Mr. Bloody Face

I really spent most of today taking humorous setups from other April’s Real Blog posters. Schmoosie as Liz gave me the “pass the information to Dr. McCauley” post about the tapeworm. I read back through the John Patterson October monthly letter from the For Better or For Worse website and was frankly appalled at his lack of sensitivity to poor Ted McCauley. In poking fun at that, I actually changed very few things from the monthly letter. The John meanness spoke for itself.

As for the snark on today’s strip, I was initially stumped about what to do, until I read the line “I wondered, what truths those tears would tell.” It occurred to me, “What truths would the tears tell?” The Cherokee Trail of Tears story or the general story of natives’ abuse at the hands of the white? Then I thought, since this is the recounting of a real-life meeting between Lynn and a native (his picture is on the website), the native might actually say to Lynn, “Your strip used to be a lot funnier” or a number of other things that are a lot ruder. That led me to what would a truth-teller say to the Mtigwaki characters and the general post. It seemed to get a good reaction from my fellow ARB posters, which was pleasing, since I found it a little funny myself. The only hard part was trying to figure out something that would actually embarrass Howard. I should mention that I consider schmoosie’s follow-up to my truth-teller story to be superb.

Andre Boisclair is a Quebec politician, who apparently bought a lot of drugs from Quebecois biker gangs and yet still manages to maintain political power. He’s sort of like mayor Marion Barry for Washington, D.C. I was a little surprised to read that biker gangs are a real problem in Quebec. I got this one from qnjones posting as Becky that her father had been in a Quebecois biker gang. It was a little too obscure to be funny I think.

Then aprilp_katje set me up with Winnie Kelpfroth visiting Howard in the bake shop after buying a number of undisclosed books and magazines. A visit to the FBoFW website showed that Winnie likes mystery novels. So, it took a little while to produce a list of gay-oriented mystery novels with gay-oriented titles. The magazines are simply the gay-oriented ones I could find that did not include pictures of naked or semi-naked men. I figured an aunt wouldn’t buy porn for a nephew. Winnie’s presence allowed me to do some Mike and Deanna October monthly letter snark. It also allowed me to set up some events for Howard that I have in mind once the For Better or For Worse strip gets back to Mike and Dee and has Mike quit his job.

Wednesday’s strip talks about the call of the dancer being compared to nature’s call. The dancers near where I am are pretty young, and their call is usually their parents telling them they are going to do it. I also discovered that there is a whole porcupine needle art industry, and it is one of the oldest native art forms. There are not really any porcupines in my section of Arizona, so I am unfamiliar with this craft. Anyway, I can see some possibilities here for tomorrow’s snark.