Lance Mannion says it better than I ever could, so go read him on the subject of Anthony and Elizabeth’s marriage in “For Better or For Worse.” This was once one of my favorite comic strips, and he comes close to capturing my utter disappointment in this awful plot development. Someone said here a while back that Lynn Johnston recently suffered some tawdry personal tragedy — her husband ran off with her younger assistant, or something — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t play a huge part in this.
It’s hard to believe, watching an interesting young woman stripped of her career and married off to a dickless bore, that this cartoonist once had the guts to kill a dog in a daily comic strip.
Poor Lizard Breath. Ick.
brian stouder said on August 25, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Lance Mannion says it better than I ever could
BZZZZZT!!! Wrongo, your highness….but modesty is a good thing, I suppose.
(I read that “easy reading is damned hard writing” – and you pull that off every day)
228 chars
Dexter said on August 25, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I used to read this strip daily but stopped when I quit getting the paper Freep…no good reason, but I did stop. Oh, but I was ranting for weeks when Lynn Johnston killed Farley!! It STILL rankles me. I told everybody I knew “Comic strip dogs don’t have to die!”, and punctuated that with “Why can’t Snoopy die?” I was then and am now sick of Snoopy. Now Wiki tells me that Schultz was gonna have Snoopy run over by a truck if Johnston killed Farley. That was a lie, or else Schultz was dead by then, no matter, Snoopy lives on and on and Farley appears once in a while as a ghost-dog. I am now going to resume reading For Better or For Worse.
652 chars
MichaelG said on August 25, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I quit reading the strip a long time ago. It just turned to mush. I don’t to repeat Nance and Lance. They’ve said it so well.
Was it just me or did that birds nest stadium look like a toilet seat from some angles?
219 chars
nancy said on August 25, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Alan said that, too! Every shot of it, he’d say, “Look, the toilet seat,” and I’d get all huffy about no, it’s a bird’s nest, and it’s avante-garde architecture, and blah blah blah.
181 chars
LAMary said on August 25, 2008 at 4:56 pm
It was a giant lit up wicker toilet seat.
41 chars
MichaelG said on August 25, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Great minds think alike. There’s an interview of the guy who designed it on a web site called “Sexy Beijing”. I don’t know why it’s called that, but it’s a fun site. I don’t want to access it here at the office for the usual reasons. I’ll do a link when I get home. Anyway, he’s a pretty cool guy.
302 chars
James said on August 25, 2008 at 5:01 pm
The best site for Foob watching: “The Comics Curmudgeon.
91 chars
Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 25, 2008 at 5:11 pm
When they took away Mark Trail’s pipe . . .
43 chars
Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 25, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Oh, if you’re watching the opening of the convention, this is a great profile on the CEO of the DNC, Rev. Leah Daughtry — http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20minister-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
204 chars
MichaelG said on August 25, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Here’s the interview with Ai Weiwei
http://www.sexybeijing.tv/new/video.asp?id=99
I don’t know, Mary. Something about the idea of a wicker toilet seat . . .
172 chars
alex said on August 25, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Ai Weiwei but it no come out. Enrarged plostate?
48 chars
Danny said on August 25, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Alex, sounds like you need to read that classic novel, “Golden Streams,” by I.P. Freely.
Well, after four days at Disneyland, my brain is mush. Maybe in a few days I’ll participate, but I’m in a real fog now. I barely made it through work today.
Mary, good for you not doing everything that those other parents do. You aren’t a mean mommy at all.
Nance, as I was catching up in the last thread, the song Zombie kept playing through my mind.
Oh and everyone who claims to be warming up to Joe Biden. Puhleesse. One word. Windbag.
…Okay, another. Sanctimonious.
And like Mary, I’m not being mean. You know it’s true. Deal.
Missed youz guyz!
677 chars
beb said on August 25, 2008 at 10:57 pm
One of the things I like about “Arlo and Janice” is that fArlo clearly still has the hots for Janice even though they are clearly middle-aged. For that matter the current story line involves the son wanting to quit college to help a girl he mets several years earlier run a restaurant. Think is, the girl was pregnant back then and is a single mom today. There’s no walking around that issue.
393 chars
brian stouder said on August 25, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Wow! Wasn’t Michelle Obama’s speech wonderful? And the little Obama girls stole the show!
And – if you watched msnbc, Rachel Maddow was on fire, baby!! She seems to have had enough of the absolute bullshit from the other side – especially McCain’s constant reiteration of his years as a prisoner of war, as a defense against (for two recent examples) criticism for not knowing how many houses he owns, or how he dumped his wife for a younger, vastly richer woman.
Every day, Rush Limbaugh repeatedly refers to Obama as “The Messiah”; and I get the tactic. Limbaugh is the meat grinder; nothing sexy, but day after day after day he produces the intellectual equivalent of hamburgers.
