#116 Not to mention that the damned thing is constantly expanding

 

#115 Merry Christmas!

 

#114 Okay. Not so cunning.

 

#113 The food in the judges' lounge sucks, and there's not much of it.

 

#112 Meanwhile, the dog ate their homework

 

#111 To boldly sell where no one has sold before

 

#110 Humpty Dumpty Strikes Again!

 

#109 Is it February yet?

 

#108 WalMars? Elon's Comet? The iPhobos?

 

#107 Forget it, Jake. It's Bile Duct.

 

#106 When the judge leaves the room without entering a decision...

Tab room, desperate, digs up phone number of delinquent judge. 

“Hello, this is the tab room. You didn’t enter your ballot for the last round.”

 

“Oh. Sorry.”

 

“Tell me the winner and the points and I’ll enter it for you.”

 

“Uh…”

 

“Do you remember who the winner was? Pro or con?”

 

“It might have been the con. Or the pro.”

 

“Which team was which?”

 

“The pro was the guys. The con was the girls.  I think.”

 

“Okay, got it.”

 

“It could have been the other way around, though.”

 

“Oooooookay… Points for each person?”

 

“They should all get 30s.”

 

“30s for everybody. Right. And the winner?”

 

“The girls. Definitely the girls.”

 

“On the con.”

 

“Right. Or maybe on the pro.”

 

“It was the girls, either on the con or on the pro.”

 

“Unless it was the guys.”

 

“Unless it was the guys. On the con or the pro. Got it. Thank you.”

 

Tabber hangs up phone and turns to partner.

“Oy! It was either the pro or the con or the guys or the girls. 30s for everybody.”

 

“Double bye?”

 

“Double bye.”

 

“And the judge?”

 

“Does tabroom have a ‘Drop Off a Cliff’ button?”

 

“I’ll put in a request with the help desk.”

 

“Excellent.” Pause. “Is there a saloon around here somewhere? I need a drink.”

 

“There’s definitely a button for that on tabroom.”

 

“Somehow I thought there would be.”

 

—    30  —

 

 

#105 We put the fun in fungible. (4n6funnies.blogspot.com)

 

#104 On the other hand, tournament emails are finally down to a manageable number.

 

#103 Wocka, wocka!

 

#102 Once again, based on a true story...

 

#101 Does Fluffy have a paradigm?

 

#100 Or maybe it's the crack heads of our response team...

 

#99 We interrupt our irregularly scheduled comic for some Breaking News!!!

 Supply Chain Issues Threaten Return to In-Person Speech and Debate Tournaments

 

LOS ANGELES — Somewhere off the coast of California thirty-two container ships are floating in limbo, unable to offload their cargo as the backlog on the docks continues to hamper US commerce. On these ships is the fuel that enables high school students across the country to come together in person to debate the latest resolutions, to perform dramatic pieces, and to extemporize eloquently on both national and international issues. On these ships are countless containers stacked to the rafters with aluminum foil trays loaded with the manna of high school forensics.

 

On these ships is the precious cargo known as debate ziti.

 

Speech and debate competitions, before the pandemic, herded hundreds upon hundreds of visiting adolescents into high schools across the country on a weekly basis. From dawn to dusk and beyond, students would debate and perform, pausing only for lunch. And that lunch, inevitably, was debate ziti. And that debate ziti, inevitably, was of Chinese origin. An obscure Foxconn factory located in the city of Zhuhai in Guangdong province is the food’s chief manufacturer, and jealously holds close its famous and unnecessarily secret recipe. All that is known is that its pasta base is a local unenriched flour from genetically modified wheat, its binding emulsification—the apparent cheese sauce—contains neither dairy nor vegetable matter, and its colorful tomato-appearing sauce is a blend of red dye forty-and-a-half and the production byproducts from local industrial soya bean fermentation. Containing little or no nutrition, debate ziti, often served with small brown nuggets of NotReallyMeatballs™ imported from Norway and, perhaps, a leaf of iceberg lettuce, is a cheap and filling lunch that can be marginally heated over a half-empty Sterno can and served to an endless line of students with great speed and efficiency. But for now, the flow of debate ziti into America is at a standstill.

