337: Post Office Showdown

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Post Office Showdown
That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.
Title text: That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.

Explanation

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Action movies, such as "Kill Bill" by Quentin Tarantino, often feature elaborate fight scenes in mundane environments. Cueball is imagining himself in such a situation, consistently with his attitude for flights of fancy.

The title text references both the song "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" from the soundtrack of "Kill Bill", and "Ride of the Valkiries" by Richard Wagner, the latter being associated to fighting scenes because of a famous sequence in the movie "Apocalypse Now" by Francis Ford Coppola.

Transcript

I spend a lot of time mentally choreographing elaborate fight scenes with strangers around me.
[Cueball is in a post office wearing earphones. There are several other people, including an old man with a crutch and an old woman with a long narrow box.]
Cueball's thoughts: Okay - if that old man pulls a crossbow,
Cueball's thoughts: I'll throw the postal scale at him and dive backward behind the stamps machine.
Cueball's thoughts: But what if the lady by the door has a katana in that box?
Cueball's thoughts: Better set my iPod to the "Kill Bill" fight theme, just in case.


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Discussion

One activity not, apparently, improved by "Ride of the Valkyries" is driving; supposedly, listening to it makes people more likely to crash. ‎108.162.221.64 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I wonder if the post office setting is an allusion to the "going postal" expression? (After some number of incidents in the 1980s and 90s, where employees started mass shootings at post offices, the expression 'going postal' entered American slang, meaning out of control anger, possibly violent, in a workplace environment.) Mountain Hikes (talk) 04:56, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Good thing I have been taught the basics of sparring (IRL)! SilverMagpie (talk) 04:54, 8 June 2018 (UTC)