Mike Shows Us What Not to Do in a Fire

The on-line message boards which talk about For Better or For Worse took the strip to task today for what could be described as a text book example of how to get yourself killed in a fire. I wrote up a Michael Patterson post, which aprilp_katje so kindly posted for her Blog entry, where I basically played Mike as extraordinarily ignorant of fire safety procedures, because, I guess the point of the strip was that they are ignorant of fire safety procedures. aprilp_katje put a few extra comments pointing out some of the errors of their ways, followed by more from the_berserker posting as Duncan Anderson, who then indicated that Constable Paul Wright would have more to say. Technically, the good constable is a good constable and not a good firefighter, but it was not difficult to find a list of fire safety procedures on-line and in order to get some humour out of it, I decided to play him as the ultra good boy, who not only did fire drills at home, but ran his girlfriend through them at her home (back when she had one in Mtigwaki).

There are a number of real-life stories about people who did exactly what the Pattersons are doing and ended up dying in their house fires, and of course, there are others who didn’t. Even though the Pattersons should not be considered a good example of fire safety, they have been portrayed by Lynn Johnston as nearly completely incompetent parents whose children only survive through the intervention of older, wise women, like Lovey Salzman and to a much lesser degree, Elly Patterson. Today’s strip certainly fell with the boundaries of their parenting skills as have been shown so far. After all, these are the same knuckleheads who let their kids play on the stairs with the Trout tricycle, and who use Lovey Salzman’s home remedies instead of taking their son to an ENT when he had earaches. There may be some question in the readership of the strip and us who snark the strip as whether or not Lynn Johnston thinks of Mike and Dee as the World's Best Parents. My belief is that they cannot possibly have that title, because it would undermine Elly Patterson’s position as the World’s Best Grandmother. Ergo, Mike and Dee are always going to be idiots, who will need Elly’s help.

Tomorrow’s strip: Mike violates yet another fire safety rule,by going back for his manuscript. Will he pay the consequence for it? Not bloody likely.