#487 – Displace

I loved playing with sand and water as a kid. I would build hills and carve valleys in the sandbox. Then I would take the garden hose and place in one corner and flood my new landscape. The water would spiral through cutting down hills and filling in trenches. Construction and destruction was the theme of a lot of my activities back then

Tags: , ,

0 thoughts on “#487 – Displace”

  1. Chivalrybean says:

    Why do they make shower heads that do all kinds of neat things for only 2 days before they get clogged and then only spray the regular stream?

  2. The Phill says:

    From the looks of it Biff must erode fast. I mean the water’s still hot. Normally mine runs out b4 I start to melt. Had something like that happen to a GI Joe though once. Water was so hot it melted his head off. I wonder if thats what really happened.

  3. setnoc says:

    biff can wait for things for a long time apprently

  4. Micah says:

    Biff is made of Styrofoam!

  5. Will says:

    this weeks theme: cleanliness?

    and imho, the only downside to hot showers, is that you eventually have to leave them… nothing worse than getting in the shower in the morning, then fearing the two minutes of shivvering and general unconfortableness that comes with getting out of the amazingly refreshin and steamy shower.

  6. stonehydra says:

    That must have bin a lot of dandruff on biff.

  7. Szalkow says:

    Guess he didn’t pay attention to the timer in the back of his head?

  8. Josh says:

    I’ve always preferred my showerheads to be aimed shoulder- to chest-level. I’ve never really liked the water directly in my face. Not sure why.

  9. insertnamehere says:

    I’m like josh there. My body just goes into a complete and irrational panic if I get sprayed by the shower in the face. and I also loved watching the sand get levelled off by the water. That, and biff must really love long showers. REALLY long showers.

  10. trueblaze says:

    Lol, one of these days you’re going to have to make a comic explaining what exactly Biff is made of.

    As for the sand box comment, I remember when I was a kid we had this big dirt pile in our back yard for about five or six years. One day, me and my brother dug a hole in the top about three foot deep and wide, then we took the garden hose and filled it with water. Then the two of us jumpped in. When we were done playing I think it took about two or three hours to get ourselves clean again.

  11. JezMM says:

    Hehe, as a kid I was never into the whole construction/destruction thing like most people. I just liked constructing and was quite annoyed when I had to pack away the blocks/train set/uhh… sand on the beach? etc. Incidentally I was reminded once I read the reason Tetris is so addictive is because it satisfies both construction and destruction urges that humans have or something… Just a random factoid I remembered there.

  12. SEA says:

    Sandbox? What’s that XD

    And yes, i am also curious on what biff is made of 0_o

  13. fishmeester says:

    I once had a sandbox too in which I made an entire river for water to stream through. But then the water eroded all the sand and I was left with no sandbox anymore 🙁

  14. bghvgjdh says:

    I, too once had a sandbox. It wasn’t one of those plastic ones with a bottom, though, so I dug holes about 5 feet deep and 3 feet across, just to fill them with water and jump in. I once filled a hole with water so often, I found a frog living there when I finally drained it!

  15. Spaceman Spiff says:

    I never had a sandbox as a kid, but I did have a farm, and my brothers and I would build dams in the creek to see who could hold the most water. I always one, but I was almost an engineer in college (I went with Math instead). To satisfy destructive needs, I would always build my dam upstream, so when my brothers would go “look how cool my dam looks,” I would open a concealed floodgate and wash it away.

  16. Chris says:

    @JezMM – Hmm… that’s interesting.

  17. Emane Yoshi says:

    Lol that’s great, I love these biff little things…

    but wow you guys get really early to read these don’t you?

  18. Chris says:

    @Emane Yoshi – or really late… depending on where in the world they live.

  19. APic says:

    Indeed. Some of these commenters remind me of people that camp outside of a store just so they can be first in line the next day when a certain product is released.

