Take a pew
Sir Alan Sugar or Lord Sir Alan Sugar is the founder of Amstrad, the world’s most vigorous company, the host of The Apprentice UK (catchphrase: “you are a fire!”) and a visible figure throughout my life. This comic is a very very sideways reference to the comic below, which came out around the same time the Amstrad PCW was “hot stuff”. Think of Sugar as my comic universe’s Richard Branson.
Frankly it’s more efficient logistics to built shitty rockets that blow up than add a car lane to any road ever
Just one more lane, that’ll solve the traffic problem for ever!
Maybe one in each direction.
I remember as a kid the A2 between Holywood and Bangor had three lanes, one in each direction and a middle lane for jousting with oncoming overtakers when you were trying to overtake too. White knuckle time.
I don’t recommend it.
I can add a bidirectional center lane to any two-lane road, on the spot. All I have to do is take off my glasses.
we have 3lane roads in sweden. they incorporate a little fence that alternates the access to 2 lanes (for overtaking the likes of Captain Slow) between directions. Good idea right? Yeah… only, they way it works in practice is that apparently many driivers are scared of driving on a one lane enclosed by fences. Yes there are fences to encourage people to stay on the road as opposed to driving into the woods or whatever. So these scared people drive at the modest speed of say 70 when the liimit is 100. So, naturally when the road is morphing into two lanes, you would like to overtake them. But now, emboldened by the increased space, the scared slow people accelerate to 100, and unless you drive like a crazy lawless person with no regard to safety you are stuck behand this idiot. So you drive like a crazy lawless person with no regard to safety…
Oh yes, we had the same in Scotland – the old A8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow was a 3-laner! More casualties than any other road in Scotland at the time! And so they turned it into a motorway. With just 2 lanes on each side.
It seems like the only market Amstrad never entered (in the universe of this comic) is computers.
Billie’s new pocket computer is an Amstrad.
True. I forgot about that.
Still, one could argue that a smart phone is not really a “computer” as that word is popularly used (even though some smart phones literally have more computing power than a $15 million Cray supercomputer from the 1980’s).
Heck, your average home pregnancy test has more computing power than the Apollo 11 computers
And is far more urine resistant.
Question; Did Sir Alan Sugar also rescue the career of the Bobbinverse equivalent of John Lydon after he left its equivalent of the Sex Pistols?
One could argue that a smart phone is not really a “phone” 🙂 It’s a camera with a computer attached and a strange extra facility for making emergency calls when you need a parent to give you a lift.
I maintain that they should be called “omni-devices”.
Such a handheld computer does have a modem on it you can’t control, this mysterious combination is called a ‘cellular phone’
So now we have to wonder if Rev and Gareth are still stuck in traffic or if they made it there in time
Catch-22 on the extra two lanes (but not really)
it is a, “cliffhanger”
Did Lord Sugar have his own Amstrad record label in this universe?
And was that the label that signed Exercise Yard?
Amstrad started in car aerials, eh? And each year Lord Sugar celebrates that success with the UK’s biggest charity event: the Antenna Ball.
I certainly hope that this was an unmanned flight.
or an un-transformered one. Gareth & co were headed that way
Pretty sure they’re still stuck in traffic.
Wondering: How was Rev supposed to get back to Tredregyn after helping his car leave the planet?
The Cornwall Hyperloop – also built by Amstrad.
He was planning to swim most of the way back, of course. With Billie riding along.
I don’t know who’s worse; Musk or Branson. Or Bezos.
But I know who’s best: Ryan Reynolds.
I look forward to Scott Manley’s YouTube explainer on what caused this rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Fly safe!
But waht about THE ELDERLY
“Helston, we have lift-off”
Heh heh heh. I may be a grockle but I see some Kernow pride in this particular bit.
For those unfamiliar with Sir Lord Alan Sugar, here’s some edited highlights:
https://youtu.be/Yxi6QDwQyLU?si=w6nkXDTZ4rsFpc76
Kinda sad to see the dreams of a poor self-absorbed multi-billionaire fall apart like that. Sad because you can’t see that very often.
If the fictional version of Alan Sugar is anything like a certain real-world billionaire (the one with the stated ambition of colonizing Mars), having a rocket explode after launch is just another day at the office. Certainly not enough to make his dreams fall apart. The primary goal for some SpaceX launches seems to be to LET the rocket explode, so they can find out WHY it exploded, and then focus on fixing that. This may sound like madness, but it actually saves money because hardware is cheaper than engineer hours.
We engineers are extremely expensive, true, but a failed launch costs more than hardware.
I’m just saying SpaceX is unusual in that they regularly do test launches of new experimental rockets where Elon openly declares beforehand that he gives it a less than 50% chance of making it through the flight without blowing up, and that he’s OK with that. And quite a few do blow up, and yet, they keep doing it that way. And now they launch more satellites into orbit than anyone else, and they launch people to the ISS for NASA because NASA doesn’t have that capability anymore. I strongly dislike Elon Musk as a person, and I think he has made some extremely questionable business decisions, but I can’t deny that this particular approach seems to have worked out well for him and SpaceX.
I just had a look at the titles of the next four pages. A perfect, delicious progression.
Hmm, I know some alternate uses for shoeboxes, seems bittersweet.
True, too. I’m reminded of The Case of the Lonely One, with poor Lem. Here’s hoping a similar fate hasn’t befallen (will not befall? won’t have befallen?) Gareth.
An excellent likeness of a man I once heard described as looking like ‘a sweaty testicle that has been rolled around a barber’s floor’
Thank you for that visual.
Now I think I need an Antiemetic and a lie-down.
I watched online the last Virgin launch in Cornwall. They had a panel of very excited commentators and you got the impression that they’d already been there for four hours and had long ago run out of interesting things to say. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a long time fan of all things space and rockets. It just their PR department needs to cool it a bit. “Calm down dears” as someone used to say.
I hope Gareth was not on that rocket. I ship Gareth as the Rev’s moody, snark-cracking car for many years to come.
Gareth: perished… or new paint job?
I love this comic for bringing all the “one-more-lane-bro” commenters out of the woodwork. Especially since I am one of those it is nice to see my own kind so well represented.
I sometimes worry about the extent to which people have “found each other” in these comments but I feel like it’s all to the good.
The background in the final panel — just great.
Is that a knife block with a tea towel draped over it in panel 1? On the counter?
I drew that detail more than two months ago, so I’ve had to have a real hard stare at it… I think it’s a cloth shopping bag, containing a bottle of something which is on a bit of a lean.
There should be a comic with Clive Sinclair. The 2CV could turn into a very small giant robot, a baby robot in fact.
I think you mean a Sinclair C5, although there is that Citroen 2CV Transformer video.
As an American I get some … greasy vibes from Lord Alan Sugar.
Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m so bloody nerdy that as I was reading this I was actually thinking “heh, this is a bit like when Richard Branson was in Transformers.” Oh god what’s wrong with me.
my gosh, Mrs. Clovis thinks just two more lanes will solve traffic, the horror
Urban planning is the worst kind of eldritch horror: the kind you can’t just hit with an axe.