Title text:
My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3209/
Wow, I wasn’t cultured enough to get the reference to William Carlos Williams. Frost, yes, of course.
Looking up the poem, I have certainly heard it before.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxand which
you were probably
saving
for breakfastForgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so coldEdit: Markdown for Lemmy instances possibly fixed
Never heard of the guy (not American) so I thought this was how we learned about Randall Monroe’s carbon monoxide leak.
Markdown broke the formatting, here’s the proper version:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxand which
you were probably
saving
for breakfastForgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so coldMbin doesn’t require two spaces at the ends of consecutive lines. I was aware that Lemmy might, but I was also prefacing each line with a “>”, so I figured that would keep them separate.
Huh. It’s impressive how many slightly different markdown versions there are
Def a more niche reference I feel:
This is a reference to the William Carlos Williams poem This Is Just to Say, in which the narrator is apologizing for eating the plums in the icebox. In this comic, the joke is that Cueball, learning that the person out of view has left themselves some plums in the refrigerator for tomorrow, cannot resist eating them as a reference to the poem.
His characters have names? TIL.
It’s rather the ExplainXKCD lore. Recurring-looking characters have been assigned names, even though they clearly denote different people in the comic. (Although Black Hat is always up to some antics.)
Well, sometimes they denote different people. They also sometimes represent recurring characters.
Beret Guy, Black Hat, and Danish are the same character each time.
At the other end of the spectrum, Ponytail and White Hat are just whoever the comic needs at the time. Sometimes they show signs they’re a recurring character, but usually probably just a one-off.
In the middle of the spectrum are Cueball and Megan. These are the generic male and female designs and the most frequently seen. They’re usually probably just one-offs, but both have two distinct recurring roles as well. The first is Cueball as an unnamed male character and Megan as Megan, with the two of them being a couple. The second is Cueball as the comic’s author and Megan as his wife, with this being most apparent in the cancer strips.
