Episode 2476 - Friday, March 29, 1985

Hey there. In case you've been wondering why we (Jon and Chris) don't seem at all fazed to have civilization collapsing around us as we happily bullshit about Garfield, it's because Being Jim Davis has a pretty considerable lag time between recording and publication. Today's episode, for example, was recorded on Friday, November 4, back before a quarter of the electorate decided that 228 years is old enough for a republic. And I'm writing these show notes on Sunday, November 13, shortly after Donald Trump announced that noted white supremacist and douchebag Steve Bannon would be his administration's Chief Strategist. Which is obscene, right? This shit isn't normal!Anyway, we'll be super-depressed during next weeks episodes, so you've got that to look forward to.Today's strip:

14 Nov 201616min

Today's surprisingly long episode of Being Jim Davis zooms in with laser focus on a number of pressing issues, including the unexpectedly voluminous capacity of Jon's icebox, the old-hollywood inspirations for panel seven's mistaken identity trope, and the cocktail of cynicism and sheer laziness that clearly inspired Jim Davis to run a 'summer heatwave'-themed strip in September.Today's strip

13 Nov 201626min

In today's Garfield, Jim Davis teters on the verge of introducing formal teleological elements to the strip, perhaps in the consideration of turning it into some kind of narrative, then backs off from that. We argue about whether or not the depicted events take place in the bathroom.Today's strip

12 Nov 201613min

In this Very Exciting Episode, our Skype call drops in the middle of the podcast! But when we come back, are we the same podcasters? Or, like Captain Kirk going through the transporter, does the disruption of continuity actually portend a far more sinister reality beneath the congenial veneer? Is the very act of podcasting in truth akin to committing suicide and being replaced by soulless doppelgängers each day? Can I successfully mine the persistence of identity problem for the podcast writeup twice in one week, or is that like stepping in the same river twice? Anyway, something about wax fruit.Today's strip

11 Nov 20169min

Heraclitus’s “table fragments” raise puzzles about identity and persistence: under what conditions does a side table persist through time as one and the same object? If the world contains things which endure, and retain their identity in spite of undergoing alteration, then somehow those things must persist through changes. Heraclitus wonders whether one can view the same side table twice precisely because it continually undergoes changes. In particular, it changes compositionally. At any given time, it is made up of different component parts from the ones it was previously made up of. So, according to one interpretation, Heraclitus concludes that we do not have (numerically) the same side table persisting from one moment to the next.In this episode of Being Jim Davis, we examine Garfield's incomplete understanding of biology, the strange life of Jon Arbuckle's orphan side table, and the surprising versatility of the onomatopoeia 'poomp.'Today's strip

10 Nov 201610min

Garfield asks a hypophoric question and we talk about Jay Ward. It's the late 1970s, and this is Being Jim Davis.Today's strip

9 Nov 201611min

Listener, please conjure in your mind your own personal conception of the platonic ideal of a Garfield strip. Really think about the nature of that strip: How many panels does it have? Does it contain references to dieting? What is the ontological quality of the discourse between its various players? Is there a perplexing denouement in which one or more characters breaks the fourth wall for no particular reason? Perhaps most significantly, is it bloated with cumbersome dialogue containing allusions to bizarrely juxtaposed real-world entities?Is Garfield a product, or is it more accurately described as a process? For that matter, is the comic even written by Jim Davis, or is there some fundamental fact of the universe that simply requires its existence? Do newspaper comics necessarily imply some connection with the material world or conscious minds to conceive of them, or is it possible that, like the laws of logic itself, Garfield is perhaps neither physical nor conceptual?Now compare the image in your mind with the actual strip for today. They're like, totally identical, right??? Nah, probably not.Today's stripWhat is bipolar disorder?Philosophical zombies

8 Nov 201614min

Today's topics include the dull drudgery of life and the minimum defining characteristics of eye contact. Then we get into a wholly unnecessary argument over whether this strip constitutes a logical progression from the previous one, which was more or less the same exact joke. For those among you who are not excited by the bleak prospect of an entire week's worth of strips organized around the plot device of Garfield dieting, may we suggest alcohol?A slight correction: Upon further research, it turns out that carrots were NOT discovered in the 1970s. Jim Davis regrets the error.Today's strip

7 Nov 201615min