Eat, drink and get busted. Check out strips 150-154 of the popular comic Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977.
150. I was on the fencing team, but I purposely limited the number of cartoons about that subject. However for any member of a sports teams (other than football or basketball or those with special sections reserved), if you got to the dining halls at 6:15 p.m. after practice, there was frequently nothing good left. Regarding one of those other sports — as noted in this Observer, senior Steve Walsh ran his final indoor mile in 4:11.07.
151. It is worth repeating that I never did drugs and never got drunk. I just wasn’t interested. I thought was silly. Still, the getting-high culture was all around me. News in The Observer included guests of the Sophomore Literary Festival — poet Hilda Morley, novelist William Gaddis, screenwriter Larry McMurtry and playwright David Mamet, whose travel arrangements kept him from arriving.
152. Detex was the antediluvium version of today’s card readers and was used only on women’s dorms. It was a system easily thwarted by just about any resident — as illustrated. I had always wanted to do a cartoon based on the painting of Jesus knocking on the door with no latch — but despite hours of research I could not find it anywhere on the campus. Back in the pre-Internet world, one could not Google something like that and get more than 8 million results in .23 seconds.
153. Also pre-Internet and when long-distance phone rates were greater, we were much more dependent on snail mail for keeping in contact with friends and family. In this Observer, an article noted that NBC was going to televise the Bengal Bouts finals.
154. This seems to be the week for contrasts in technology. Our dining hall card-reader system was prone to errors, but it was a great improvement over the paper checklist system, as it allowed us to dine at either dining hall. Prior to that, you needed special permission to eat at the other dining hall.
See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.