Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 02, 2011
Transcript:
Student: ... all because I happened to read a book on ultimate frisbee! Zipper: Man, I gotta read a book sometime. Student: Changed my life, man! So ask me what I've been working on. Zipper: You've been working? Student: Yup. I built this cool photo recognition app that identifies groups of people clutching plastic cups... I paired it with a search algorithm that isolates users listing birth dates between 1992 and 1998. Then I ran it through Facebook. Turns out the site has over 7.967 billion posted images of hammered teenagers! Zipper: Wow... what an awesome thing to know... Zipper: I believe it to be the largest such archive on the Web. Zipper: Any way to check? Before going public?
In the background, the teenagers who read books are shown going to class and experiencing the intellectual life of young adults. Zipper and Jeff, walled out from that academic experience, use their books or computers as pillows and grow old (note the falling leaves) trying to compile an “archive” of youth as they remember it.These are two of his slightest characters, yet GBT makes their nostalgia poignant as they try to recapture the youth that they squandered so heedlessly. All they can remember is getting “hammered.”