Elly Cleans Part II
We are unfortunately in an Elly Cleans arc, which is probably going to hit new lows in boredom as we go along. At least in today’s strip, Elly showed a flourish of energy and John had a reasonably decent rejoinder.
Constable Paul Wright would normally be difficult to snark, but for some reason, one of the running themes in the April monthly letters was cleaning. Elly, Deanna, and Liz all mentioned cleaning. In Elizabeth’s case, she mentioned that Paul’s place was very clean, and so this pegs Paul as a neatnik. This story arc allowed me to unload the Ojibwe dictionary and find all the words related to “clean.” As is usual in these cases, the availability of words with very particular definitions shows the very distinctive and different way the Ojibwe think than I do and most importantly than Elly does. I tried to have Paul remark on it in semi-humourous way, but I couldn’t get it to come out funny. The plain fact of the matter is, in the strip and in the monthly letters, Elizabeth is a slob, and the fact that the monthly letters mentioned Paul is neat, could be interpreted as a possibly source of conflict between the two of them. However, we have not seen any conflict between Paul and Liz, even when she ran off with another guy, so I don’t know if it is possible for Paul to get upset with Liz over anything. Given that, he just mentions that Liz is perhaps not as clean as her mother. I have also been going with the idea that Paul really liked Elly during his one visit with her. I would hope it would allow the story of his going to Mtigwaki based on seeing her photo once less creepy and more like, if this girl looks like that and is as nice a person as her mother, then she is worth meeting.
Howard took aprilp_katje’s snark on Moira and the mysterious moving date of Elly’s retirement and provided an explanation as to why they had the dinner at the Kabuki House, hopefully enhancing aprilp_katje’s explanation. Then qnjones threw me for a loop with her Howard interrupts Drew and Becky skinny-dipping story. She had Howard quote Dirne Aufkleber, had Howard pinky swear Becky and had Howard upset with Becky for trying to go to third base – 3 things that Howard has never done before. I decided to work them into the character by making Howard fear Becky was going all the way with Drew Fontaine. And to be perfectly honest, if I were a high school boy in a heated pool naked with my high school girlfriend, I would have been shooting to go further than 3rd base, so this made sense to me. One of the things I like best about posting with qnjones is these unexpected challenges. She’s great.
Jeremy Jones’s storyline was mainly his increased involvement with susannamoodie's Zandra Larson / the_berserker's Duncan Anderson MacBeth story and including aprilp_katje in it posting as April. So, I wrote up some school gossip about Zandra and Duncan and discussed with April the possibilities of what could be done with getting her into it. I like to involve April in my stories, if possible, since she is the lynchpin of the whole Blog.
Tomorrow’s strip: Elly finds a slide projector. I predict pictures of button nose April are going to surface in coming strips. Lynn Johnston so much prefers that April to the modern one, I must say I should not be surprised Elly would find some memorabilia that would allow Lynn to draw button-nose April once again.
Constable Paul Wright would normally be difficult to snark, but for some reason, one of the running themes in the April monthly letters was cleaning. Elly, Deanna, and Liz all mentioned cleaning. In Elizabeth’s case, she mentioned that Paul’s place was very clean, and so this pegs Paul as a neatnik. This story arc allowed me to unload the Ojibwe dictionary and find all the words related to “clean.” As is usual in these cases, the availability of words with very particular definitions shows the very distinctive and different way the Ojibwe think than I do and most importantly than Elly does. I tried to have Paul remark on it in semi-humourous way, but I couldn’t get it to come out funny. The plain fact of the matter is, in the strip and in the monthly letters, Elizabeth is a slob, and the fact that the monthly letters mentioned Paul is neat, could be interpreted as a possibly source of conflict between the two of them. However, we have not seen any conflict between Paul and Liz, even when she ran off with another guy, so I don’t know if it is possible for Paul to get upset with Liz over anything. Given that, he just mentions that Liz is perhaps not as clean as her mother. I have also been going with the idea that Paul really liked Elly during his one visit with her. I would hope it would allow the story of his going to Mtigwaki based on seeing her photo once less creepy and more like, if this girl looks like that and is as nice a person as her mother, then she is worth meeting.
Howard took aprilp_katje’s snark on Moira and the mysterious moving date of Elly’s retirement and provided an explanation as to why they had the dinner at the Kabuki House, hopefully enhancing aprilp_katje’s explanation. Then qnjones threw me for a loop with her Howard interrupts Drew and Becky skinny-dipping story. She had Howard quote Dirne Aufkleber, had Howard pinky swear Becky and had Howard upset with Becky for trying to go to third base – 3 things that Howard has never done before. I decided to work them into the character by making Howard fear Becky was going all the way with Drew Fontaine. And to be perfectly honest, if I were a high school boy in a heated pool naked with my high school girlfriend, I would have been shooting to go further than 3rd base, so this made sense to me. One of the things I like best about posting with qnjones is these unexpected challenges. She’s great.
Jeremy Jones’s storyline was mainly his increased involvement with susannamoodie's Zandra Larson / the_berserker's Duncan Anderson MacBeth story and including aprilp_katje in it posting as April. So, I wrote up some school gossip about Zandra and Duncan and discussed with April the possibilities of what could be done with getting her into it. I like to involve April in my stories, if possible, since she is the lynchpin of the whole Blog.
Tomorrow’s strip: Elly finds a slide projector. I predict pictures of button nose April are going to surface in coming strips. Lynn Johnston so much prefers that April to the modern one, I must say I should not be surprised Elly would find some memorabilia that would allow Lynn to draw button-nose April once again.
posted by howard at 10:38 PM
6 Comments:
Invoking Jeffo Bray was a good choice. Thanks for the compliments on how I played it.
Yes, Paul is insinuating that not only is Liz a slob, but Elly may be a slob too, by his "Spartan" standards. Certainly both the strip and monthly letters have given us leeway to snark Liz the slob and on one of Elly's visits to Mtigwaki, she pretty much said the same thing. It looks like Lynn is going to be doing "cleaning" all week, so we have lots of oppotunities to snark away.
Lynn Johnston so much prefers that April to the modern one, I must say I should not be surprised Elly would find some memorabilia that would allow Lynn to draw button-nose April once again.
ITA. Note that Elly never answers April's question here about whether they miss her baby self. BTW, I was certain April was brown-eyed. Do you suppose Elly only meant the blue eyes a newborn has?
D'oh! My post above was supposed to have a link to the March 31, 2005 strip.
I was certain April was brown-eyed. Do you suppose Elly only meant the blue eyes a newborn has?
They only seem to put black dots in the eyes, even in the colour strips, so eye colour is difficult to determine.
True--one exception is the third picture in from the left, second row, in the photo gallery at the Foob site, where April is holding a magnifier to her eye, which looks brown. Though I seem to recall another close-up where her eyes looked purple, so I dunno.
aprilp_katje,
You are extremely observant. I had not noticed that before in the photo gallery.
Post a Comment
<< Home