Feeeed me

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3121.html

A somewhat common factoid perpetuated by various Internet factoid lists is that human blood has the same salinity as sea water. This is poppycock.

Sea water has a salinity ranging between roughly 3% and 4% (by mass), depending on where in the world's oceans you take your sample. Human blood - and in fact that of almost all vertebrates - is pegged very close to 0.9% salinity, which is a hugely significant difference. It's the reason, for example, why drinking sea water is an incredibly bad and dangerous idea. All that excess salt has to be excreted by your kidneys to maintain your internal chemical balance, and the only way to do that is to pump it out in your urine in a more dilute water solution matching more closely your body's salinity. The result is that you get critically dehydrated very quickly.

(This is not to say that the small amounts of sea water you will inevitably ingest when swimming are dangerous. Just have a big glass of fresh water afterwards. You'll probably need one to wash the salty taste out anyway - I know I always do.)

Presumably if the Führer's brain really is kept in sea water, it's mixed with enough fresh water to reduce the salinity to a more reasonable level.

Or maybe Erwin is just making stuff up.

Or maybe this is a comic and none of it's real anyway.

EDIT: As it happens, I overlooked an important fact about the Baltic Sea. As reader Mikko Rasa writes:

I'd like to point out that the Baltic Sea actually does have a suitable level of salinity. To quote Wikipedia:

"The open surface waters of the central basin have salinity of 0.6 to 0.8 %. At the semi-enclosed bays with major freshwater inflows, such as head of Finnish Gulf with Neva mouth and head of Bothnian gulf with close mouths of Lule, Tornio and Kemi, the salinity is considerably lower. Below 40 to 70 m, the salinity is between 1.0 and 1.5 % in the open Baltic Sea, and more than this near Danish Straits."

So the surface water actually has a lower salinity than human blood. That's not to say it's necessarily very good for use in a brain jar, with all the micro-organisms and such. I don't know if the comic characters are aware of this, but you neglected to mention it in the comments so I thought I'd notify you of it.

Why do I know this? I happen to live in Southern Finland and do scuba diving as a hobby, so I've picked up a factoid or two about the local oceanography.

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2026-05-14 Rerun commentary: I've since been to southern Finland. And it's a braver person than me who would willingly jump into that water. At least in November. On sea water, one of the travel documentaries I remember enjoying as a child was a pair of Australian adventurers who in 1966 collected water from the Indian Ocean on the west coast and then drove across central Australia all the way to the east coast, where they poured it into the Pacific. (I watched it in reruns - I wasn't even born in 1966!) Hopefully they were careful not to transport any invasive organisms!

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3121.html

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3120.html

You can interpret anything as a risque euphemism if you're in the right frame of mind.

Or maybe that should be the wrong frame of mind.

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2026-05-13 Rerun commentary: Don't mind me. I'm just in the right frame of mind over here.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3120.html

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3117.html

I guess if the universe can be wounded, it needs giant space-amoeba-like white cells to travel around and heal them up.

Well, that's the best explanation I can think of for the Star Trek episode "The Immunity Syndrome".

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2026-05-10 Rerun commentary: That really is one of the weirdest episodes of the original Star Trek. You can relive the experience in just two minutes with my comic version.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3117.html

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3114.html

Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz, was and remains perhaps the most famous stage magician and escape artist in history. He was also a noted sceptic, and spent much of his later life debunking claims of spiritualists, psychics, and mediums.

Ironically there exists a tradition to this day of magicians to try to contact Houdini's departed spirit at séances. This is not quite as strange as it sounds, because prior to his death, Houdini agreed with his wife Bess that if he passed away and his spirit ever returned to Earth he would utter a secret codeword that only she knew, to prove it was him. In this way he planned to foil any claims by charlatan mediums that they had contacted him. Bess held séances on the night of Halloween for ten years after Houdini's death, but never heard the code word. She gave up at this point, but other magicians continued the tradition.

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2026-05-07 Rerun commentary: This comic would have been better if I could somehow have shown that Jamie was actually yanking the chain in the middle panel. Anyway, the one intrguing question about Houdini's miraculous escapes is how-dini.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3114.html

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3112.html

Why is it that hussies are always brazen?

I always thought that meant they were plated in brass.

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2026-05-04 Rerun commentary: And that hussies were a breed of dog used for pulling sleds. Brazen does actually mean "made of brass", although that usage is somewhat archaic now. However, it's a good word to use to spice up your Dungeons & Dragons room descriptions. You see a 30 by 20 foot room, decorated with brazen statues of sled dogs. EDIT: Reader SEF pointed out the missing connection in my musings:

The other relevant phrase (eg for an outspoken upstart of a woman within a patriarchy) is "bold as brass". So a brazen hussy is just a shorter form (ie a metaphor replacing the simile).

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3112.html