The arbitrariness of it might eventually get lost in translation; if enough people echo it, it becomes accepted – especially by the time the McCain’s national campaign goes to play that card against Obama (the “he’s a celebrity” canard)
And yet – McCain himself seems to be personally one-upping this fabricated “messiah” riff, referring to himself as a genuine Martyr! We cannot criticize McCain’s inability to know how many mansions and condos he owns; we cannot question his abandonment of his frst wife, nor his subsequent marriage to a wealthy beer barroness; we must not scrutinize his Keating Five finagling; we must avert our eyes from his seemingly endless streams of mis-statements and flat-out factual lapses –
ALL because, remember, he was a POW in Vietnam for 51/2 years. He is our national Martyr-In-Chief. It is nothing less than political blasphemy to question our National Martyr – indeed our National Savior – on ANY grounds at all!
I have never heard the Obama campaign impugn McCain’s military service to his nation; whereas hardly the day goes by, anymore, that McCain himself doesn’t himself devalue and diminish his noble sacrifice – with ignominious and ignoble invocation of it, on entirely unrelated matters.
1974 chars
Dexter said on August 26, 2008 at 12:00 am
Toilet seat!? Damn, you folks have active imaginations! It was a birds nest in my mind’s eye…now if you wanted a guffaw in the potty-department, you had to have seen Don Imus’s new studio in NYC last December when he started with ABC & RFD-TV. His set looked exactly like a bare-bones crapper seat, and Imus was irate. They went on holiday break and returned in January with a newly designed, continuous-flow desk that only looked like a toilet if you thought really hard, strained your mind…then you maybe could have seen it.
538 chars
Dexter said on August 26, 2008 at 12:18 am
Jeff the Mild: 24 years ago Mort Walker commented on how editors painted out cigarettes and pipes from his many strips (he is most famous for beetle bailey). I remember Cookie always was burning an ash-dropping cigarette and Cosmo always had a cigar burning. In this story he comments on how he toned-down Ms. Buxley’s personna…
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198412/murphy
379 chars
Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 26, 2008 at 7:16 am
Arthur C. Clarke, in one of his later novels, set i’m thinking around Saturn, had a character who had made a fortune having written an algorithm that deleted not only cigarettes but cig smoke from digital editions of classic movies, allowing people in 2100 to watch “Casablanca” without the obscenely incomprehensible sight of two consenting adults smoking.
(And let me say, Bergman was indeed smokin’ in that movie.)
Anyhow, reality lapped Clarke on that one — they already can digitally elide smoke wisps without touching the scene. Does that take the heart, or at least the lungs of a movie like “Now, Voyager” out of it with a cig-ectomy? But it’s happening . . .
* * *
‘Scuse me — Teddy honored with footage of him and family on a classic, wooden yacht that costs a mill a year just to keep in sailing condition, and reaction on all networks from an heiress marryin’ guy who windsurfs at one of their 20 or so homes (go ahead, ask Kerry how many he *and his wife* owns — i’ll bet he knows, today). I think the 7 house deal (Housegate? C’mon, Olbermann) with the Hensley Family Trust’s condo investments is over. If they put up Romney as veep, he’ll have a cheery retort about “we own 19, but i’m building two more this week just to beat Sen. Kerry.”
1273 chars
Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 26, 2008 at 7:39 am
If all these politics stress you out — serenity now!
http://www.peninsulaclarion.com/kenairiverrun/kenairiverrun.html
121 chars
beb said on August 26, 2008 at 8:15 am
I am at times astonished by how much smoking went on in old movies, still it’s wrong to re-edit movies to remove smoking references. I’m told when Baen Books recently reissued a number of SF writer James Schmitz’s stories, all references to smoking were edited out. Honest to God, who picks up smoking from reading a book? And of course in the old Modesty Blaise series the newspapers were always having her panties and bras painted black so they’d be more modest.
467 chars
Peter said on August 26, 2008 at 9:25 am
FB or FW: Talk about jumping the shark. It’s a shame, too.
Mr. McCain: Yes, it’s probably true that the Kennedy’s and Kerry’s own a lot more homes than his wife, but really, you don’t know how many homes you own? That’s freaky on many levels. He could have just said a shitload and it would have blown over. Is it OK to diss him because of the wife switch? I don’t know. Is it OK to go after him about being one of the Keating Five? Hell yeah.
Mr. Obama – Mad props to his daughter! Did I dream this, or did Obama say he was in Saint Louis when the graphic said Kansas City, and then didn’t his daughter say “Daddy, what town are you in” and he changed it to Kansas City? Looking out for Dad – what more could you want from a kid?
746 chars
moe99 said on August 28, 2008 at 10:36 am
Late to this party, as I was in S. Cal dropping my youngest off to college (small gulp) but, Nance, have you noticed how Lizard Breath’s new mate Anthony really looks like her father? Talk about Oedipus/Electra issues. I just hate this strip in a way you only can with something you used to love.
299 chars