Cars and Death and Rent

Today, the family went to go see a showing of Pixar’s Cars with the kids and fought the massive crush or crowd that accompanies such an outing on opening weekend. We got to the mall theatre and the showing we had planned to attend was sold-out, so we had to wait around for the next showing. As happens in these kinds of situations, our family got penned in by other people arriving and the kids drank most of their drinks and ate most of their popcorn before the movie was very far into starting. Also, the movie is rated “G”, so it attracts a different crowd than the “PG” crowd, which means younger and louder. My children, of course, had to take bathroom breaks during the course of the movie, which meant that 2 times, I and one of my kids had to walk in front of people to get out. There was a particularly impatient little girl who started shrieking she couldn’t see each time we passed her for the full 1 second she couldn’t see. That was lots of fun. The movie is good, probably on the level of another Pixar film, A Bug’s Life, but not with the same quality as Pixar’s The Incredibles or Finding Nemo. This was mainly because the humour was predictable and there was a glaring plot hole at the end of the film, where the main character race car's new-found friend cars show up unexpectedly without any reasonable explanation. Kid’s pictures are usually the dregs of the movie world, so compared to that standard, Cars was excellent.

Before we left, I had a Blogger battle to get my usual 5 posts in. The little window got errors after I opened the window again and again and again. I knew it was working, because I could easily open the Howard Kelpfroth Blog window, which does comments right on the same window. There is something about Blogger having to open a separate comment window for April’s Real Blog that makes it fail a lot.

In any case, today’s strip continued the burial discussion and fortunately for me, aprilp_katje chose to make a lot of extra comments to give me something to work with. I kept trying to find Ojibway burial rituals, but I got website after website complaining about the violation of Ojibway burial mounds across history. So, I finally gave in and made Paul’s response deal with that. Howard’s post had to do with AIDS, which is a big, big deal with my homosexual friends, but I cannot recollect it ever have been mentioned in For Better or For Worse, despite the fact some of its prominent characters are gay. And for Shannon I researched the health difficulties of the mentally retarded. There was quite a bit of that also. It was pretty sad. I have a second cousin, who is special needs, like Shannon. She lives with her mom and dad and has done so, all of her life. Her mom and dad are now in their 60s and they are facing some pretty serious issues about who is going to get to take care of her, after they die. She is a very independent woman, involved big time with Special Olympics, but I do not know if any of her 3 brothers or their wives is up to the task. I thought of this situation as I wrote the Shannon perspective. Overall, I was quite pleased that I had managed to wring something else out of this dreadful death week of For Better or For Worse.

Tomorrow’s strip: In the FOOBiverse’s Journal, this was my last strip to write up for cookie77, as qnjones takes over tomorrow. I was actually pretty pleased with this strip. It showed an astonishing level of character development for both Mike Patterson and Melville Kelpfroth, showing sides of them that were not just animosity over apartment noise. Melville showed a little softer side and my initial thought was, “Who wrote this thing?” Melville has been a one-note character since he was introduced around this time last year, and I wonder whose idea it was to develop the character. He is actually trying to point out to Mike that he doesn’t need to make a repair for free. Mike tries to point out that it isn’t for free, it’s for old lady hugs. Creepy, but true. Everyone loves Lovey, but when I go back to the strips which showed Mike and Dee checking out the apartment for the first time, my thought was, “Cheap old woman won’t get anything repaired.” And as I recollect, she also doesn’t clean apartments after one person vacates them.

I remember a roommate in university, who worked at a steak restaurant on weekends. He would be there from literally the crack of dawn until the restaurant closed late at night. Then he would come home starving. I remember asking him why he didn’t get food at the restaurant, and he responded that workers don’t eat. But my roommate just loved the old lady who owned and ran the restaurant and talked about her with lavish praise. My thought always was, “How could you let a guy work all day without a break?” I never understood it, but then again, that roommate was a little odd. That situation reminds me a lot of Lovey. When I think of Lovey I think, “Nice grandma. Lousy landlady.”