The iceberg that came away from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in the week is twice the size of Luxembourg (or as big as Delaware if you’re in the U.S.) and weighs in at a trillion tonnes.
The experts are not directly linking this particular iceberg to global warming but say there are a lot of other ice shelves that are coming apart quicker than they should be.
Mat
This comic strip began with Kate saying something different (and lifted from real life) but I’m going to keep it to myself as I may use it in another strip.
Hitting snooze is indeed bad for you – it can leave you groggy for longer and can break the association between your alarm going off and actually needing to wake up. The grogginess – also known as sleep inertia – affects your decision-making, your memory and the performance of even simple tasks and can take hours to shake off.
The solution to chronic snoozing? Put the alarm clock out of reach so you have to get out of bed to turn it off.
Mat
Knowing how to take the best care of our natural resources is not always straightforward – disposable vs reusable plates, for example. Often protecting one is done at the expense of something else.
Bagel’s heart is in the right place, though.
Mat
In the Game of Thrones, winter has been coming for quite a while now. Now that this prophesized winter is finally wintering, it stands to reason that summer must be well on the way. What better way to celebrate the murder of every single person in Westeros than a sunny summer beach party?
Mat
This strip was inspired by seeing a whole piece of white bread floating in a duck pond near our house. There are signs asking you not to feed the ducks, and there is the no shortage of info on the internet telling you that bread, especially modern highly-processed white bread, is just not good for Daisy and Donald, but the urge to feed bread to ducks is obviously strong on the genetic level for some.
That thing about birds and rice, though, not true. Birds like uncooked rice and it doesn’t make them sick or explode. Hashtag birdfacts
Mat
If women-only screenings of Magic Mike XXL were announced, no eyebrows would be raised. But do so for Wonder Woman – which is a traditionally male-dominated super hero genre movie – and the entitled man-babies come out of the woodwork.
Fellas, it’s hard to see from the inside of all this male privilege, so let me help: basically the entire world is a men-only screening. This tipping of the scale is trying to right so much imbalance.
Mat
I always end up watching a bit of MasterChef each season, even though my own cooking skills are not exactly noteworthy.
Danielle suggested that if people were on the cooking show menu, the current MasterChef catch-phrase ‘this is me on a plate’ should get a look in, but I couldn’t make it work with the planned set-up.
Mat
No news story took my fancy this week so I wanted to do something simple, and breaking the 4th wall which I haven’t done in a while.
The decluttering gag was originally going to include the ‘bringing you joy’ line – Bagel says to Jaffa ‘You don’t bring me joy’ and then Jaffa is out of the footpath for hard waste collection. I felt, though, that the Gilmore Girls Netflix show did this already, so blending in some Harry Potter felt more correct. Bagel has shown us his wand skills previously.
Mat
Rescue groups need money. Bunnings sausage sizzles are a great way to raise money. An animal rescue group raising money by selling meat sausages didn’t sit well, and vegan sausages were sold instead. Then Australia lost it’s mind. Why? It’s hard to say. It’s as if this one day of fundraising at one Bunnings store in one suburb in one city challenged the entire country’s ideals and culture. People were free to ignore the vegan sausages, or go somewhere else for lunch or (gasp) try a non-meat alternative for once. Maybe you’d like it. What then? Maybe you’d have to admit that you could live without animal products for one meal.
If you liked that vegan sausage, that also means that you must become a Green’s voter, hug trees and cancel your subscription to the Herald-Sun. Just kidding, no-one subscribes to newspapers any more.
Mat
Anne of Green Gables is hot property again. Netflix has made a new ‘grim and gritty’ version of Anne that focuses more on her sad situation prior to her adoption. I’m not certain the story needs more of a dark focus – the original story didn’t have much of a dark side – but the reviews are generally positive so I guess I’ll have to watch it for myself. The original Canadian series will remain the true Anne of Green Gables in my heart.
Mat