 

“After the pandemic shut down in-person tournaments,” says Truck Ulent, spokesperson for the National Speech and Debate Association (formerly known as the National Football League), “we were able to fill the gap with remote events. People participated from home, and ate whatever they could find around the house. We had hoped to reopen live tournaments back in the schools with the beginning of this school year, but the delta variant and the debate ziti shortage have put those plans on hold.”

 

While many schools in states where no one believes anything they read or hear in the Satanist mainstream media have gone back to in-person education, the tournaments for the most part have not followed. “I hear they had a novice Model UN somewhere out in one of those prairie schools where no one is allowed to wear masks or be vaccinated or anything,” says Ahsoka Horowitz, a nationally ranked debater from Manhattan Lodestone, a magnet school, “but the death rate afterwards was so high that the place is now a ghost town.” And without debate ziti to fuel them, these tournaments are not going to be coming back any time soon, the pandemic death rate notwithstanding.

 

“It’s a shame, really,” Pope Francis said, albeit not in English. “Speech and debate provide the backbone of high school extracurricular education. But teenagers march on their stomachs, and they’ll eat practically anything, but without debate ziti on the menu, they are like rich men trying to go through the eye of a camel.”

 

Meanwhile, those thirty-two ships continue to float off the California coast. And their cargo of debate ziti will not remain viable forever. “Fortunately, their preservative-to-foodstuff ratio is about 80/20, so they should last at least a few more years,” says Zorro Beaverbrook, chief nutritionist for the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. “But if those trays of pasta aren’t off those ships and into those high school cafeterias by 2027, we’re going to see some serious acid reflux.” And with that acid reflux might come the end of high school forensics as we know it in America.

 

For the moment, with no end in sight to the bottleneck on the docks, all we can do is wait and see. 

 

 

#98 If it wasn't for ForensiCoin, I wouldn't have no Coin at all

 

#97 Maybe you'll get a lump of data in your Christmas stocking this year?

 

#96 The eye of the beholder

 

#95 Saturday Quickies

 

#94 No, it wasn't there already.

 

#93 As long as gravity is just a theory, I'm not buying it.

 

#92 Everybody panic!!!

 

#91 All I do the whole night through is dream of Zuck

 

#90 Which raises the question, if they're virtual, how exactly are you putting them somewhere?

 

#89 Once upon a time hitting return actually returned something.

 

#88 So, tell us what you really think.

 

#87 It really gets interesting at around page 47

 

#86 The Reader's Digest Version

 

#85 Plus ca change...

 

#84 Do you have any idea how hard it was to tab on stone tablets? Harder even than on Amazon tablets!

 

#83 We're back, and a weary world rejoices

 

#82 TTFN

 

#81 Not to mention the Livonian War of 1558-1583

 

#80 If you enjoy our comix, you'll love our horse dewormer medicine. Get yours now!!!

 

#79 "Klaatu barada nikto!"

 

#78 OTOH, they do have 27 different words for potzrebie.

 

#77 Take my wife. Please.

 

#76 To the stars through difficulties and, possibly, also through Lithuania

 

#75 BTW, in Risk, Ukraine has lovely beaches on the Baltic. Well done, Hasbro.

 

#74 Letts do this thing

 

#73 No, no, Lone Ranger! That's not how you wear the mask!

 

#72 I'm taking an active position on this. I'm writing a letter to the Times.

 

#71 No Balt is an island.

 

#70 Not to mention all the diacritics

 

#69 Speaking of vague, which one is the other one?

 

#68 Not to mention Bali and Bilbao.

 

#67 Forget it, Jake. It's Somaliland.

 

#66 Not to mention Xi = Pooh. (And now we're banned in China. Damn it! A billion and a half readers lost in one swell foop.)

 

#65 Butt kicking, the unsung sport of the 2020-21 Olympics