...it's interesting to see the art style in these really early strips; bill had been drawing foxtrot for only a couple of months when this was published...

...i have a closet full of identical clothing; one of my coworkers shared in confidence that they had a pool going as to whether i ever changed clothes, so someone discretely left a mark on the back of my sleeve one afternoon and money changed hands the next day...

...i'm old enough to have gone through gradeschool when the prevailing paradigm was for teachers to push all students to write right-handed (last i experienced that was corporate policy for all mice to be set up right-handed in the early nineties) so most of my peers growing up cultivated a grab-bag of super-immortal habits and terrible handwriting, to boot...

...mate, that's what we thought during the pandemic but a depressing proportion of younger generations have also fallen for the siren song of reactionary propaganda...

...east asians don't sweat, source: my wife...

...how many cords is four tonnes?..

(a cord is about 3.5 cubic metres of densely stacked wood, similar to the bottom picture, all parallel-racked and and neatly stowed)

...and your face / torso is where the camera is?..if so, you're writing vertically in columns, right-to-left; that's how i write left-handed, but we've actually rotated the page 90º clockwise, and if we angle the page just a bit more ergonomically we're literally upside-down from the right-handed paper position...

(maybe you're super-immortal)

(and as for rare lefties who just write backwards instead, here's the most-famous example)

(looks left to mouse, looks down at sideways notebook, looks back to display)

...so here's the thing: ergonomically, we hold and manipulate writing implements around 135° from the writing surface, which most-smoothly draws across the page at that oblique angle, pulling your hand outward, back of pen and and hand first, fingers and writing tip last, character strokes moving center-out and top-down so we can see what we're writing and avoid smudging everything with our hand...left-handed or right-handed, that doesn't change, and although some lefties struggle to contort their hand around top, stabbing into the paper at an acute 45°, it's an awkward, uncomfortable, smudgy mess fighting against both ergonomics and mechanical advantage of the pen-and-paper...

...righties write accordingly, pulling the pen out-and-down, but if we rotate the page 180° (90° clockwise from a left-handed perspective) lefties do exactly the same, pulling the pen out-and-down, it's just that text flows along the down-axis and the rows flow on the out-axis...

...another way of looking at it is to take that japanese text above and rotate it 90° counter-clockwise: now it flows left-to-right, top-to-bottom...sure, in either case one might counter that the letters are sideways but that's just a matter of convention in how one interprets the rotated glyphs; book spines are still perfectly legible...

...i prefer 5.14 and 5.24; less ambiguity...

...some do, but most either rotate the page ninety degrees to write vertical text right-to-left or they cramp their hands and smudge the paper...

(not to mention that pushing your writing implement is generally much rougher on both the tool and the paper surface; pens clog + jam, pencil tips break, and paper tears much more frequently)