The Wedding of Thorvald and Kortney / Thora

Today’s strip was difficult to snark because ultimately you didn’t know where John Patterson was going with his “agitated” line. As it turns out from tomorrow’s strip, John is concerned about not monitoring April on the internet. Elly says you have to trust your teenager. There are some snarking possibilities there, particularly considering that the monthly letters are in direct opposition to the “trust” concept.

The various commentaries ran wild with John calling April, “beautiful” another in a long line of statements where the father compliments the daughter on her appearance when he never compliments his wife. Speaking as a married man, it was impressed upon me years ago, that it was necessary to tell your wife every day she was attractive. My initial thought was that women were not so insecure as to believe such a thing was necessary, however married life has proved to me otherwise. Whenever I say even the slightest thing positive about some other woman in the presence of my wife, I usually encounter a “Why don’t you say those kinds of things about me?” response, to which I respond, “I compliment your appearance each and every day”, and then I tell her what the compliment was and when it occurred. The easiest thing to do would be to never compliment another woman in the presence of my wife, but sometimes I slip up.

In any case, John seems to compliment April exclusively, which causes many For Better or For Worse snarkers to consider his compliments a little bit more than paternal. I compliment my 8-year-old daughter’s appearance often, because, as I understand it, the daughter is supposed to get self-esteem about her appearance from her father and not (as is the tragedy later on) from a teenaged boy, who is only interested in one thing. Also, my daughter is a very pretty 8-year-old girl. I think I would have fewer problems with John calling April beautiful if he would fire off an occasional compliment to Elly, like “I love the way your nose increases and decreases size when you have hot flashes. It’s lovely.” Since I am not interested in doing a “John is in lust with April” snark, I simply used the word agitate(d) several times during the day.

Icelandic weddings. One of the nice things about April’s Real Blog is that it causes me to research subjects I would have never thought to have researched before, like the traditions of an Icelandic wedding. The traditional Icelandic wedding is supposed to have 4 -14 days of prewedding activities to be culminated in the wedding ceremony and the blessing of the conjugal bed. Well, I could not tolerate 4-14 days of Thorvald and Kortney doing wedding celebration, and 2 days was almost more than I could handle. The type of posting where you try to maintain a real-time clock on the subject is fast, requires quick reaction, and also a fair amount of mind-reading. qnjones had sketched out the wedding festivities up to the point where Kourtney is revealed as Kurt, the invasion of the electrified rodents (pray the next Pets monthly letter does not talk about this again) and Howard being revealed as Belfrieda Batsize. It was easy to follow along, because I knew what would happen. After that, we were making it up as we went along, with the second wedding, the drinking contest, and the raising of Tobias Nights as an issue all as new items.

Tobias Nights was something that I uncovered during my researching that I figured Kortney would never invoke, but qnjones introduced Thorvald’s new bride Thora and also indicated that she was an expert in all thing Nordic. So, it seemed appropriate to add in the Tobias Nights as a plot point. However, I could not introduce some of the stickier parts of the tradition which specified that a nobleman, or a priest would be the first person to enter into the marital bed during the Tobias nights instead of the husband. The nicer version was to deal with the idea that a marriage could put together a man and woman who had never met each other, and so they might need to have at least 3 days to get to know each other before they consummated the marriage. The story is based on the Book of Tobias. Much of the traditional Icelandic wedding has its roots in Danish / Catholic tradition, since Iceland was under the rule of Denmark for quite awhile. The wedding ceremony is actually a blending of the 2 traditions. It was interesting to research and as always with such things, I was not making it up. The traditions were confirmed by more than one website.

Brennivín and mead as the traditional wedding drinks were a lot of fun, particularly the Brennivín. Most alcoholic beverages in Iceland come from outside the country and are heavily taxed. Brennivín is an Icelandic schnapps, is not taxed and so it is cheap. Unfortunately for Icelanders, it is also nasty-tasting and the comment about it being the “black death” from yesterday is accurate. Apparently people in Iceland drink it to be patriotic or because it is cheap or to show off for tourists.

The other part that is difficult in those real-time posts is to drop off and give love for the funny things the posters are writing. It is going too fast. However, I must compliment qnjones for conceiving and sketching out the idea, aprilp_katje for playing Kortney, Marjee Mahaha, Eva and April very gamely, considering she did not know what the plot was; the_berserker for managing to read all those posts and drop in some pertinent Duncan posts of her own, and greytaill088 for doing some early Vicki Simone work to help set things up. It was a fine day.