An homage


I opened up You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack this morning, and this cartoon leapt out at me.

I felt so smart, like a classically trained art historian, because I knew instantly that this was a reference to a famous cartoon from Gary Larson’s The Far Side. I even remember seeing it in the newspaper back in the 1980s, and puzzling over its profundities.

It’s become the painting of a pipe for our age.

Comments

  1. submoron says

    I spotted it too.
    Link to Wikipedia entry for the Larson original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
    I got the same satisfaction when I recognised the ‘Tristan’ theme originating from a Mozart quartet and Beethoven’s ‘Muss es sein?’ in ‘Die Walkure’. It’s always good to spot something for yourself.

  2. submoron says

    I looked down ‘You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack’ and believe ‘Physics for Cats’ to be a reference to M C Escher.

  3. submoron says

    Rob Grigjanis.
    please note the ‘AND’!
    I’m not a’ Perfect Wagnerite’ but but I’m well aware enough of these things to know that Tristan und Isolde is not the same mythology as Der Ring des Nibelungen. If I throw in the Caesar Franck symphony does that make things worse?

  4. moarscienceplz says

    Submoron, thanks for the WP link. It would have never occurred to me that WP would have a page for a single cartoon.

    Since cows don’t have hands, one would expect their “tools” would “lack something in sophistication” as Larson said, but these articles are entirely non functional; fetish items rather than tools. Reminds me of the kind of guy (and it’s always a guy) who has a shop full of thousands of dollars worth of power tools, but he has a few hand planes and hand saws screwed to the wall like a museum of sacred (but obsolete) artifacts.
    I do find it very appropriate that the cow chose to recreate what is colloquially called a handsaw, but which is properly called a panel saw. As someone who vastly prefers muscle powered woodworking tools, I can attest that a panel saw is probably the least useful and most difficult saw ever invented (and is probably the one hand tool most responsible for people thinking they can’t do good work with hand tools).

  5. submoron says

    Thanks Rob Grigjanis! BTW If anyone can explain Kullervo’s blue stockings/äijön lapsi I’d be grateful.

  6. says

    Well, yeah, if you’re gonna do the Uplift thing, cows aren’t the best candidates. It’s better to work with dolphins and maybe chimps, as they did in David Brin’s novels. Maybe also some of the bigger, smarter dog breeds; maybe pigs, I’m told they’re kinda smart and make good pets; not sure about cats; but definitely not cows.

  7. moarscienceplz says

    Cows aren’t the best candidates for Uplift? I dunno, at least cows have four full limbs instead of two stubby fins and a tail. Brin’s Uplift novels were a lot of fun, but a spaceship half full of water seems like a pretty dumb idea, really.

  8. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    OP has a typoed link. The “Tom Gauld” url currently starts with “hhttps” (extra h).

  9. lumipuna says

    BTW If anyone can explain Kullervo’s blue stockings/äijön lapsi I’d be grateful.

    Huh? What’s the context?

  10. submoron says

    lumipuna
    Since mythologies had come up in my conversation with Rob Grigjanis I thought that I’d pop a question that has bothered me ever since I first heard the Sibelius setting. Every time his name is mentioned Kullervo is referred to as Kalervon’s son (self explanatory) but I could never see the significance of mentioning the colour of his stockings.
    Sorry for wandering so far off topic!

  11. lumipuna says

    After checking from the Kalevala, it turns out (as I’d guessed) that sinisukka or “blue-stockinged” is a part of Kullervo’s long-form formulaic introduction. This consists of a few lines describing him not only as Kalervo’s son (as in the short form) but also as blonde-haired (or more broadly physically handsome) young man with some moderately fancy clothing items. It comes up only a few times, first at the beginning of Canto 32, where Kullervo shows up in Ilmarinen’s household after being sold to him as a slave.

    This sort of poetry contains a lot of embellishment and repetition, for poetic and performance purposes, with no deeper meaning. Kullervo is a fairly generic masculine hero character, whose main thing is that he grows up from childhood to avenge his own mistreatment, after his family was killed and the survivors enslaved. The whole narrative is wildly inconsistent, in literal terms, because Elias Lönnrot mashed together various “orphan protagonist” tropes from the folk poetry. There is constant emphasis that Kullervo is a son of his father, despite growing up separated from said father and possibly also his mother (the narrative is ambiguous on the latter).

    The word sinisukka is apparently used as a semi-random filler to complete the second line of Kullervo’s introduction, where the more meaningful part is “äijön lapsi” or “child of the old/great man”. This is basically a repetition or elaboration of the previous reference to Kalervo as Kullervo’s father, with connotations of heritage, family continuity and known descent. The notion of a farm slave owning some good clothes, however unlikely, seems to fit in this theme. Kullervo is also said to somehow own a knife inherited from his father, which later becomes a plot-relevant item.

  12. submoron says

    Many Thanks lumipuna!
    All is as clear as it could be in the circumstances. I was wondering whether the stockings were a symbol of his rank in society or a family identifier and they seem to be neither if I understand you. It would seem that Elias Lönnrot did something similar to what Lady Charlotte Guest did to the Welsh Mabinogion but without her partial ‘Christianisation’ of the tales.
    I will happily donate £10 to a charity in thanks for your clearing up this longstanding puzzle and a winter appeal from UNHCR just popped through my letterbox. Would this please you?

  13. lumipuna says

    You’re welcome, submoron. I’m glad to discuss the Kalevala – not as a scholar but as a relatively well-educated Finnish reader. Your donation to the UNHCR is none of my business, though it sounds like a good cause. I also sometimes donate to global development and refugee aid via the UNICEF, what little I can afford.

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