So I did it; I tried to shoehorn Les’s incredibly boring story about Pavarotti using bent nails as good luck charms into a conversation at work.
It went about as well as you’d think.
Finding the segway into a story like that was the hard part. For my first attempt, I acted like I was reading a webpage of random facts and made the bent nail story the third item I read. I shouldn’t of had that story follow the tale of how King Adolf Frederick of Sweden ate himself to death because in comparison it was pretty dull. I looked over at my coworker after I mentioned the nail story but he was reading Ninja Turtle reviews on RottenTomatoes and didn’t react.
My second attempt started with me telling a coworker about a local theater near me that puts on some pretty good shows from time to time.
“Sometimes the kids get stage fright, but that’s normal,” I commented to my disinterested coworker. “That used to happen to Pavarotti until he would find like a bent nail or something and he sewed it into his shirt and it helped him not have stage fright.”
And that was that. My coworker didn’t even say “Really?” or “Interesting.” like Mason did. Instead, she just kind of wandered off, wondering if I was developing schizophrenia or something.
All of this leads us to today’s strip. The Nail Tale isn’t over; in fact it’s far from it. At that rate things are going, the damn thing is going to show up in Crankshaft or maybe get a spin-off comic of it’s own.
Mason is an *actor* for crying out loud. If he can’t do a table read in front of people he knows then how is he not going to freeze up like Cindy Brady on a quiz show when an actual camera turns on him?
Son of Stuck Funky 
When I first saw this strip, I thought, “Huh, well, it’s nice that Les is being nice to someone, just because.”
But then I remembered Steven Furst, Flounder from Animal House*, and one of his best quotes:
“I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I’d look up at your lifeless eyes and wave like this. [does Vir wave] Do you think your associates could arrange that, Mr. Morden?”
And I thought, this isn’t just some random kindness. No, Mason will now be “Oh, that Les is such an awesome guy! I will fight to see that his original script is used.”
And Clay Wallace will cower, hands over his head, “Oh, no, the writer won!”
And Les will smirk and say, “For want of a nail…”
*That’s two! I’m on my way to Batiukhood.
Get a load of Thelma’s dialog in panel one where she deftly rehashes the events of the week in one brief sentence. Maybe she should take a stab at “writing” the strip. And “Writer Guy”? Really?
Coming next week: Mason Jarr is horrifically disfigured when the set collapses due to a several missing crucial load-bearing nails that somehow mysteriously disappeared. Les then begins working on his new book, “Mason, Ajar…A True Hollywood Story”.
God, even when Les is helpful he’s a smug, pretentious asshat.
Years from now, long after “Lust for Lisa” bombs horribly and ends up shutting down the entire television industry, and Mason can’t get work anywhere, being known as the actor who played Les Moore, he’ll come looking for Les. And he’ll bring plenty of nails.
The problem is that Batiuk doesn’t SEE the same smug, pretentious, pontificating and pessimistic dullard we do. He sees Les as being a grand fellow and sympathetic hero….because he’s crazy and stupid.
I think we need to add “salt” to the Batiuktionary, at least the way TB uses it. I even looked it up. In 2 dictionaries. TB seems to think that you salt the comic book into the long boxes, or bent nails just sort of generally about. The only way I’ve ever seen or heard this sense of to salt, and my authorities support this, you salt the receptacle with the item of value.
Now I know that language is flexible and that grammatical prescriptivism is foolish, but man, what an idiolect!
Let’s remember something. Les not only knew about Mason’s fears beforehand, he took the time to actually find and bend several nails before telling Mason a story about Pavarotti and nails, all while knowing that Mason wouldn’t just tell him that it’s great but he needs to get to the table.
@oddnoc: This, of course, has to do with the fact that Batiuk has lost sight of the fact that the regional terms he uses without really thinking about them aren’t nation-wide terms. It’s why people end up shaking their heads in confusion when he has Crankshaft call that patch of grass we sometimes see between pavement and the curb the devil’s strip.
