2563: Throat and Nasal Passages

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Throat and Nasal Passages
I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing neeeded in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.
Title text: I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing neeeded in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by someone very aware of both their throat, nasal passages and now also their lounge- Title text not mentioned - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This comic is another in a series of comics related to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Randall has even before the corona pandemic complained about sore throat caused by the cold, more than once, so every year during the cold/flu season, he has been forced to think about his throat and nasal passages, as they become sore and stuffed. But during the last two years he has been thinking about them much more, also when he has not been ill because of the pandemic.

In the graph a black solid line displays how much he has been thinking about this since 2000 and up until 2022. The first 20 years the graph oscillat up and down once every year, and every spike represents the cold and flu season, so autumn and winter causes the spike, spring and summer makes it drop. There is basically a spike for every year, although some years it looks a bit different. But all in all the peaks seem low. That is when compared to how much time he has thought about it since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out around March 2020. Each summer since there has been a dip, but not anywhere close to the tops of the previous years, and around New Year 2022 (2 days before the release of this comic, the first in 2022, and the first year in a long time without a New Year comic), the graph peaks (likely due to the Omicron variant). The peaks in 2020 and 2021 (2022) are about 6 times higher than those the year before 2020. So if the Y-axis begins at zero, this is how much more he thinks of his throat now than during the times when he actually had a cold.

There seems to be no way of knowing if Randall has had covid-19, but from his comics it seems safe to assume he is fully vaccinated. But at the moment of release the Omicron variant of covid-19 seems to ignore vaccines for about 50% of those vaccinated. Although it seems those vaccinated usually gets a milder case.

The joke is in the dotted line at the very bottom of the graph which either is just above zero, or is actually supposed to be the zero line (which would not change the above assumption about 6 times more thinking). This line reflects how much time he actually wishes to think about them, which is probably not at all. But even before corona Randall seems to have spent way too much time pondering his sore throat.

Transcript

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Discussion

at time of publishing, the title text contained a typo ("neeeded"). Im pretty sure it is going to be corrected soon though.

162.158.233.115 13:08, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Hasn't yet been corrected, but I'm sure it will be. Anyways I added a transcript and although I did try my best I doubt it's good, so if you can improve it, I won't exactly be mad. *256.256.256.256 (talk) 15:30, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
I have added a Trivia about the error. When/if it gets corrected this should be mentioned here. I also changed the transcript. Not so much the content more the order. Also I believe that all text written in the picture should be written beneath explanations of the image. And try to leave out any explanations or theories, leaving that part to the explanation above. The transcript should help people that cannot see the comic well enough to get the idea, so they can form their own ideas, before reading what others think ;-) But always great when people fill in the transcript. So thanks for the effort. --Kynde (talk) 16:54, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
It's a day later and the title text still has the typo. If there's a way this could be intentional and somehow related to the topic, I can't think of it. Barmar (talk) 15:06, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the title text might be related to 972: November, since that also dealt with people being made aware of their tongue. Should it be added in the explanation? (I know that editors should be at least somewhat bold, but it seems a bit of a tenuous connection, so I want an opinion from a more experienced editor). --172.70.130.213 18:34, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning it. I have included it in the title text explanation. Much of what needs to be said on this subject stands there already, so I deleted a lot of the current title text explanation referring to that instead. It is perfect. Also nice to read the Peanuts version of it again which is on that page, collapsed though!. --Kynde (talk) 19:20, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

I have changed the introductory sentence on the pandemic as it isn't really a 2020 pandemic anymore, and also started a discussion thread on this on the Covid-19 Cagetory page. --Lupo (talk) 08:35, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

As a generally curious-minded person, one would think that the amount that Randall would want to think about throat and nasal passages would be non-negligibly >0. 172.70.90.121 15:58, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

If it's a decent and unmisleading graph (e.g. vertical axis is at zero where the horizontal axis crosses. So it is non-zero. Exactly how unnnegligibly so depends upon the scale used. (It could even be a Log axis!) 162.158.159.105 18:02, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
Seeing that comment, 833: Convincing comes to mind... "I can do better than someone who doesn't label her axes." --Lupo (talk) 08:20, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

My association with the meme of being aware of your tongue was a Peanuts cartoon from way back - don't know if it was original then - but a copy is here: [1] 172.70.91.116 08:43, 5 January 2022 (UTC)