this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
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I may be missing something here
I would guess Larson wasn't a fan, and thought that "new age" practices were mainly performative and non-productive, leading practitioners to get stuck in repetitive little circles, getting nothing done in the end.
If so, it's a pretty cynical take IMO, and certainly one of his more personal, brassy ones.
Yeah, this one has me totally Cow Tooled. Anyone have an explanation of the joke?
I think specifically "new age" here is referring to water-divenation, this is where some person claiming to be able to detect water gets a divining rod, which is often just two sticks and claims the sticks can show them where to dig a well and hit water (you can look up videos of it on YouTube). They often walk on strange paths, or stagger around and around fields in this process.
So I guess these guys are doing something similar with construction related tasks.
EDIT: I've seen it suggested elsewhere that Gary Larson was particularly annoyed with New Age music, and found it repetitive:
https://i.imgur.com/X1Hxm.jpeg
Wicca is also linked to very old practices and considered new age, as is tarot, and the zodiac. New Age doesn't mean new, it's a polite way to say hippie dippy unscientific bullcrap that was revived by new people in the 60s whom had no traditional connection to it.
I mean, if you bend over backwards, sure. But the idea that Gary Larson would expect readers in 1993 to associate the phrase "New Age construction workers" with dowsing practices -- instead of actually using the term "construction workers dowsing", or something -- seems unreasonable. Plus it's not funny at all.
Edit: just for reference, the word "dowsing" does not appear even once in this very long wikipedia article about New Age.
The shape of a dowsing stick is like wheel barrow handles:
https://appleofgodseye.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/dowsing_21.jpg?w=584
(Note how new age that image from google looks, it's from a book cover about dowsing)
They all have wheel barrows, because they're all dowsing.
Dowsing is often done on a specific property, resulting in a circling of the property until the sticks point downwards.
I don't see an alternative explanation for the characteristics of the cartoon.
Why do you think they all have wheel barrows?
EDIT: Here's a Smithsonian Magazine article lamenting that dowsing was being used by "urban New Agers" on things other than finding water: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/urban-new-agers-have-taken-over-the-art-of-dowsing-1-38424068/
That article is from 1996, three years after the cartoon, yet is based on the same premise: new age types, using dowsing for other things.
I think my initial interpretation has now been proven correct.
Well, I certainly disagree, but I doubt we can find any common ground here. You seem content with any tenuous connection between concepts to fit your interpretation.
It's definitely cryptic. I've suggested that it's a reference to crop circles elsewhere in this thread, which is still the best interpretation I could find even if that's not particularly satisfactory either.
In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley took credit for creating a lot of crop circles in Britain, using ropes and planks. It was a well known story and a cultural meme, even if people didn't know about Doug & Dave specifically they knew that the crop circles that New Agers believed were messages from aliens actually were created by pranksters. The construction workers are walking around in circles so that the tracks from the wheelbarrows create...mud circles, I guess.
But as I said, this interpretation doesn't feel satisfactory either, it's just the best one yet. I'd love to hear a better idea.
Yes, agree to disagree, but I will finally and once again note that my interpretation has explainatory power (eg. They all have wheel barrows because they're all dowsing), as well as has an article contemporary to the mid 1990s time period discussing the over popularity of dowsing at that time.
Construction workers push wheelbarrows. This particular feature of the image is not mysterious at all and does not need explaining. In the crop circle interpretation, the wheels of the wheelbarrows make the circles in the ground. That's why they're in the picture.
You have a short personal observation from 1996 which happens to be published in a newspaper. You like sources? Here's some sources on manmade crop circles that make explicit that the phenomenon was connected to new age beliefs in the popular imagination:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/10/world/2-jovial-con-men-demystify-those-crop-circles-in-britain.html https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/crop-circles-the-art-of-the-hoax-2524283/ https://www.msn.com/en-sg/lifestyle/travel/the-fascinating-history-of-crop-circles/ss-AA1dFqlU https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/480768/Meder26.pdf
Some contemporary news clips of Doug&Dave:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzvuqs9Bf7Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XkGbnUXfh4U
Dowsing, however is old folk magic:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/dowsing http://dowsing-research.net/dowsing/articles/Dowsing_from_the_Late_Middle_Ages.pdf https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17532-why-dowsing-makes-perfect-sense/
I could go on, but let's not.
Also by the way Dowsing is bunkem, practicioners are just drifting to the lowest parts of the property then making their best guesses, or in the case of using metal dowsing rods they're allowing the idiomotor effect (aka the trembling of their hands) to trigger the rods into forming an X shape.
That said, if ritualizing a skill set works for them, then it works for them. I'm just saying the beliefs attached to it aren't explainatory. Having dug wells before (experience), and having your subconscious processes and feet involved in the process (physical and mental feedback) is what's actually pulling the trick off.
Also, most places have groundwater, you don't need a dowsing rod to find it, just a shovel.
For real, I reckon as long as there have been wells, there have been people claiming to be able to detect water underground.
Dowsing also works well for finding utilities in the ground, it's pretty nifty.
Dowsing is just guessing, although even the person doing it may not realise that.
And, amusingly, "just guessing" probably has outcomes not all that different from "Looking at the crappy scribbled map from whoever said 'not it' the slowest somewhere in 1964"
You'd be surprised how close you can get with it. I'll use my locator first and foremost, but every now and again some areas can be stubborn and two pieces of 12awg copper has found what the locator had issues with. I would never use a machine where we doused, only hand dig, but it has come in handy.
Where were you in '91? You could have won Randi's prize! wikipedia on Dowsing
Haha I was 2, so yeah.
I've never tried finding water with it, only buried electric lines and pipes. Apparently it was popular with gold miners.
I was thinking it was a crystal-dangling thing. Know how they put one on a string and let it swing?
I believe both of those are considered types of dowsing
Those New Age kids and their circle pits
Seems plausible, maybe the rocky components of concrete aggregate are causing the circling.
Maybe it's meaning that the construction workers are just going around in circles and not getting anything really done?
Bingo.
Me too. Damned if I can remember what people associated with "new age" in 1993 other then crystals and Enya.
No one seems to get this one, at least on the internet. The most likely interpretation I could find anywhere is that he's referencing crop circles. Which kinda works, but also not...I'm not sure that's it either.
They all have a wheelbarrow