From Marty
Today's For Better or For Worse reminded me of the classic lines from the old movie Marty, which I showed to my wife for the first time a few years ago, and it actually holds up very well.
Michael: So what do you feel like doing tonight?
Lawrence: I don't know. What do you feel like doing?
I remember when the fall used to come. My best friend and I would sit together and mourn the loss of summer, when we used to go swimming and have picnics and …. We never did that. Sorry. If it wasn’t raining, and my parents let me outside to play with my best friend, we wouldn’t come inside until my mom called me in for mealtime. Autumn is the time when you can jump in piles of leaves and in the mountains where I grew up, you could actually slide down hills on the leaves if they were moist and slick from dew or a recent rain. Autumn was the time for pick-up games of football, and you could be outside without getting sweaty.
Here’s the thing about swimming in the summer. Unless you have access to a pool or some other body of water safe for swimming, swimming is not an every day summer event. I haven’t seen a pool in either Elly or Connie’s yard. Maybe the local Milborough Park has a swimming pool we haven’t seen. Or maybe Mike is talking about that ravine behind his house, after it rains. In the modern strips, when we saw swimming, it was associated with a beach off a lake and the Pattersons had to make a special trip to drive there.
As for picnics, when you are 6, that depends a lot on mom making a picnic lunch for you. It’s not something kids usually plan as a daily event. Around noontime for lunch was a great time to come inside the house for lunch to cool off. That usually means no picnic in summer. The Pattersons traditionally have one big summer outdoor barbecue, and this may be what Michael is talking about.
Although these are nice activities, they are not the kinds of activities which would keep a 6-year-old kid occupied in the summer. The kind of activities which would keep a kid occupied, like a game of tag, a pick-up game of football or baseball, riding bicycles, etc. are all things that kids can do in the autumn too. When I was bored was when it was raining or sleeting, and I had to stay inside the house with my younger sisters. If my son was foolish enough to tell me that he was bored, my son would find himself suddenly assigned a household chore, and that would be the end of that. In fact, that exact thing has happened a few times, and now, it just doesn’t seem to happen any more. Imagine that.
“Kids being bored” is an old theme of Lynn Johnston’s that she has handled many times and almost always better than today. In this strip reprinted in the hybrid year on February 12, 2008; we see a situation where Mike is bored and it makes more sense. It is raining, and he can’t get outside to play with Lawrence. In today’s strip, Mike just seems like an idiot. What kid would ever leave his best friend outside to tell his mother he was bored? None I know of.
As for this week, I must admit I thought we would be in the middle of Farley reprints after last week. I guess Lynn Johnston was serious when she said the month of September would be all new. Is everyone ready for another week of old strips redone badly? Me either.
Michael: So what do you feel like doing tonight?
Lawrence: I don't know. What do you feel like doing?
I remember when the fall used to come. My best friend and I would sit together and mourn the loss of summer, when we used to go swimming and have picnics and …. We never did that. Sorry. If it wasn’t raining, and my parents let me outside to play with my best friend, we wouldn’t come inside until my mom called me in for mealtime. Autumn is the time when you can jump in piles of leaves and in the mountains where I grew up, you could actually slide down hills on the leaves if they were moist and slick from dew or a recent rain. Autumn was the time for pick-up games of football, and you could be outside without getting sweaty.
Here’s the thing about swimming in the summer. Unless you have access to a pool or some other body of water safe for swimming, swimming is not an every day summer event. I haven’t seen a pool in either Elly or Connie’s yard. Maybe the local Milborough Park has a swimming pool we haven’t seen. Or maybe Mike is talking about that ravine behind his house, after it rains. In the modern strips, when we saw swimming, it was associated with a beach off a lake and the Pattersons had to make a special trip to drive there.
As for picnics, when you are 6, that depends a lot on mom making a picnic lunch for you. It’s not something kids usually plan as a daily event. Around noontime for lunch was a great time to come inside the house for lunch to cool off. That usually means no picnic in summer. The Pattersons traditionally have one big summer outdoor barbecue, and this may be what Michael is talking about.
Although these are nice activities, they are not the kinds of activities which would keep a 6-year-old kid occupied in the summer. The kind of activities which would keep a kid occupied, like a game of tag, a pick-up game of football or baseball, riding bicycles, etc. are all things that kids can do in the autumn too. When I was bored was when it was raining or sleeting, and I had to stay inside the house with my younger sisters. If my son was foolish enough to tell me that he was bored, my son would find himself suddenly assigned a household chore, and that would be the end of that. In fact, that exact thing has happened a few times, and now, it just doesn’t seem to happen any more. Imagine that.
“Kids being bored” is an old theme of Lynn Johnston’s that she has handled many times and almost always better than today. In this strip reprinted in the hybrid year on February 12, 2008; we see a situation where Mike is bored and it makes more sense. It is raining, and he can’t get outside to play with Lawrence. In today’s strip, Mike just seems like an idiot. What kid would ever leave his best friend outside to tell his mother he was bored? None I know of.
As for this week, I must admit I thought we would be in the middle of Farley reprints after last week. I guess Lynn Johnston was serious when she said the month of September would be all new. Is everyone ready for another week of old strips redone badly? Me either.
posted by howard at 9:59 PM
4 Comments:
This one is so cliche that it's like Lynn is standing up on a chair and shouting, "I don't care anymore!"
qnjones,
True. I went to the AMU reprints site and checked "bored" and "boring" against their For Better or For Worse archives (1996 on) and found 29 strips where the joke was one of the characters being bored (an average of about 2 a year). Do you know how many of them were worse than the strip we had today? In my opinion, not even one, and this is with 2 of the strips coming from the new-runs where new-run Michael complains about being bored by Fred the fish. In one month, we have had 3 strips about boredom. I think I can hear Lynn Johnston shouting from where I live.
howard,
Autumn is the time when you can jump in piles of leaves and in the mountains where I grew up, you could actually slide down hills on the leaves if they were moist and slick from dew or a recent rain. Autumn was the time for pick-up games of football, and you could be outside without getting sweaty.
The fact that Lynn doesn't seem to realize or care about things like that tells me that not only is she bored out her mind, she can't be sufficently stirred from her apathy to make sense. Not only do we have inferior copies of the old stuff, they don't even cohere logically. Absurdism is less funny than it sounds.
dreadedcandiru2,
Not only do we have inferior copies of the old stuff, they don't even cohere logically. Absurdism is less funny than it sounds.
It's kind of like we have Bizarro-For Better or For Worse, like the old Bizarro-Superman, where he was an imperfect copy of Superman and the humour was derived from the fact that Bizarro-Superman did everything the opposite of what Superman did. Instead of showing 2 young boys enjoying a fine, autumn day; we have 2 boys disgusted with the good weather and bored. Of course, if it were true Bizarro-For Better or For Worse, then instead of showing poor parenting, we would see good parenting instead.
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