#166 – Lost
Posted on January 11, 2007 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I used to never get lost until I moved to Boston. I grew up in the grid-like suburbs of Chicago. I always knew where the lake was and that the lake was east. Boston is an older city that evolved more like a living organism. I found out the hard way that if you are in Boston and miss a turn you better turn around and go back. None of the roads are parallel so you can’t treat it like a grid city and just take the next cross road. I knew I was in trouble when during my first week there I asked a police officer for help and he had no idea how to get to the road I was supposed to be on.
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Man where the hell would we be without technology??
We’d be brainless nimrods without technology, that’s for sure. 😛
My first week in college in Cincinnati, I decided to take a walk down to the local pharmacy . . . took a wrong turn, ended up at Union Terminal . . . about ten minutes drive . . . still don’t know how I did that . . .
Love the comic, just discovered it yesterday 🙂
Hey Adam, yeah it’s east to lose track of time when you are in a new environment like that.
My favorite Biff comic so far!
hahahahhaha. this one is instantly one of my favorites by far. so freaking clever, chris. this 5 day a week updating thing certainly isn’t hurting your ability to amuse and render awesome artwork.
thank you!
Hey thanks Christian. You guys have some great shirts. 🙂
Thanks calan. I’ve been enjoying your comic as well and I’m going to keep pestering you until you start making them more frequently. 🙂
When I missed one of my turns near Phoenix, I found myself on a one-way street that dumped into a dead end.
I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Hahaha, that’s awesome.
Hehe, agreed, one of my favourites. I always wondered if there was a more convenient way to use a GPS. 😛
I stumbled upon this from site sight. Hilarious. I kept snorting Coke out of my nose. My favourites off the top of my head is the Snowman One (may actually build a snowman and take a pic so you guys can see!!!), Mirror, Bus, Breath (I live in Manitoba and it’s COLD here.. Winnipeg… where we lovingly call it Winterpeg) Gravity, Road Signs, Socks, Drink Box and Bubble (just to name a few).
One of the very first things that I noticed was his eyebrows. I’m fangirling Biff’s eyebrows to know end!!! I love love love the green shoes, as well. (Green’s my favourite colour.) I love the backgrounds, and I love the colours that you use in all your comics! I also laugh at the replies IN the comment section of each strip!
You say you love new readers. I’m assuming you’d like to branch out. I have a suggestion. Have you heard of a site called livejournal.com? (If not, livejournal, aka lj for short, is like an online journal, where you post entries and other lj-ers can comment on said entries. You could set it up so that your entries are private, public, or friends only –meaning only the users on your friends list get to view them. There are also communities for people to gather and talk/post about a specific interest, ie a community for webcomics in general or a community for exploding dog, per say.)
I’ve been on there for years, and there’s a lot of communities on almost every subject known to mankind. Maybe if you could put yourself out there, you’d get an even more of a fanbase! Heck if you want I could even help you set up a community!
Thank you once again for a good two hours of laughs and giggles… gotta love those damn eyebrows, man. lmfao!!!
PS. I just noticed that one of your links does have lj syndicated feed off… so just disregard the bit about lj. Guess that was me not paying attention :O
I live in Denver, which is fairly grid-based. However, if you ever come out here and find yourself on Orchard Road…don’t expect it to last long. That road is like a ninja–one moment it’s two lanes each way, the next minute you’re in a neighborhood. Or a ditch on the side of I-225.
I once attempted to drive 23 miles to a water treatment plant on an environmental science class field trip, and ended up lost, driving over 120 miles. For you Californians, I almost reached Pyramid Lake in search of Moorpark.
saturnfaerie – Thanks for all the compliments and your offer to help with LJ. 🙂
Siirenias – dang, 100 miles out of your way. You must have been pretty sad.
Brilliant
While everyone’s sharing getting lost stories… It’s never good to have a recent kidney transplant patient driving high school kids on a long distance field trip. The painkillers convinced this guy that going south from Los Angeles was a good way to get to Sacramento… What was kind of fun about it was when we stopped at one gas station 3 hours before he finally turned around, and ended up stopping at the very same gas station a total of 6 hours after we had first come in. Naturally, we all went in and did the exact same things we did the first time just to freak out the person who was working the counter.
But yeah… it took us 22 hours to get from LA to Sacramento. For those of you not from California, that should be around a 6 hour drive.
Hey I just found your site, as I was surfing around.
I live in the suburbs of Boston and even after my parents living there for over 20 years and they still get dreadfully lost. Not only is it built like an organism, it is built like one with frequent tumors and surgeries constantly changing were all the roads go.
PW – haha, well it feels good to know that I’m not the only one.
Your Boston story reminds me of my Mom when we were in Washington DC. The roads there are similiar to those in Boston, and she was getting very frustrated missing the turns and spending an eternity in the round-abouts I believe they were called. To make matters worse, my sisters and I were getting crabby in the back, my dad is trying not to laugh at her, and she is pulling our camper behing us. Finally she had enough and said, “HEY! I’M DRIVING, I’LL KILL US ALL!!” So we all started laughing of course.
Downtown Boston’s not so bad. As my wife points out, if you’re in town, eventually, you’ll hit 90, 93, 128, or the ocean, and from there, you can figure it out.
