Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Grandpa Jim get Fondled and Drugged

Today on For Better or For Worse, Grandpa Jim breaks down and the comforting doctor grabs his knee, and says, “I can prescribe something to help deal with the depression.” Of course in the strip, he means an actual prescription, but the idea that it was not a prescription and had something to with the knee-fondling, spurred me on to post my long Jeremy / Zeremy Jones story twisting on this phrase. I couldn’t read Dr. B. Foell’s name on-line, but I could see it in the printed newspaper version. Then I spent a little while trying to find where this name came from. Foell is an actual German name and I found several people on-line with that for a last name, but no famous authors with the name B. Foell. A search across the yellow pages in Corbeil also yielded no businesses or doctors with that name. The altavista babelfish translator yielded no special meaning for the word Foell. So, the only thing I could think was that Lynn was using a last name similar to Be Fool, but that would be weak, even by Lynn Johnston’s standards. I used it anyway.

Tomorrow’s strip: Iris makes an appearance and the doctor reveals hither-to unseen Grandpa Jim abilities. So, instead of seeing this accomplishment displayed with doctor, we get to see it done for humourous effect of the punch line.

3 Comments:

Blogger April Patterson said...

Why the frig did Gramps not use these mad "yes and no" skills when the doctor was ASKING HIM YES-NO QUESTIONS?!?!?! Well, four days of this down--at least two to go.

4:13 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Obviously the doctor is a mind-reader, because he recognized Grandpa Jim still had his sense of humo(u)r, and no doubt, heard all those mental jokes Grandpa Jim was firing off all week, and could even tell that putting your head in your hands was a sign of clinical depression requiring medication and not the sign of having an itchy head. If your doctor can read minds, then you don't need to go through the trouble of saying "Yes and No".

The other possibility is the old "Tell" vs. "Show" aspect of the strip lately. Maybe Grandpa Jim had been saying "Yes" and "No" to those questions all along, but we were not allowed to know it, until the doctor "told" us in today's strip. Lynn's tendency to want to "tell" us the story taken to a maddening and infuriating degree.

5:20 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

I think it must have been some form of Lynn wanting to keep the "yes and no" rejoinder as a surprise, but continuity-wise, it stinks.

5:53 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home