Okay, help. I remember one bit from one of the Bloom County strips, apparently not enough to google it properly, and I need help to find the strip itself.
Someone was going to propose - I think Cutter John? and they were going shopping for an engagement ring.
The salesman in the jewelery store was giving him a ridiculously hard time, trying to upsell him to a rock the size of gibraltar. However, the thing that I remember from the strip were the signs in the jewelery store. They changed from panel to panel, but it was always something like “A woman without diamonds doesn’t believe you love her.” The last one was “A woman without diamonds is a tree sloth.”
That was Opus getting ready to propose to Lola Granola. Page 71 of “Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989”.
The sign says:
1st panel - A woman without diamonds is a tree sloth
3rd panel - A woman without diamonds is gross-buckets
4th panel - A woman without diamonds is like a day without a twinkie
5th panel - A woman without diamonds is a parsnip
Oh hey, um, there’s one I’ve always wanted to track down too.
All I remember is it involved Opus (that’s the penguin’s name, right?) trying to give a speech, but he keeps screwing up the words “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
It was the first comic strip episode (do you call them episodes or what?) that I read and re-read and kept around for a while thinking it was hilarious. I was in approximately the first grade at the time, so who knows whether it was actually funny or not. But finding it would be a nice blast of nostalgia.
I still whip out “A woman without diamonds is gross buckets” from time to time, especially after jewelry commercials. Mr. Snicks generally looks at me like I’m touched, but damn I loved that strip.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, he steps in front of the mike, clears his throat, and starts shouting nonsense, while waving his fist in a speech-giving style. He was shouting stuff like “IBN MOOT SPEEP BLABOO!” it ends with him complaining to Milo that it’s time to “give the teleprompter a swift kick in the patootie.”
To my recollection (but it was over twenty years ago so who knows) this was a Sunday strip, and Opus tried three or four times to get out “Ladies and Gentlemen,” and when he failed, he dropped down below the podium and hid, complaining to himself about the situation.
There might have been another character there trying to encourage him.
The one I’m looking for basically consisted of a poem spoken by Oliver Wendell Jones (I think) bemoaning the less-than-extraordinary appearance of Halley’s comet. The part I remember goes:
It’s a speck! It’s a spot!
It’s just barely a dot!
A comet spectacular
It most certainly is not!
