dip is a mild insult meaning "a foolish person". It's a play on the term Big Dipper, aka the Ursa Major constellation. Larson drew what he thought represented a foolish person as the constellation.
I assume they're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street. That came out in 1984 and this comic's date is 1985, so Larson would've been aware of the film. The joke in the comic seems to be just that repeating something in front of parrots means that they'll repeat it to the cops, and doesn't seem to be a reference to the horror film.
Not ruining the joke, I appreciate reading dissections like this! Makes me wonder if we would still be able to interbreed with Neanderthals or other hominids if they were still alive. There's definitely people around that would be up for getting freaky with them.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
What kind of sordid, bizarre past a scientist and some duck could possibly have is for anyone to surmise, but I enjoyed the drama in suggesting that, once again, their lives have become entangled and a new chapter is about to be written. Personally, I enjoy cartoons of this type because they lack the obvious "cymbal crash" at the end of the punch line. The idea evolved as shown.
It's riffing on anthropology books like Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes--The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists. That book is just what came up with a quick search, but it's a common snowclone title. The humor comes from imagining the author of the book living life as an invertebrate, blending in and befriending them, and learning their culture.
Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don't get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152
To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you'd make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?
Yeah, I don't quite get this one.
Yeah, that does improve it. He mentions a few times in the The Prehistory of The Far Side that he sometimes dithered on what was too much to kill the joke vs not enough to let people get the joke, and here he should've scaled it back. Sometimes it was his editors too.
EDIT: Example:
Transcript:
In hindsight, I wish I hadn't included the title to this vampire cartoon. It's obviously redundant and only distracted from the humor.
Some more history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Been_Working_on_the_Railroad
The "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" section, with its noticeably different melody, is actually an older song that has been absorbed by "I've Been Working on the Railroad". It was published as "Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah" in London in the 1830s or '40s, with music credited to J.H. Cave. "Dinah" was a generic name for a slave woman and, by extension, any woman of African-American descent.
This extra verse confirms what I figured the lyrics were about:
Someone's makin' love to Dinah
Someone's making love I know.
Someone's making love to Dinah
'Cause I can't hear the old banjo!
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We should start normalizing gifting potatoes again. Everyone could use more in their life.