Oliver Moment

Still in pursuit, we followed the ball toward a small lake in Motor World that had been earmarked for a fleet of tiny bumper boats for children. The area wasn’t open yet, but the empty boats were being tested and floated on the surface. The ball soared over the grass and smashed into several of them, scattering the others with rippling waves from the impact, which launched some of the boats several feet in the air.

Charlie and Ken waded into the water looking for the hatch. After some difficulty, they got it open. Charlie pulled Frank out by grabbing him under his armpits like a baby. Frank crawled up the bank, coughing and sputtering. He splayed across the grass as we all stared at the ball, which bobbed in the water like it was attached to a fishing lure.

We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of one being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snow-makers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years."

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

The base premise has a stock phrase attached, “The ball works his core.” Someone needs to say the stock phrase to a visitor.

So for the ball on head gag you put him on top of Grandpa Nutmeg’s head or on top of Grandma Nutmeg’s head. And for the big ball gag you have Grandpa Nutmeg explain it or Grandma Nutmeg explain it. This fills out a 2×2 table and gives us the four comics above.

Notice that there’s at least one year between each of these comics, and that the oldest one is from 2016. The series is nine years in the making. These are the only comics so far with this caption.

(Disclaimer: this data is biased by reruns and right-censoring.)

I predicted Iggy would show up. He did not. On careful consideration I don’t think he could have. He doesn’t fit the caption. Iggy is whimsy-neutral: he describes wacky events impartially. Grandpa and Grandma Heathcliff are whimsy-mitigators: they comment on ordinary elements to downplay the overall wackiness. Compare:

“The ball works his core” is whimsy-mitigating. It’s funny that the speaker only explains which muscles the ball exercises and ignores Heathcliff’s species and the ball’s size.

To break out of the 2×2 matrix above you need to either come up with a third joke (tricky) or apply one of the existing jokes to a different character.

You can’t do the ball-on-head version with another character. Grandpa and Grandma Nutmeg are used up, Iggy isn’t suitable (I called this), and neither is anyone outside the Nutmeg household. Cats are known to rest on heads, the ball-on-head is exaggerated cat behavior, but they do this with people they trust. So it has to be the big ball version.

The joke has to take place in a location where people exercise. The speaker has to be familiar with Heathcliff’s routine. The obvious setting other than the Nutmeg household is a gym and the obvious speaker other than the Nutmegs is a gym employee.

The “Mid City Gym” location was used in a few comics in 2003, then resurrected starting in 2023. Same interior, same uniform.