Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 03, 2013

There’s an easy way to settle this: Which one has the biggest pianist?

Feets, don’t fail me now…

Shlomo… What a nice Jewish name for a violinist!

HAH, yer not fast enough, Shlomo!

Cage match!

You should hear what goes on in the bass section…and that’s no joke.

Such violins!

Why settle for second violin when you could be first percussion?

@Yammo. Shlomo Mintz’s performance of the Paganini Caprices is breathtaking.

http://www.amazon.com/24-Caprices-Niccolo-Paganini/dp/B000001G5O/ref=sr_1_7?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1372844322&sr=1-7&keywords=paganini+24+caprices

Hurry, Goat! You and Zebra (a.k.a. Zeeba Neighba) need to be far away before this gets out of hand. The rancor amongst the string section is getting rather testy! And judging from the way he’s holding that bat that materialized out of nowhere, Shlomo the Second Fiddle is a very sinister guy.

I was told that this type of animosity is quite typical among violinists & apparently starts at an early age. Youth orchestras are especially cutthroat.

Shlomo is as terrible as Ivan.

What they need is a common enemy to gang up on. Say, a viola player.

Google “viola jokes”.

So violinists are really predatory? No surprises there…

Schlomo must be related to the Crocs needing to kill in order to succeed, and possibly as successful….

I have a friend who plays the accordion. She left her accordion in the back seat of her car one day, and forgot to lock the car. When she came back … yeah, you guessed it …

… somebody had put a second accordion in there.

Is this the Klingon promotion system, applied to orchestra?

Funniest PBS in a long time. I agree with Sisyphos, there is something in the way Shlomo is holding the bat that suggests a sinister plot is fast coming. He may even have done it before to reach second fiddle status….

Hope he rosined up the bat.

Gary Larsen had a Far Side panel concerning 2nd chair granite rock’s sudden, irrepressible jealousy for 1st chair granite rock.

I’m reminded of a short film by Michael J. Fox called “The Iceman Hummeth”, made for David Letterman’s 2nd Annual Holiday Film Festival in 1986. The film follows both a hockey team and a symphony orchestra (with Fox in dual roles) as they prepare to perform. It ends with the musicians breaking out into a fight while the hockey players watch, and Fox laments “Violence is tearing the heart out of the symphony”.

String him up.

One of my ex-students is a great violinist, Crimson String Quartet, check them out (website, youtube)

Hmm…I’ve always disliked the ambiguity of “first violin” and “second violin”. Technically, those are different parts and a second violinist killing a first violinist would not move the second up to first. If they’re talking about first and second chair violinist, then those are the two best players of the same part (first or second violinist) and the second chair killing the first chair would move him up.

But the term used here can (or at least, often has been) used for both, so I can’t really say Pastis made a mistake here.

Stephen could string this along for a few days…

I can imagine Stephan Pastis saying: “Ivan to Shlomo violins in this strip”.

Schlomo v. Ivan has the making of a great matchup!

so is the pbs group headed back to jail?

Shlomo & Ivan huh? I smell a pun in the oven.

Somebody’s going to get in trouble.

Sectional Harassment is illegal!

I know if Rat were there he would be cheering one of them on.LOL xxx

after all those accordion jokes, yesterday, check out dru torturing everyone (especially the troll) on today’s Pibgorn!

This could get ugly… cleanup teams are standing by.

Violin bows at 10 paces. Gentlemen, turn and FIDDLE!!!!!!!!

Now bring on the sax!