@Paul Jones…I don’t know, I’ve lived in NE Ohio lo these 40 years and I can honestly say that up until these 2 times I’ve read TB use the term “salt/salted”, I have never come across it before. And I am a fairly well read and social person.
That ones a mystery to me.
Once again, Batiuk gets it wrong. “To salt something away” means to put it up for safekeeping. It doesn’t mean “to put something where someone else will find it.” This is the second time in recent strip history he’s used it in this sense, so maybe it needs to be added to the Batiuktionary. Apparently a big part of “writing” is using words in ways that don’t make sense.
But that’s the least of this week’s problems. Most enraging is the idea that an actor with any experience would get nervous over a table read, but we can also add Les droning on and on about Pavarotti, and the old lady office worker hovering around the edge of each strip has also been weird and dumb.
I wonder if the rest of the year will be the table read – it would certainly be a means for TB to inflect “Lisa’s Story” on an unsuspecting nation.
@beckoningchasm, There were so many memorial quotes from “Babylon 5” and that is one of my favorites also. Note to TB, J. Michael Straczynski is a writer and you aren’t worthy to carry his whiteout.
Also I know it’s too much to hope for, but wouldn’t be great if Ziplock Bag grabs a set nail, scratches himself, and then gets lockjaw.
I still can’t believe that Less-The-Idiot thinks it makes any difference to the producers how Empty Jar does at a table reading??? WTF is he thinking??? That if it’s bad, they’ll stop production or something??? This has got to be the dumbest storyline ever by BatHack.
In panel one of “Mary Worth” today we get to see what evil Les (as opposed to tedious Les) looks like.
http://www.seattlepi.com/comics-and-games/fun/Mary_Worth/2014-08-09
“The dumbest storyline ever…”?
No, just on endless continuation of TB’s menusha.
Someone else earlier mentioned Summer hasn’t appeared at all this calendar year. I want to know what SHE’S up to, dang it. Isn’t she turning 21 right about now? I bet a storyline with her getting sloshed for the first time would be far more exciting than…anything else, really.
Yep, I noted we haven’t seen Summer yet, at the beginning of summer. Nothing about a campus-centric strip would interest readers, I guess.
This woman looks like how Lisa would have aged if she survived cancer. She should be irrestible to Les, but he probably thinks of her as an older woman.
Just FYI – A Segway is a vehicle that Steve Wozniak rides. A segue is a transition from one subject to the next.
Also, it’s minutia, not menusha.
“It’s why people end up shaking their heads in confusion when he has Crankshaft call that patch of grass we sometimes see between pavement and the curb the devil’s strip.”
From Urban Dictionary:
Devil’s Strip
The grassy area between the street and the sidewalk.
[b]This term is unique to the Akron, Ohio area.[/b]
The city can plant trees, or come and dig up the devil’s strip
without the permission of the resident that pays tax on this land. The “devil” in this case is a vague reference to the Tax collector/government in general.
More on Devil’s Strip
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/bob-dyer-devil-strip-origin-is-a-free-for-all-1.326946
Good thing Pavarotti was into bent nails instead of, say, plutonium pellets or something. I thought he’d definitely wrap this LFL thing up before the school year began but now I’m not so sure about that. Sigh.
Gyre: That’s a great point. Are we to believe that Les found a few bent nails and pocketed them just in case an occasion to tell that story just happened to pop up? How would he have known that Mason was terrified over the big table read?
Les has three nails. All he needs is a large wooden cross, a purple robe, and a crown of thorns, and he can crucify himself.
dougputhoff: perfect. His big Lisa-shaped cross, fashioned from gazebo and park bench wood and stained with the tears of all those she touched and loved during her all-too brief stay in TB’s warped little fantasy world.
DavidO: Just a few days ago I mentioned the name Mason Jarr to a non-FW reader and my reply was “seriously???”. It’s so weird, FW makes no sense whatsoever unless you read it everyday, but who’d want to? It’s the strange paradoxical nature of the strip that keeps fascinating me through all this drudgery. It exists, but why?