Vacuuming Day 5

We started off the day going to Krystle’s Kakes & Pies. The character of Howard cannot possibly go back to work for Krystle after she raped him using the werewolf pheromone last week. He has some sense of pride. So I had to contrive a reason for her rejecting his application for employment. I resorted to Dr. Ted again. Weak writing I know, but it fit too well with the events that had most recently occurred in April’s Real Blog.

Then aprilp_katje suggested that Howard work in her dad’s medical building. qnjones used the building name Mefait when she had Howard and Becky go there last, and I foolishly tried to verify that this was the correct name hoping I wouldn’t find anything to contradict it. Of course I did and Mefait wasn’t the correct name. I was hoping that nobody had ever mentioned it in the strip or the letters. Oh well. I am somewhat obsessive about making those kinds of details match in April’s Real Blog, so there you go. In any case, because I had just used the Dr. Ted excuse before with Krystle McGuire, I naturally could not have Howard working in his building. However, I decided that Howard would go through a series of interviews for the job, which would allow him to snark things other than Dr. Ted, of whom I have grown extremely tired.

In looking for things about which to snark Dr. P that had not already been covered so marvelously by qnjones before me, I noticed that Dr. P had rambled on in the November monthly letter about talking to his associate about expanding the business, but then said absolutely nothing on the idea in the December monthly letter. So, I decided to make Dr. P have a little attention span problem.

Deanna snark was directly derived from her December monthly letter with her being obsessive about cleanliness. All the items mentioned in the Deanna snark in her inspecting and asking questions of Howard are taken directly from the December monthly letter. The sauerkraut is a reference to an earlier Deanna snark from qnjones on the Howard and Becky visit to Deanna where sauerkraut helps prevent the flu or something like that.

Dr. Everett Callahan came into play because sometime back I asked for suggestions on what to do with Howard, and the good doctor was mentioned as a romantic interest. In this case, Everett’s dialogue is mainly pulled out of his dialogue from the 3 daily strips he was in. I decided to do that one in script form to intentionally contrast Everett’s style of speech with Howard’s.

Finally, Howard is not hired due to Dr. McCauley. I thought that would be the end of that until qnjones challenged my writing skills by having Dr. McCauley kidnapped for a second time. Shortly after I read this post, I had to go do a concert. When I came back there was all this slumber party dialogue. I was a little jealous, because I have no female characters who could have participated. It was clear my fellow ARB posters were trying to get Jeremy involved, which I thought was very nice of them to include me. Unfortunately, I was singing at the time and missed it. Oh well. Can’t be on the computer all the time.

After getting home, I decided to return qnjones’ challenge back to her by turning Dr. McCauley into a made man, a term I learned from watching the movie Goodfellas. Just to let you know, if anyone touches a made man, no matter what he's done, it's like an act of war against the family he's associated with. You can only kill him if you have permission from the top levels of the organization. We have tied Dr. McCauley into having criminal dealings so many times, this designation did not seem farfetched to me. Hopefully this will add a new dimension to the Krystle/Thorvald/Dr. Ted triangle to test qnjones’ writing abilities. Plus I enjoyed doing the running joke on the schnitzel torture one more time.

Tomorrow: aprilp_katje suggested as Marjee Mahaha that Howard work for her as a shampoo girl. I liked this suggestion, because it was different from the things Howard had been doing before. In the strip, we see an almost an exact duplicate ending to one to the Sunday strips in the archives to which aprilp_katje provided a link in her Blog today. That in itself, should lead us to some nice snark.