Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 06, 2014

But Jef, how big is that in inches?

I think you have out-pastised Pastis!

Did anybody notice the number 6 MILLION TONS?One article online says “mammoth ore ships able to carry 400K tons”. So is Caulfield thinking of one, oh, say, half the size of Lake Erie?

At risk of being a useless dork, a freighter doesn’t have to be a ship.Therefore, its not impossible that he also passes Lake Michigan, given how far over Marquette is. Which would entail another 3%… and an interesting loophole, which I wonder if it was deliberate or not…

I don’t remember the last time I saw an ore ship loaded in Marquette, surely been a while.

3% of the original load or 3% of the load remaining at each lake?

Would this be Captain Jim Kirk or the pirate from the Shel Silverstein poem?

Assuming that the ore doesn’t end up in one of the lakes after a gale in November….

The Marquette ore dock (owned by the Lake Superior and Ishpeming Railroad) is still in operation. See http://www.travelmarquettemichigan.com/recreation/ore-boats/ , but 60 million tons would represent about 6 years of production. The largest freighters operating on the Great Lakes top out at somewhere between 60- and 80- thousand (not million) tons. A 60-million ton freighter would never make it through the Soo locks.

Even if we assume Caufield’s freighter to be a large, but reasonable 60 thousand tons, we still have a bit of a trick question. The post-Erie weight of the cargo on a Great Lakes ore freighter will be zero, because the ship gets unloaded in Cleveland (or perhaps Erie, PA). A 60-thousand ton freighter is too large (by some 250 feet) to pass through the Welland Canal.

Very clever. I had to say it out loud before I got it. Given how close they were to Wisconsin I wonder if Capt. Jim smelled (smelt?) their dairy air?

That is one of the funniest strips I have seen. Just hilarious.

Makes me glad I’m not the butt of Caulfield’s jokes.

I thought the Frazz crew could appreciate today’s Rhymes with Orange http://seattletimes.com/comics/rworange.html

((60000000*0.97)0.97)0.97 for those of us who were trained to show our work. ;-)

My brain hurts…

Jef, you’re spending too much time with Stephan Pastis!

Hey, they should dump a lot of it at the bottom of Lake Huron, where erosion and dredging has lowered the level of the Lakes permanently by over a foot…

stewbek, it still happens everyday. But it’s north of Marquette, the loading dock downtown isn’t used any more. Remember when the train cars ran right over and above the town? So strange….But still, one of the prettiest towns in the UP….The prettiest? Calumet, and Laurium….

Did you remember to carry the bum?

It looks like Caulfied has mastered Common Core question writing as well.

Sorry. I try to see logic in even math problems, and the logic here is that the ship would be illogically huge.