The Fall of Elizabeth Part 1

In today’s For Better or For Worse, Elizabeth and April regress in age and battle. It was infantile, I decided Beavis and Butt-head needed to make a return appearance. I did all those dialogues, except the one which did not have a website reference who was done by persons unknown to me.

With Constable Paul Wright, I was initially tempted to play him appalled that Elizabeth would get into such a stupid argument with April, when it occurred to me that he is probably fully aware of just how childish and temperamental she can be, if it wasn’t beaten into him when she arbitrarily decided to move back to Milborough. I found a website on Ojibway discipline of children, where it talked about using applicable Ojibway legends to teach lessons to children, but I couldn’t find an Ojibway legend about fighting women, except the one I quoted where “fighting women” meant “women who knew how to fight battles.” So, I went with that one, thinking it’s lack of application to the situation between Liz and April might be somewhat amusing.

Zeremy / Jeremy Jones couldn’t really do anything with the strip, except play off the John Patterson off-duty line and snarked his perverted December monthly letter with the thought I initially had when I read it, which was John was going to the grocery story to pick up skinny, wrinkly women. Just writing that line delights me.

With Michael Patterson, I went through his monthly letters and found that he reminisces about the good old days when he used to fight with Elizabeth. That worked with today’s strip pretty well, and then I snarked his Sheilagh story by having little Meredith read it. aprilp_katje gave me a good feed-in line to respond with Mike being proud of Meredith’s reading ability, and I was able to snark one of my favourite things from the world of public education, which is the qualification of readers in term of grade expectation. My daughter, in her reading evaluation at school, was told she was reading at a 7th grade level (she’s in 3rd grade), but I have had so many other parents describe their child’s reading level in terms of much higher grades, the evaluation is fairly meaningless to me. I remember being told the same kind of thing when I was young too, and thinking, “Wow! Those 7th graders are really stupid.”

Thanks to another feed-in line from aprilp_katje, I had Howard duplicate parts of April’s monthly letter describing Liz’s reaction from the Howard attack, for Winnie Kelpfroth being hit on by John Patterson.

Tomorrow’s strip: And just when you think Liz cannot get any stupider…