Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 30, 2023

So the NYC Sanitation Dept is only tasked with picking up banana peels? That would explain a lot.

Reading a story set in 2058. The protagonist, a professor, is ever so slightly OCD, so he’s very annoyed at the students, who all grew up in homes with robo-cleaners and so they never put ANYTHING in the trash.

I’m not sure the author intended to write a dystopian novel, but it sure seems to be trending that way.

Mithrandir could explain that myth!

It will be a wonderful world if littering was a myth

Dr. Spaetzle is wondering about slippery bananas?

Mythbusters did a banana peel segment

I see Frazz has been in NYC recently.

Not horse manure?

https://fee.org/articles/the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/

A myth is as good as a mile….wait…

Actually, littering as a crime dates to the 1950s as the plastics industry comes to grips that their products —which they’d promised would be recycled —were polluting bunches. Re Adam Ruins Everything.

Other species keep their living spaces clean. Another inexplainable behavior by people except to theorize it’s part of their insanity, like shooting up kids at schools, etc.

If most of recycled stuff was actually recycled and repurposed it would help in lots of ways. Seems on of the earliest new forms was benches for parks. Have heard little of other products.

Most people seem to have two modes: “It’s not my problem” or “Why aren’t you doing something about it”.

Littering is not a myth; it’s a mythtake.

Can anyone find any reason to believe this? So far, I can’t. In 1881 New York City had far, far worse sanitation issues than banana peels. As in dead horses littering the streets.

Non Sequitur also had a banana-peel strip just the other day. I suspect Chiquita subsidies for subliminal advertising.

I hope that is a compost bin Frazz is dropping that peel into…

I knew I read it somewhere. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/can-you-slip-banana-peel

New York had disgustingly filthy, trash-filled streets and sidewalks in the late 19th century (1885 for example) due to Tammany Hall corruption.

Banana peels were a menace because they were mixed in with huge amounts of horse manure and urine and other trash that did not get removed.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/can-you-slip-banana-peel

Once the corruption was rooted out (and the streets cleared of trash) banana peels were no longer a problem.

Now the most common litter is cigarette butts, a fact that’s been known for a few years now, yet smokers continue to throw them out of their car windows or drop them as they stand outside their offices or wherever they may be walking. Smokers? Please stop.

I went to Wikipedia to check out the banana-peel story. I couldn’t find it, but I did find that the NYC sanitation department was once the “Department of Street Cleaning”, which explains why so many old comic strips used to give their equipment (especially the iconic wheeled-trash-can-and-broom devices) the logo “DSC”, which I’ve vaguely wondered about for nearly seventy years.

Usually you TRIP on a banana peel not slip.