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
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
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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.