#949 – Plank
Posted on January 29, 2010 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
A good friend of mine spent a lot of time and effort digging out and sculpting a natural looking pond in his yard. We never refer to it as a pond though. We always use it’s ultimate intended purpose, “heron feeder.”
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That feeder looks like the aftermath of some sort of carpentry tornado.
The Duck Has Spoken.
yeah… there’s also a typo – it should be ‘there haven’t been’ instead of ‘there hasn’t been’ because the verb ‘have’ has to be conjugated to match ‘infestations’. so i suppose you could also change it from ‘infestations’ to ‘infestation’ to make it work. but i digress. sorry about being a grammar nazi but that kind of thing bugs me.
Heh, Heinrich beat me to it.
Biff is going to need to spend alot on lumber to keep termites happy. They eat like little fiends, and apparently even faster when listening to Rock music! Then again, biff seems to be a more classical guy.
I figure Biff is more of an Ambient / Electronica kinda guy, myself.
We had a pond on my mother’s deck – With Koi. But it was really a raccoon feeder. :p
I have endured termite infestation…OMG! Biff FYI wood eating termites don’t fly or jump. Sacrificial wood must be in contact with the ground as they can only climb 6″ exposed to the outside air. Your wood feeder might attract wood pecker birds though…
Augh, the grammar! It burns!
I think i got it… unwanted critter week.
For those of you unfamiliar with time travel, hasn’t is the right word to has be enusened in the present dangling pasticle tense.
Perfect! End of story. — True story: When I was a truck driver, this one shipping clerk at Harley on Capitol asked me: “Why are you such a pest?” The mind instantly knew the answer: Because I liked her. But I had yet to learn to trust the simple thoughts. If I answered with any words, they probably amounted to a shrug. Another Heather story.
That is, Heather who said this once outside the auditorium:
“Lincoln, Shakespeare, Mozart… Life!”
“All the world’s a stage” in one word?
I suddenly want to try that…
nicely put, karen 🙂
k sry to only comment on the grammar. linzleh, you haven’t seen biff’s termites. you don’t know what they’re capable of. have you read the other biff comics? you never know what biff’s dealing with until you see it, and sometimes not even then.
I think my favorite part is the fact that there’s actually little wood bits underneath the feeder. Crumbs, or put there to attract the termites?
@Heinrich, Jan 29, 12:34 AM: Sounds like you need debugging. Does this work for you? The subject of Plank is a non-occurence. If something doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t only once. But if that which isn’t re-happening did in fact occur multiply, then it would be correctly plural. Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… Sorry Karen.
Actually, termites would not like bright open spaces like wood planks in the outdoors. But it’s an amusing comic strip anyway.
whoohoo! i finally got to the end!
my dad actually leaves rotting wood in our sideyard for the termites to get to. every month or so he checks it for termites and gets rid of any that he finds
@ i.half4, january 31st, 2010 at 2:44 pm, i’m having a little trouble making sense of your post. are you trying to say that ‘plank’ is the subject of the sentence? grammatically, it isn’t. grammatically, the caption uses the existence phrase ‘there (is)’ with the verb to be conjugated in the past perfect tense. since the english existence phrase was used, the verb ‘to be’ also has to be conjugated to match what was (or wasn’t) existing. in this case, that’s ‘infestations’, which is plural. so ‘to be’ should also be plural, which it isn’t. but i digress. again.
What I meant was that the subject of Plank was a non-infestation, and that which does not happen does not possibly happen again, which means it can’t be plural.
um… i think you have stopped talking about grammar in favor of some bizzare branch of philosophy with which i am not familiar.
i may have. Let’s call the whole thing just a bit off.
just a bit