The Rantings of Pab Sungenis
Police and other authorities in Boston, fearing a terrorist threat, shut down the Longfellow and Boston University bridges, and blocked all boat traffic on the Charles River because of suspicious electronic devices.
What were the devices they were so scared about?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html
…that at least three people on my LJ Friends list have either had their car fall apart or get smashed within days of each other.
Be careful out there.
Went to settlement, it only took about 35 minutes.
We have the new house, started moving boxes and other stuff this afternoon.
Too tired to type right now. Mongo has a vet appointment at 10 AM, so I may not get a chance to get pictures tomorrow. Maybe later in the week. Buit, rest assured, pictures there will be.
For those who are too busy (or have lives) to watch it tonight, here’s advance audio of Fearless Leader’s State Of The Union address.
Nothing surprising.
GoComics (the parent company of Comics Sherpa, who feature The New Adventures Of Queen Victoria) announced on their blog that the unthinkable is happening to For Better Or For Worse.
No, friends, it’s not ending. It’s mutating. Starting this fall, the strip will be switching to what they’re calling “hybrid” form: new strips whenever possible, and retellings (usually with “flashback” first panels, like Mike sitting there saying things like “Remember when Farley died?” to some character who wasn’t even born yet when Farley actually died and retouched art).
That’s fine. It cuts back on Lynn’s workload, and while I’d rather she just bring on some new artists to give her more time to concentrate on the scripts, I can accept the need for this.
Second, John, Elly, April, Liz, and whichever guy Liz happens to be shagging this month are essentially being written out of the strip. Michael and his family are going to be the new focus.
I can deal with this, also. It’s taking the strip back to its roots in a natural way. It started out about John and Elly dealing with their kids and life approaching and through middle age. When Michael was out on his own and Liz was old enough to start dating, they needed to bring baby April in to continue to tell the kinds of stories the audience was used to. Now that April is the age (actually older, I believe) than Liz was when that change took place, and Elly is too old for another child, it makes sense to shift to Michael and his family.
Third, Johnston has decided she’s going to freeze everyone at the age they’re currently at. One of the comic page’s longest continuing real-time stories (second only to Gasoline Alley, which is still continuing in real time after almost 80 years, believe it or not!) is coming to an end.
For this I shall not stand.
The joy of following For Better Or For Worse was that at whatever point you jumped on, the strip grew with you. If you started as an adult, then John and Elly were your characters and you emphasized with them. They were going through what you were going through.
I happened to be just younger than Michael and older than Liz (at least that’s how I perceived it…in reality I was 10 when the strip started) so I always followed them and felt for them. If you came in as a kid in the nineties, April’s story was yours. We dealt with dating, graduation, marriage, death, Liz becoming a slut, because for many of us it was happening in our own lives, our family’s life, or our friend’s lives. The strip built a beautiful narrative that, intentionally or not, held up a mirror to all of our own lives.
And it’s all going to end.
Remember Blondie? There’s a comic strip out there by that name nowadays, but it’s not really Blondie any more. When it started, Blondie was a continuing story about “flapper” Blondie and her millionaire beau, Dagwood. When Dagwood’s family disowned him for marrying Blondie, readers followed their adventures in married life, including the birth and growth of two kids. Eventually, however, the decision was made to “freeze” the strip. As a result, people stopped caring about what happened to Alexander (formerly known as “Baby Dumpling”) and Cookie, how Dagwood was managing at work, and how Blondie could pinch pennies at home. It became just another cheap gag-a-day strip with no continuity and no consequences.
That’s what For Better Or For Worse is going to become. Michael and Deanna will always have two kids. They’ll always be extremely young. We won’t see what happens to them as they grow. We won’t see what they grow up to become as we did with Michael and Liz. We’re being robbed of our chance to mourn the death of Grandpa and, eventually, John and Elly. Worse, our kids who start identifying with Michael’s brood will eventually outgrow them and, consequently, the strip.
If you really need it driven home, think about this: without the continuing storyline and aging characters, we would have been robbed of the Death of Farley story, arguably the greatest thing Lynn Johnston ever wrote. Farley would still be chasing after Baby “Nizzie” as she tormented her brother Mike, who would still be in grade school. John and Elly would still be in their late 20′s to early 30′s. We never would have had Warren or Paul or anyone else Liz has slept with, or Lawrence’s coming out story, or Shannon, or the birth of Merrie, let alone her brother Robin. Or April! All those characters we love, and have shared our lives with, would never have existed.
And we’ll never see another real character introduced again. Sure, we may see some new friends for Merrie at school or Robin at day care, but they won’t have fascinating stories like even the least significant supporting character were given with tender loving care by their de facto mother, Lynn Johnston. There will be no more Lawrences, or Gordos, or Anthonys. Never again. And that’s sad.
So, even if the strip itself isn’t ending, we’re still losing one of the last intelligent strips in the paper. Farewell, For Better Or For Worse. We’ve had the better. All that can be left now is worse.
©2007 P. Sungenis, All Rights Reserved.
In a recent Cingular commercial, two morons can be seen loading a song onto their cell phone. They are unable to sing along properly with the refrain, debating about which incorrect version of the lyrics is allegedly correct.
They do this despite the fact that the refrain in question is, in fact, the title of the song, which can be seen very clearly in the commercial on the phone’s display: “ROCK THE CASBAH – By The Clash.” Presumably, young blonde idiot must have had to search for the song to move it onto his phone, so at least he should know what the refrain is. Yet he sings it as “Rock the cashbox” and eventually agrees with young brunette idiot who insists it’s “Shock The Catbox.”
Hidden Message Number One: People Who Use Cingular Phones Are Stupid.
Alternatively….
Hidden Message Number Two: People Who Use Cingular Phones Can’t Read.
Or both of the above.
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