XKCD

I am a huge fan of the online comic XKCD (www.xkcd.com). I'm always an enthusiastic audience member when very smart people do interesting things, and I think Randall Munroe's drawings definitely fit the bill. By way of example, the reason he calls his comic XKCD is because it's a four letter grouping that has no phonetic pronunciation -- the exact opposite of, say, S.H.I.E.L.D.* There aren't many such groupings and props to Munroe for a) finding one, and b) even thinking about it. 

In any event, it's also been amusing to see how often the comics seem to have some personal resonance. Here, for example, is the comic that was posted on Monday:

And I gotta say, the meeting with the oncologist did feel a lot like being handed a "life expectancy advent calendar," and yup, it was unsettling. 

But I suppose getting to open the little door and eat a piece of chocolate every day would be a feature. At least until you got down to the point where you were counting the remaining doors in double or single digits. 


* Agents of SHIELD is a terrible show, but the exchange in the first episode wherein one character tells another that he'll be working for the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division and asks, "What do you think of that?" and he replies, "I think someone really wanted the acronym to be shield" was pretty amusing.