Of course, yesterday, after dropping said wife off in the Back Bay, it took me an hour and a half of driving around lost to get back to Melrose. . . and I’ve lived here my entire life.
this comic is titled Lost and Biff is dressed as John Locke often does on the show
I am wholeheartedly delighted
I wonder how does Biff gets all that money… I cannot buy a GPS and he has a sack full of them ^^”…
Your story reminds me of when I came to San Diego. When I live in Mexico, I also grew up on a grid-like city… And the weekend after I came here, my brother and I went walking to gamestop, on our way back we made a wrong turn and were lost for an hour or so ^^”… I still haven’t figured out how we got on the right street…
I grew up in Milwaukee, but never really visited the cities surrounding it. One day, on a whim of course, I decided to take the bus as far as it goes and then walk home. I ended up in South Milwaukee, which is two cities south of Milwaukee for some odd reason. The bus route was in a stairs pattern, which made no sense and also made me a little sick. Now, I didn’t know this, but South Milwaukee has a very confusing street plan. Most of the streets are in a grid pattern, but the number streets don’t go in order! Also, 12th street is the same as … I think it was Chicago street.
Trying to find my way home was pretty hard. Just go north, right? I looked up to see where the sun was, all clouds, even though people said Milwaukee was sunny all day. Aside from that, it was near noon, so that wouldn’t have helped much. I checked the trees for what side the moss was on. Sure enough, the moss in South Milwaukee grows on ALL sides of the tree. I guess it would with no sun exposure, though. I even tried looking at the airplanes to see where they were taking off from or landing, since Milwaukee has a pretty big airport. Oddly enough, I saw planes coming up from two different sides. I can’t explain that one.
Finally, I tried following the busstop signs, but with the strange bus route I kept finding myself back at the end of the line. I found what looked like a main road and walked it until I finally found a person. I asked him “This may sound strange, but … What city am I in?” The city he said was even further away from home. I thanked him and turned back. After hours of walking, I finally found a neighboring city that had the same busroute. I knew my way from that city, but had to be to work, so I just hopped the next bus. I barely made it to work on time, having wasted my whole day lost in a city that seemed to be trying to digest me.
Biff’s road dirting job sure pays well.
I love peaceful Biff. so cute… er… but anyway, nice ideas there.
biff must be rich…
I got hopelessly lost when I was visiting my father in new york. for some reason, I thought i could walk from, um…(that area where Ground Zero is?) to Canal street,(china town) with my little sister. I kept telling her, it must be the next street, it just has to be!
But thank God for mapquest.
I wonder if Biff could program his eyebrows to point in the direction he needs to go like the giant arrows in Need for Speed.
Anyone ever tried searching for a route from New York City to London using GoogleMaps? Check out step… 23, I think it is. 😉
That’s why I love Utah, EVERYTHING is a grid..
The roads, I mean..
I’ll bet this is how the amish use them.
Mint Sharpie – just checked it out, and i think you mean step 21, which is:
swim across atlantic ocean 3,462 mi.
That looks like an expensive habit.
I grew up in a town with organic, curvy streets. They’re hard to get used to, but once you get used to it, you ALWAYS know where you are. I live in Phoenix now (a grid city) and I’m always lost because everything looks the same. Sure, you understand that all the numbered streets go [cardinal direction] and all the numbered lanes go [opposite cardinal direction] from, like, first street, but that doesn’t help someone whose brain is wired to travel by landmark…
Biff must be rich!
I managed to get lost all of once in Boston, about six months after moving to the area. Of course, I also made sure to always stay within a few streets of a T station, so it was kinda impossible to get lost.
Cheaper than rox!
Namamps – are you female?
Girsl – tend to use landmarks (pictures)
Guys – tend to use cardinal directions & distances (#s
…If the world were perfect, then GUYS WOULD UNDERSTAND THIS, ASWELL AS PUTTING DOWN THE TOILET SEAT AND DON’T BUY ANY GIFTS WITHIN A MONTH OF A BIRTHDAY OR CHRISTMAS FOR YOURSELF!!!!!
On the Boston note, I was told when I went that they built their streets on the cowpaths made by their cows. That said, it is incredibly easy to get lost there.
They have nice drivers though.
Elkian, you seem to have some anger issues. Calm down.
Take a deep breath.
Relax.
…
…
…
Put down your own toilet seat.
Where I live, it’s a pretty small town, so I know all of it. Once you get out into the country, there aren’t very many roads, so they’re all built with maximum efficiency: that is, if they’re close to another road, they’ll intersect it. However, I often go to one or both of the cities nearby, and MAN is it confusing. Hamilton, I think, has more one-way than two-way streets. St Catharines was built on a 45-degree and 135-degree grid, with also a number of one-way streets (not as many as Hamilton, but still too many).
Somehow I manage to find my way around places. Not a clue how; must be good at WMG (wild mass guessing). I don’t navigate by street signs, but I don’t think it’s because I’m female. I call it “psychic myopia”. I’m slightly nearsighted; almost never wear my glasses because they give me a headache, but even when I do, I THINK I can’t see things far away. Because when I’m not wearing glasses, I can’t read the street signs, so I just never look at them.
I can’t get lost where I live. We have two directions, uphill, and downhill. Civilization is all downhill, wilderness all uphill. If you get lost in the forest, turn downhill, walk that direction for a while, eventually you’ll get to a road. Or a river. Either one will eventually lead you home.
Oh man, i got lost in Boston *so much* when I lived there! A few years later, when I was living in Pittsburgh (much less confusing) my ‘rents bought my a GPS system for my birthday… It is useful, though. If I’m ever back in Boston, we’ll see if it can manage…
I’ve also heard the story that they built the roads along cow-paths. Would explain a lot.
Oh, and love the comic!
each one of thouse is an eazy 30 dollers. He has a full backpack full of them. How much is the goverment investing in biff?
Emotoast- He bought them all from the royalties he gets from his steam powered thinking cap.
I…. dont think hes using the GPS right.
Boston evolved like a fungus.
That’s not how you do it Biff……
Actually, that is how he does it. You saw him doing it that way. What you mean is that that’s not how YOU do it.
GPS unit, ur doin it wrong
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!