines.

WayLay is always outstanding in my book. The drawing, the stories she chooses to tell, the heart. I read it instantly, even if it's the only thing I read on Salon that day.

Sincere and thoughtful, I can't imagine being on a plane where someone has passed away. Not all comics have to be funny for sure. Carol Lay is a wonderful storyteller - a person who can tell a story so completely and succintly is a master of their craft.

I have to agree with the other poster about Tom Tomorrow. I really used to love this strip, starting way back when it first started, but it's really changed and it doesn't hold the same edginess or interest it used to for me.

This strip was sincere and heartfelt, but its conclusion was kind of silly. Imagine a grain of sand underneath a redwood tree. A bacterium dies a micron above the sand-grain's surface, rather than directly on its surface. Did the microbe die closer to the tree?

...the more I think about this particular cartoon, the more I scrunch up my forehead. Saying something romantic and New Age mystical about a guy who buys it on a crowded, sweaty airplane is just so awkward.

This strip almost calls out for a vicious parody, invested with the particulars of flying around with a corpse. I can imagine such particulars, but it would be really bad taste to describe them in a letter column to be read by people who may want to eat and keep their food down. Despite that, it would be as funny as a dead granny strapped to the roof of a car (see National Lampoon's Vacation for this wonderful visual).

Did the microbe die closer to the tree?

From the point of view of the other microbes, yes. Being a microbe myself, I'm ok with that.

"why is this strip still here?...does this actually appeal to anyone?"

Yup. While not all of her strips hit one out of the ballpark (but, what cartoonist does?), so to speak, she's generally very good, and at times excellent.

You may want to stick to Garfield, Marmaduke, Family Circus, Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible for your comic strip fare.

I know this is a (sometimes dark) comic and not a physics lesson, but current theory is that the Big Bang did not create elements heavier than hydrogen other than helium - the energy from the Big Bang became elementary particles that eventually condensed into hydrogen and helium along with the photons created by the bang which we can still see as the cosmic background radiation.

Stars fused this hydrogen into the lighter elements up to iron. Some of those stars blew up as supernovas, and the shockwave of these explosions made real heavy elements, as well as spreading the other elements around.

This is even more romantic, in a way. As Joni Mitchel sang, "We are stardust." Literally.

L.A. to Portland is done in tiny spam cans these days. Just Ask the Pilot.

Imagine a microbe a micron above a sand grain in a mountain range. It is no closer to the mountain range because the sand grain is part of the mountain range.

It's true that on an airplane the stars seem closer, simply because you're away from city glare. An even better effect can be achieved by camping. I suspect that humans create city glare in order to hide from the sight of the stars.

But that doesn't matter either. If that microbe were at the bottom of a mud puddle, it would still be part of the mountain range.

Tomreedtoon: "...if you want funny-ha-ha, stick to Family Circus."

What year was that comment written? Has Family Circus ever been funny-ha-ha?

As to the plane, maybe that panel is a Picasso.

Regarding the "we are stardust" theme, although I like that perspective, it reminds me of the Car Talk guys' discussion of a semi-related topic. As I recall, after providing mathematical evidence in favor of the premise that "You're drinking the same water that Archimedes drank" Tom and Ray went on to say that that's a more romantic way of putting it than "an old Greek guy peed in your drinking water".

I hope this means Carol is getting over her bias against scientists. She usually portrays them as vivisectionists or worse. Recall the story about losing gravity, where the divers preferred death over living with scientists?

I love Carol's work, but that bias is the one thing that always disturbs me.