Wherever I go, you bring me home

ONLY 3 SECONDS IN AND: “possible dubious practices” regarding British horseracing, ,along with “there is a creed of omerta which prevents anyone from speaking out”

omerta: (as practiced by the Mafia) a code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to give evidence to authorities.

0:37

[flashes back to THIS iconic tweet]

fun find at 1:12 featuring the green eyes…. “every [obscured] a relevance to”

1:42: “It was as if I had spent my years jiggling the key into the wrong lock.” A quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy.

Coates for Time Magazine:

2:10 - GIANT “H” that we somehow missed, followed by…..

2:38 - another gigantic H that is quickly covered up, but not before…

2:45: a split-second bullhorn, followed by…..

2:47: a fun ‘mirrors’ reference, alongside “Ruby In The Dust”. This appears to be either an allusion to the Neil Young song “Cowgirl In The Sand”, featuring the lyrics below….

or perhaps more likely, the Ruby In The Dust Theatre Company based in London.

3:09 - the crossword is abruptly colored in. admittedly, this is a reach but my Harry Tomlinson heart is begging me to post it anyway because……

as I posted about earlier, @ann-fortunately found an 8-ball at 2:30. There’s also many 2′s - $2 dollar bills, 2′s instead of “to” in the actual lyrics… but the 8-ball itself is significant because of this:

and the lovely @thecompassleadingtheship miraculously located the exact comic strip they’re from!! What’s more, this comic has some particularly interesting subject matter. It’s from Yogi Bear. Yes. Yogi Bear. Just wait! It gets better! Here it is in full, followed by some panels of note.

Yes, I absolutely broke into a cold sweat upon reading the words “the bears”.

Ah yes, Boo Boo. Boo Boo the Bear. You could almost shorten that to Boo Bear, couldn’t you?

And here we have Yogi and Boo Boo cunningly escaping the Ranger’s tricks - because there’s no such thing as Pic-a-nic-itis! The panel on the right is the exact one in the video.

[flashes back to….]

And we have the first rule of the park… Don’t feed the bears! The Chief Ranger is making a fool out of himself, which I think the Bears (and I) quite enjoy. :-)

For the grand finale, we have the bears asserting the fact that if you pay attention, you’ll realize the bears aren’t just “dumb animals” like some people might think. They’re smarter than average. Much smarter.

So you may remember we were attempting to source the Beetle Bailey comic from 0:48, given that the Yogi Bear comic was so big.

I had been working on this for literal hours - scrolling through 70+ years of Beetle Bailey history in an attempt to find this one cropped panel with the dialogue removed. I’d been feeling discouraged because my theory about the dotwork seemed to be wrong, so I decided to go through the years to determine exactly when the dotwork changed. I was clicking completely random days, two per month, and had gone from 2017 all the way back to 2000 when I decided to click on July 13, 2000 and stumbled upon this:

YES, YES THAT IS THE EXACT STRIP I HAD SPENT ALMOST NINE HOURS TRYING TO SOURCE.

The panel is about 4(!) soldiers who get left out in the rain because they’re “no men” and stand up to the general, while the general and his “yes men” get to ride in a protected car. A pretty clear allusion to 1D, if you ask me. 

What’s also important about this is the date, the day before articles started officially dropping about Babygate on July 14, 2015. I wondered if there was a significance to him featuring the day before versus the day of, but I haven’t found any compelling evidence toward that. I went through the calendar year of 2000 and looked at a bunch of significant Babygate days. Obviously, disclaimer for massive head-canons since this stuff was written 17 years ago, but I’ll include it anyway because I’m sure you’re interested to see:

First up, January 21 - F’s birthday featuring the comic strip above about angry words producing angry results and better mashed potatoes. This one definitely has me a little intrigued even though I’m sure it’s just a coincidence - remind anyone of anything?

Nothing significant for H’s birthday, so I moved back to prominent BG days. Check out what I found on May 12th:

May 12th 2015 is the day BrianaFacts is created on Twitter, before she’s even associated with Louis. The strip above shows somebody trying to cover up a mistake on a computer in a very….unintelligent manner, lmao.

Onto the next! On May 14, 2015, those photos of Briana and Louis are taken outside of a club. This comic appears for the 14th of May in 2000:

Interesting that it should be about a practical joke played on Lieutenant Sonny Fuzz, a character who’s known for “always trying to impress uninterested superiors, and ‘rub it in the noses’ of his subordinates” - followed by Beetle delivering a sick burn in the form of a monetary donation. Sound like a familiar story? :-)

Moving on to August 3rd, the day before the GMA confirmation.

Speaks for itself, I’d say.

Finally, to lighten everyone’s mood, a cute find from September 28 - AKA the Anniversary.

I wish I could write all this off as a coincidence, but take it from someone who spent hours researching this - there’s a truly overwhelming amount of Beetle Bailey content out there, and this particular year took ages to find. The date of the comic used is important, and the coincidental easter eggs are certainly interesting. Literally any other year out of almost 70 could’ve been picked, yet this one (and this day, July 13th) was the one featured. 

After all, SBB and RBB don’t really deal with “coincidences”, do they? :-)

[thanks to @iamalarrie for reminding me of the bears in an army jeep at OTRA Manchester!]

edit: this is getting a lot of attention so just wanna say that it’s been debunked and they’re probably different sweaters but they’ve shared clothes on multiple other occasions anyway 🥰

and it really is never-ending

wait let me add this too, it’s one of my favorites:

you make my heart

      feel like it’s summer

            when the rain is pouring