  20. Trip Hazard says:

    Cheese. He’s made of cheese. Look at the color, and how he grated his hand, etc. Hot water would erode cheese very fast.

  21. MaskedMan says:

    @The Phil; Biff erodes fast, or he’s just got God’s Own Water Heater. Knowing Biff, he’s done Something Man Was Not Meant To Do with his hot water heater.

    Me? *I* think Biff is showering with #50 Angular Steel Grit – That’s not steam billowing in the background, it’s dust. His shower is, in fact, an industrial sand-blasting cabinet. Then Biff could be made of almost anything – #50 grit will cut through anything less than diamond, given sufficient time.

  22. Jackson says:

    Notice that it doesn’t say “If you stay in the shower too long…” The wording of the caption makes it read as if Biff is deliberately seeking a hands-on demonstration of erosion.

    I never had a sandbox, really, but I did have backyards. I dug trenches and canyons in the dirt for my GI Joes, and sometimes I filled them (the canyons) with water. One of my figures had a grappling hook that was excellent for crossing canyons.

  23. Seraphine says:

    Cuts and scabs look interesting when
    you stay in the water too long, and the
    skin around them turns all white, and
    the skin softens and looks dead.

  24. J.R. says:

    MaskedMan –

    Steel will wear down even diamond eventually. Otherwise diamond knife sharpeners would last forever, rather than just a decade or so. Also, it might take an order of magnitude less time for steel grit to wear down alumina crystal (corundum, ruby, sapphire, etc.) or glass, or any of the artificial compounds between alumina and diamond in hardness, but I imagine it would still be ridiculous. Unless you mean grit _for_ abrading steel, which would probably be alumina or SiC, in which case you’re probably right.

  25. Nikanaiko says:

    I sort of had a sandbox as a kid… A ‘ghetto’ one, as the hip kids would call it nowadays. It was a tractor tire with sand in it.

    …Is Biff made of dirt?

  26. ¡el pingüino bilingüe¿ says:

    Spaceman Spiff, are you a member of G.R.O.S.S. as well?

    At least he hasn’t turned into a prune.

  27. MaskedMan says:

    @J.R.; I’m referring to a specific media/grit size, one with which I’ve had the most experience. Your points are well-made, but I don’t have sufficient experience to guess at the cutting rate of other grades and types of blasting media.

    Yeah, I knew diamond would eventually succumb, but only in timeframes that even Biff would find silly.

    BTW: IME, diamond sharpeners don’t fail so much due to loss of cutting edges, as they do to actual loss of the diamond chips which become dislodged over time, and due to the cutting surfaces packing up with microscopic metal shavings.

  28. insertnamehere says:

    hold on everyone… it doesn’t even say that that’s biff! it could be a model of biff made out of something else. so maybe biff doesn’t actually erode that fast.

  29. Dracos125 says:

    Hey it’s not like he has to worry he has very good regenerative abilities. Or a closet full of extra body parts.

  30. DEC says:

    Best shower, I say, is standing under a waterfall. If you could get that amount of water at right temperatures, that would be great.

  31. MaskedMan says:

    @DEC; You’d have to define your standard waterfall, before I’d chance it… Angel Falls, for instance, would smash you before it eroded you… And Niagra… Well, there’d be no knowing which got you first – The drowning, the erosion, or the smashing weight of water. OTOH, a nice stream cascade might be just the ticket.

  32. Cthulcantspell says:

    If you look back to the elevator comic, the one I’m not going to bother to link, you’ll se that Biff is an ink drawing, so he’s not really eroding, just running a bit.

  33. person says:

    Biff needs to buy some common sense

  34. KZero says:

    I do tend to stay in the shower an awfully long time sometimes… it just feels soooooo good on my back. 🙁 I haven’t had a back massage since I was like 12 except maybe once so I have an achey back… I honestly think if I got one I’d have a lot more energy and feel a lot better.

    I wonder how long Biff was in there to cause that o.0

Leave a Reply to Szalkow Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *