1786: Trash

|< < Prev Comic #1786 (January 16, 2017) Next > >|

Trash

Title text: Plus, time's all weird in there, so most of it probably broke down and decomposed hundreds of years ago. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to get in touch with Yucca Mountain to see if they're interested in a partnership.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a human with slightly more intelligence than a BOT- Please change this comment when editing this page. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Black hat is, once again, thoroughly confusing a house guest/room mate. (Shown previously in The Cloud and others). This time, when enquired about a chute extruding from his wardrobe, he explains that it is a trash chute into another dimension, Narnia. this is a reference to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and the other Narnia books by C. s. Lewis. In the books, the characters use a portal that they find in a wardrobe (and later other places) to travel to a magical dimension called Narnia, where time passes differently from on Earth. Apparently, Black Hat has gotten his hands on the titular wardrobe and is using it to dispose of trash. There are many problems with this. First, the portal only works some times, so the rest of the time the wardrobe would just fill with trash. Also, Narnia is considered magical, so it may seem sacrilegious to be throwing trash there. The cat he refers to its Aslan, a Magical lion that inhabits and watches over Narnia. He would probably be really pissed that someone is throwing trash there. He would probably try to stop this by any means necessary, even if that means coming up through a trash chute into another dimension. But, because lions are a type of cat (feline), apparently he can be repelled with an ordinary spray bottle, usually used on small house cats. The system would dispose of trash very efficiently because time passes much faster on Narnia than on earth (previously mentioned in five minute comics: part 3). Because of this, within just a few Earth minutes, the trash could completely decompose. Yucca Mountain is a radioactive waste repository. Black hat wants to allow them to transfer this waste to Narnia, where it will decay quickly by our time scale, likely for a profit for black hat.

Transcript

[Cueball looking at garbage chute attached to wardrobe]

Cueball: What is this thing on your wardrobe?

[Black Hat off-panel]

Black Hat: Garbage chute.

[Cueball and Black Hat face each other]

Cueball: Into a wardrobe?

Black hat: There's some sort of magical portal in there. Half the furniture I get has them - It's kind of a pain.

Cueball: You dump your trash in Narnia?

Black Hat: Yeah, it's a real time-saver.

There's a huge cat in there, but i have a spray bottle i use when he tries to come up trough the chute.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

I put in an explanation, but I'm on a mobile device, so someone will need to fix all the spacing, and necessary links, and probably fix a bunch of other stuff too. Yosho27 (talk) 07:26, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Yucca Mountain is a nuclear waste storage. STEN (talk) 07:33, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps one should mention that Narnia is a retelling of the Christian tradition. Aslan created all 'dimensions' or worlds including ours and is the allegorical Jesus. Narnia is a wonderful world for children, at least most of the time, when there are no witches, where they can have fun and are able to prove more noble than in the real world. Both makes dumping trash in Narnia quite sacrilegious. Sebastian --162.158.89.115 08:07, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

I have mentioned some of it. But I do not think it is especially important for this comic, only for the fact that Aslan is God everywhere, and since Narnia is a dead world today, then Aslan could be in a different world that Blacl Hat taps into. --Kynde (talk) 14:50, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Presumerably also the whole comic is a reference/cynical look at human's history of dumping things in the sea and so on? ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_debris for example) 141.101.107.162 11:25, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Added some on this especially regarding the nuclear waste --Kynde (talk) 14:50, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Is Black Hat getting his furniture from Beret Guy's new shop? The wiki itself says that this seems like something that would happen. Comic 1772: Startup Opportunity. SteelStarling (talk) 15:10, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah but probably rather this shop: 1533: Antique Factory ;) The wiki says what the users can agree upon. I wrote most of the current explanation. (And then someone else was so nice to copy edit all my spelling mistakes - not a native English speaker!) --Kynde (talk) 18:45, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

If we dumped radioactive waste into Narnia, wouldn't Narnia receive much less waste per unit time, than we are inserting? Therefore the nuclear waste problem would be much less severe than on Earth? --162.158.59.70 23:31, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Well for some isotopes the half life is billions of year (Uranium for instance) so that kind of waste would not wither away in Narnia which only reaches an age of a few thousand years... So they would sum up even though they came in over a longer period. And most importantly, it was not their problem but ours. Just like 1st world problems are exported to 3rd world countries... --Kynde (talk) 14:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Actually, subduction zone tectonic deposition of nuclear waste is a very promising form of nuclear waste disposal that would be considered oceanic disposal, which is why no one's been able to try it yet. Additionally, I'd like to point out that oceanic disposal of nuclear waste isn't really a current issue, since it's been banned by a number of treaties, and nuclear power plants are monitored closely enough that it doesn't really happen anymore. 162.158.122.108 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Anyone else think that this is pretty derivative of this SMBC comic? Similar themes of Narnia and the nuclear waste: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 129.59.122.25 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Yes, added it to the explanation. Thanks ;-) --Kynde (talk) 14:21, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

The first two panels read naturally with "Narnia" as a metaphor for a culture's sacred narratives, and "garbage chute" as a metaphor for the exploitation of those narratives by sociopathic individuals/corporations/subcultures (in the person of Black Hat). Then per the Narnia Wiki ( http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Cat ), the name of the "large cat" is Ginger, whose Narnia-fate is to become soulless; transparently a reference to a "ginger"-haired American politician "He Who Must Not Be Named". John Sidles (talk) 11:02, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Could be, but more probably Aslan is referenced as cat. --162.158.88.164 09:57, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Do we need a Narnia category? There are quite a few references to the books now... --Kynde (talk) 15:18, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

The Pevensies went to Narnia because Aslan wanted them to know him better there so that they could learn to know him here. Edward and Eustace both learned to be much better people there. If half his furniture has portals, then it seems to me that Aslan is *really* trying hard to reach Black Hat! 162.158.179.214 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The explanation refers to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe as being the first Narnia book. However, it is only arguably so. As I understand it, it was the first one written, but as it turned into a series, C.S. Lewis wrote another book to be book 1 of the series, The Magician's Nephew, as I recall, making this actually the second book of the series. But Book 1 seems often skipped, especially in adaptations (such as the BBC miniseries series of the 80s and the more recent movies), so Wardrobe is the best known and Book 1 seems often overlooked. Nevertheless, it IS the first book now, and has been for decades. - NiceGuy1 162.158.62.21 03:33, 20 January 2017 (UTC) I finally signed up! This comment is mine. NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:54, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

When reading, 'The Magician's Nephew' feels like it fits more naturally as the sixth book (which is when it was published), even though its events predate 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'. A similar thing happens with the fifth published book 'The Horse and His Boy', which has events that take place within the time jump in the last chapter of 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'. Thaledison (talk) 16:38, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Also, I used to collect copies of this series. Most of the copies I have have the book number on them, and the first time I saw a collection with 'The Magician's Nephew' as the first book was in the mid-late 1990s. -- Thaledison (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)