I won’t have much to say this week because I have a head cold and I’ve messed up one of my oral discussion projects in my Italian class. Mama mia! Che schifo!

This week should have featured Cherry and her concrete adventure. We got to it, but not until Thursday. The strips for Monday-Wednesday were devoted to Mark and Cherry trying to share an intimate moment sitting out a nighttime storm. Normally, such lovey-dovey events appear after completed adventures. In fact, it originally seemed that Cherry’s concrete driveway story was done and buried under the concrete when Violet Cheshire went ahead with plans to lay a concrete driveway, using the services of Honest Ernest. Of course.

After the nighttime storm, Cherry showed up at the Sunny Soleil Society the next morning with Violet, only to discover pools of water on the floor inside the house. Somehow, water also got onto Violet’s work desk! Is there a leaky roof, too? Well, Violet acted as if she had no idea that there could be bad consequences to a concrete driveway, in spite of Cherry’s earlier warnings. Cherry volunteered to help clean up, issuing an odd warning about the (very remote) possibility of spadefoot tadpoles showing up, presumably to lay eggs in the pools of water. Somehow, this flooding disaster was supposed to have made Violet more sensitive to Nature, the Earth (e.g., Earth Day), and Conservation.

Okay, the Saturday strip was not a lead-in to today’s discussion, as I guessed. Fool me once, shame on me… fool me uh …  won’t get fooled again!

So, we have another topical subject, still in the news. Rivera provided another great custom title panel. From what little I read in a Scientific American discussion, rather than one giant blob (or “mat”) of Sargassum, it is more like a lot of separate chunks floating together. That distinction may not matter much when we are dealing with some 5,000 miles of moving seaweed. This might not be the best time to take a vacation to the Southeast, Caribbean, or Gulf coasts.  The NY Times reported the seaweed contains arsenic, so it should not be used as fertilizer or in animal feed, as some entrepreneurs are wondering.

Finally, why is Mark’s figure outlined in white in the central panel? Is this some kind of “flashback”? I don’t think so; rather, it was probably done to ensure Mark’s image did not get obscured by the Sargassum background. I don’t think it was necessary, given she didn’t do it with the other images. Perhaps we are looking at an example of digital copy-and-paste.