Of all the webcomics I’ve read, that is the most recent.
Anyhoo, about 15 years ago I wrote a one-page story about an elderly Japanese gentlemen folding origami animals and musing on a (what I’ll cheerfully admit is a lousy) haiku:
Drawing strength from numbers
As fast as the slowest
The animals walk
Then his drunken irresponsible great-grandson shows up and violence briefly ensues.
You mean the one that starts (an indetermininate amount of time after midnight) in Act I, scene 4 and ends in Act I, scene 5? How do you know how much time passes between Hamlet and the ghost’s exit in scene 4 and their reentrance in scene 5? Anyway, the ghost finally takes off because he senses the dawn, not necessarily because dawn is actually breaking. It sounded like an excuse. He just wanted to get some of his chain rattling done before the real dawn.
Well, you have to consider, too, that poor old Hamlet père had finally gotten shut of his dithering kid and now he was forced by Necessity to actually seek the indecisive git out and talk to him. I’d make excuses for moving on early, too…
Well, we are! 
One just jumped out at me today since I am now a resident of Ohio.
Was rereading Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman (Penguin Edition w/Dustin Hoffman as Willy on the cover) and got to the scene were Howard, Willy’s boss, is playing his recording device for Willy and Howard’s son is reciting the state capitals. Anyway, the kid (who seems to be super smart) says the capital of Ohio is Cincinnati. No, it is actually Columbus.
Seems odd that no one would catch it and correct Miller during the production/printing of the play.
Was this ever pointed out to Miller? Did he decide to leave it in, incorrect though it may be? Or, do I have an edition with an error, and every other edition has Columbus in this line?
Sir Rhosis
I am from Ohio myself and I clearly remember this error from the first time I read the play in high school. My impression has always been that it was intentional.
But if you fill it with water to form a convex lens… it might just work.
Woo! I should learn to preview.
HEREEEETIC!
What, all of Lope’s comedies and Shakespeare’s plays and Quevedo’s poetry and Becquer’s works aren’t classics? They’re perfectly enjoyable!
Silly Innanna 
Y’all realize that, originally, “desert” meant “area mostly uninhabited” and not “dry hot area”?
Alaska is mostly desert. Promise.
Now, I haven’t actually given this a heck of a lot of thought, and I last took a class that covered such things back in the '80s… plus I’ve just spent the last hour studying Art History so my brain isn’t in Science Mode… so this could be the stupidest comment in the history of the board: Would the lens work right if you turned it over?
Not really. Because the line is merely quoting (in translation) the poet Catullus.
So he’s not really stating “as a fact” that one never returns from the grave, merely indulging in poetic imagery.
I haven’t studied optics in a really long time, but I believe as long as the lens has uniform curvature on both sides, you’ll have the identical “view” through it regardless of which side you look through. Now in the case of eyeglasses which are curved differently on each side, you see a different picture when you where them backwards (or even upside down). However, as CalMeacham explains, the orientation of the lens (assuming it’s a single lens) does not affect whether the lens causes the rays of light to converge or diverge. A converging lens will always converge; a diverging lens will always diverge; the curvature just affects the distortion. Astigmatics have problems focusing perfectly, because their lenses are naturally curved, and the further away the corrective lens is from their eye lens, the more compensation needed in the corrective lens. I have very slight astigmatism in one eye that results in my contact perscription being different from my eyeglass perscription. The eyeglass perscription for that eye is -0.75 diopters stronger.
Well, the bulge does jack shit for me. I have really long eyelashes so back before I got contacts (which was sophomore year of high school) I was cleaning my glasses every day.
Oh and in regards to the time passing differently when dealing with ghosts, fey, and other other-worldly beings, I’m reminded of the scene in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger when Roland has finally caught up with the man and black and they spend a long night talking. It’s revealed the next morning that Roland aged 10 years (IIRC) in that night. And in the third book in The Dark Tower series The Wasteland, Roland mentions that a couple centuries passed in the world during that night, before the drawing of the three took place.
Maybe it was a magic bullet?
Opal and Hoopy – a lens has the same focal length, regardless of its shape, regardless of which side you’re looking through. But, depending on the shape, the focal point can be very differently placed relative to the lens (plus it helps to have the concave side toward your face for “eyelash relief”, as noted), so a lens with a given focal length could work either way, depending upon whether you’ve placed it the right distance away. But it’s not that critical.
More annoying is the fact that, if you have astigmatism, you have to line the axis of the lens up properly with the axis of your eye, so in cases of astigmatism where the axes aren’t horizontal/vertical, you can’t just flip the lens around and have it work right.
As for flipping your eyeglasses completely around, that won’t work well unless your eyes both have the same prescription (or else yopur right eye correcting lens will be on your left eye, and vice-versa), and you’ll almost ertainly have problems if one or both eyes are astigmatic.
That said, I sometimes take m glasses off and flip 'em around, with the part that normally goes over my ears projecting into space. I see fine with 'em that way.
Wow, a double zombie thread!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these before.
Does it count to mention that the Eye of Argon (in the piece of the same name) is a scarlet emerald?
Or does that take too many liberties with the term “Classic Literature”?
Thanks to CalMeacham for reminding me.
C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage Of the Dawn Treader has an albatross, as a manifestation of Aslan, landing on the ship’s mast with a whirr of wings. Albatrosses do not whirr: they glide silently on thermals, with the occasional leisurely flap. What’s more, they land with all the grace and elegance of a sack of spuds thrown out of a truck: an albatross couldn’t perch on a mast on a bet.
And in The Silver Chair {look, I’m reading all the Narnia books to my son at bedtime, OK?}, why didn’t Jill just write the bloody signs down? It would have saved forgetting to repeat them.
But it wasn’t an albatross, it was God. And besides, it wasn’t an albatross in a different world.
In Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Albert de Morcerf challenges the newspaper editor Beauchamp to a duel for insulting his father. The duel is fixed for September 21st. On the day both turn up with their seconds and… well, I won’t mention what happens next. But a little later in the book, when Monte Cristo is trying to convince Maximilian Morrel not to commit suicide, he mentions in passing that it is September 5th. Time has gone backwards!