Small Peculiar

I honestly don’t know what the deal is here, because this is a very cheap model of treadmill and according to the documentation it is not equipped with Bluetooth. It does have a remote control—something that makes no sense to me, because it is impossible to use a treadmill without being on the treadmill—so maybe I am getting stray radio signals that way. It can happen whenever the machine is plugged in, whether it’s on or not. I got part of a sports broadcast the other day, and yesterday is when it began barking, something it did again today. It took me a minute to figure that one out, but I think the bark must be someone’s ringtone.

I asked Batty to tell me a good German word for a ghost that rings like a phone and barks like a dog, but to my disappointment he said it seems to just be a poltergeist, a word English has already stolen. See, I’ve always thought of a poltergeist specifically as a ghost that moves things around, but it seems the literal meaning of the word is “noisy ghost” and it can refer to any ghost that makes noise, not just those that do so by throwing stuff. In looking that up, though, I’m happy to say that I learned about the German tradition of the Polterabend, “noisy evening,” which happens the day before a wedding, when everyone gets together to smash stuff in order to bring luck to the spouses-to-be. The couple then cleans up the mess, because marriage is about working together. Isn’t that a nice tradition?

Jews, of course, also think smashing stuff for weddings is a good idea. It’s just fun to smash stuff!

I drew this comic with a regular number 2 pencil and not my usual black colored pencil. Since it already looked a bit different, I decided not to clean it up as much as I usually do. I like it like this, it has a kind of wobbly Jules Feiffer quality.