Monday, April 17, 2006

John Buys a Car Part II

I must admit when I saw today’s strip, I wrote up my usual snark for the Foobiverse’s Journal, going through it panel by panel and thinking to myself, “What am I going to do with this one? Neither Howard nor Jeremy nor Constable Paul Wright will care 2 wits whether or not John has his hands in his pockets or you can’t see through the Crevasse’s windows or Gordon sucks up to John.” Fortunately for me, apparently aprilp_katje had the same problem and she went on a completely different tangent, resurrecting one-time-appearance-only Josh, the computer geek-god from an erasing. There would have been more to do to play with this as Jeremy, only the kids in Canada are out of school today, so there would not be a casual meet between Jeremy and Josh. So, I opted to have my characters react to the unerasing of Josh for their initial posts of the day. The odd thing was I wanted to write a school lunch time snark about it, but I had to keep reminding myself they weren’t in school.

The character of mine to whom aprilp_katje reacted the most in their initial snark of the day was to Constable Paul Wright, and she inspired me to have a brief conversation with her about how the good constable might try to emulate Patterson-like behaviour with the sticky-out tongue laughing. We already saw Paul try out punning during his last appearance in the strip, so this wasn’t farfetched. Not terribly funny, but reasonably within his character.

In the Creative Writing Forum, I noticed that qnjones had the Melanie Forsythe character mention her profession as a professional shopper, so I thought it would be fun for the shopping princess, Dirne Aufkleber to run into her. From what qnjones wrote, it appeared that Mrs. Forsythe’s qualification for being a personal shopper were simply that she liked to shop and she lived in a nice neighbourhood. The actual qualifications for personal shoppers listed on the internet were not far from this. The only difference was that many of the personal shoppers had a background in retail sales, and so they knew a little bit about how stores worked with their buyers. One website also recommended the personal shoppers keep up with the latest fashions by reading magazines, so I took great delight in creating my massive fashion magazine list, all of which exist in real life.

Last but not least, I remembered that susannamoodie had her uncle Arne character mention briefly the possibility of doing a magic act for Thorvald McGuire’s supper club, the Valhalla. No one had acted on that comment, so I decided Howard would do it. Aside from using susannamoodie’s delightful uncle Arne, it also provided Howard with the opportunity to get some time off. The Howard workaholic joke is fine, but I have discovered it is somewhat limiting, when I try to put Howard in a position to snark things. It took me forever to find a way to snark Mike’s monthly letter from the month of April, which has been crying out for a good snarking since the beginning of this month.

Tomorrow’s strip: John Patterson finally gets around to trading in his car. Since his September, 2005 monthly letter, John has been talking about this. The big day has finally come. It’s like seeing a movie preview more than a year in advance of the movie. When the movie finally comes out, it is a big letdown, because you already know what is going to happen. John trades his Bushwhacker convertible in for a Crevasse sedan. End of story. The only thing really different about this strip is that John said this already happened in the strip not once, but two times last month. Are they just picking up strips randomly and putting them together wherever they fall? Are they going to explain why John isn’t going for a station wagon to haul his train stuff, like he mentioned in his March monthly letter? Will there be any part of this story that is even the slightest bit interesting? For example, I got a new used car last year, and the salesperson did that thing they always do where supposedly they go off to talk to their boss to try to get a lower price for you and then make you wait and wait. I had 2 kids with me, that were extremely impatient, so we started to get up and leave. Then the salesman came rushing out from wherever he was to keep us from going. As boring as that story is, I will lay money it is more interesting than what Lynn is about to give us. Prove me wrong, Lynn. Prove me wrong.

2 Comments:

Blogger April Patterson said...

I set up Josh the Geek god to sit at Jeremy's lunch table. Hope that suits for Jeremy's lunchtime snark. :)

9:27 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Yes it does. I snarked away on poor Josh, but not too badly.

11:03 AM  

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