2006-12-03

A six-panel comic. Each panel is time-stamped with a yellow banner and shows a man telling a long story to a woman with orange hair, both seen in profile against a dark blue background. Panel 1 (TEN HOURS AGO): 'So, 13.7 billion years ago, an incredibly dense point of...' Panel 2 (EIGHT HOURS AGO): '...amino acids came together, forming complex polymers...' Panel 3 (SIX HOURS AGO): '...australopithecines developed bipedalism, which...' Panel 4 (FOUR HOURS AGO): '...then Aristotle, born in 384 B.C., was...' Panel 5 (TWO HOURS AGO): '...and in 1905, a man named Ernest Hackett met my mother...' Panel 6 (no time stamp): the woman now looks unamused as the man says, 'Very eloquent. But, you know what would've been better? If you had STARTED with "you have herpes."' The joke: he has narrated the entire history of the universe over ten hours just to arrive at telling her she has an STD. Votey: a rough black-and-white sketch of a man holding a telephone receiver to his ear, speaking, with the back of a listener's head visible on the right.