You can't be too careful with a complex popcorn investigation. However, you can be too probing.
500. Dion's treatment at the hands of the vice squad was a reference to the still-recent strip searching of Saint Mary’s College students whom the South Bend Police had detained for underage drinking. As for the newspaper, I notice now that Iona College had taken out an ad for intersession classes in this edition of The Observer. I’m sort of astounded. How many Notre Dame students lived in Westchester County, New York, and how many were likely to spend their Christmas break taking classes at Iona?
501. Musical acts advertised in this edition include Genesis (Phil Collins singing lead; Peter Gabriel already gone), Head East and The Ozark Mountain Daredevils.
502. The paper featured a photo of Father Fitz (in a large blond wig) and Sister Mary Lou (with veil and flowers) posing as Luke and Laura, characters who, in the very popular soap opera General Hospital, were getting married.
503. With the dismal 1981 football season winding down, Digger Phelps and the basketball team were preparing to play Red Star Belgrade, a club team from Yugoslavia. The Irish were, according the next paper, “squashed.”
504. This is the first time the sheep’s name, Ashtabula, is mentioned in the strip. The paper reported on the football team’s loss to Penn State, quoting Gerry Faust as saying “We’ll be in the Orange Bowl . . . next Friday. We will be playing Miami,” a joke about the last game of the regular season. They would lose again and finish 5-6 — the first losing season for Irish football in 18 years.
See the first five classic strips. Buy the book with all 581 original cartoons: MOLARITY: The Compleat Molarity is available at the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore and Amazon.com. 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.