beckoningchasm
March 4, 2021 at 11:01 pm
I can understand why TFH doesn’t want to do any entry for Friday’s episode. One has to be able to stop vomiting long enough to write a post. Today’s strip makes that an inhuman achievement, and not the Marvel Comics one.
Sorry you guys! Something came up. Please rip today’s strip to shreds for me!
Son of Stuck Funky 
“It turned out that making snow angels wasn’t the wisest idea, as Lisa got all wet and caught a chill which soon developed into triple bonus walking pneumonia, which was even worse than the flu, which she also contracted while we were frolicking in that day’s snowfall. She did recover, eventually, sort of. I can’t help but wonder if things might have gone differently if binge-watching TV shows had been a thing back then. I’d love to ask Lisa for her opinion, but, well, you know.”
“I get that reference too!”
“–whenever ‘back then’ was.”
Ooooh, the sign of fallen angels! And just think, if the ground hadn’t broken their falls, they would have plunged all the way to Hell!
“But then there was a warm spell come April, and sure enough Lisa got sicker and eventually died. Let this be a warning to all of you; NEVER let your guardian snow angels melt, lest your loved ones perish! Heed my warning…oh, and buy my book, which is about to be a major motion picture with Starbuck Jones playing me!”
Sure, why not? Les has already wiped his ass with the fields of medicine, sports, and literature this week, so religion is a logical next step. It’s like he’s trying to speed-run Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. And if that lady in the back says “got the reference”, I will slap her into next week.
I personally would love to hear the insult Wowbagger would have concocted for Les.
“You’re a prat, Les. You’re a lazy, sanctimonious, failed high school teacher with a superiority complex. Even though you still can’t climb a gym rope, or write for shit.”
Another reference to the snow angels, eh? Haven’t had one of those since last August. And in yet another retcon, we learn that Les and Lisa made the snow angels during their quarantine period. Because, hey, it’s not like we’ve piled enough emotional weight onto that scene already; let’s add a COVID layer!
(Note: if the quarantine is somehow not a retcon, please correct me.)
Also, this is the fourth time that Les has explained to his audience that he and Lisa were under a quarantine. Do they have the attention spans of goldfish, or does he just think they do?
It is definitely a retcon in that there is no mention of a “quarantine” or anything about limiting contact with others in regards to Lisa’s clinical trial. TB might argue that he has some wiggle room from the standpoint that Lisa isn’t depicted leaving the house between Crazy and Donna’s anniversary party at Montoni’s (natch) in early December 2006 until the referenced snow angel strip on January 7, 2007, and doesn’t interact with anyone other than Les between the anniversary party and her visit to the oncologist in late January (where the fateful mix up of the scans is later revealed to have happened). Les, however, visits with friends and teaches his classes at the high school several times during this period per normal, even forcing his class to pray for a snow day over the objections of noted freethinker (emphasis on the “free” part) Mooch Myers. I don’t believe Lisa ever participates in the much-discussed clinical trial, I presume because her mixed up “good” scan results indicated that she did not need to.
Much of the fall and winter of 2006 is actually taken up by Lefty’s pregnancy with and early days raising Wally Jr. rather than Lisa’s cancer. Wally Jr. is born on Christmas Day while Wally is deployed overseas. Lefty has a Christmas-themed baby shower with a
stripperexotic dancer dressed (temporarily) like Santa Claus. No one spends weeks at the eye doctor.As we say around here…I stand in line.
Wait a minute. Les forced his students to pray? For a snow day, which I presume would benefit Lisa somehow? This actually happened?
Now I’m kind of glad I wasn’t around for Act II.
Get to the goddam bench!!
So TomBa wants us to believe –
1. That Lisa’s pre-clinical trial quarantine lasted an entire winter.
2. That for that entire winter the snow angels were neither subject to any kind of melting nor covered by fresh batches of snow.
It’s really a toss-up which of those things is the most implausible.
At this point, I’m sure that even Les’s cult-member audience would prefer to hear a reading of Vogon poetry.
“Vogon poetry? I get that refer…AAAHHHH!!!”
These were the last words the annoying bookstore woman ever spoke, as the Vogons shoved her into an airlock and opened it, sending her into the cold emptiness of space without benefit of towel.
How long was their freaking quarantine? Because I promise you whatever it was it was still shorter than the goddamn year of Covid-19 we’ve been putting up with…
Lisa couldn’t work from home? Was the high school closed this entire time? They couldn’t drive or fly to a warmer state and wait things out? Was this epidemic just a Cleveland thing, or was it national?
Well done to Les for spending 5+ days talking about his wife and we learned absolutely nothing new about her that wouldn’t have already been published in the three previous Lisa books plus the graphic novel… Even if this lecture was free admission, the crowd got ripped off…
Tune in next week as Les explains to Masone and Marianne why his banal stories of supermarket pens and snow angels are “too intimate and deeply personal” for him to ever consider them being put in a movie for the unwashed masses…
It doesn’t matter how long it was. It was Lisa’s quarantine, which automatically makes it more special and meaningful than anyone else’s.
On a day of particularly Choice comments, yours grades Prime.
That’s a meat reference by the way.
“Wow Mr. Moore! I see how your utterly inconsequential and pedestrian life events are lent a great emotional resonance because your wife died of brain cancer.”
“Breast cancer.”
“Whatever.”
I see from the masthead that it’s Jessica’s turn next to overhear an out-of-context conversation and assume that it means her spouse is cheating on her.
The “young couple just starting out” who’ve been married for twenty years.
Or that he doesn’t approve of her big-hair style, which went out with the Eighties.
BWAWAHAWHAW! It’s funny because snow angels foretell Lisa’s future.
So, what we have here are a bunch of trivial observations that have nothing to do with Lisa other than she happened to be there.
And we needed a book signing event so people could ooo and aah over these trivialities. Because if he’d offered them to Funky, Crazy, or anyone who knows him, they would have responded with a sneer and a pun, and that just wouldn’t do.
Les has to be the smartest and bravest, nothing less than perfection.
I live in Ohio and the have been numerous stories over the last few years of people faking cancer or claiming their child had cancer simply to raise money which they spent on vacations, new cars, flat screens…etc. I’m starting think Les’s whole act is a complete hoax, and either is living it up in Bermuda or Les has her dismembered body mummified in his basement.
Les’ act is a complete hoax. But he’s Tom Batiuk’s self-insertion character, and Tom Batiuk writes all the other characters in the universe. So Les will never be called out for his poor writing, massive ego, or questionable decisions. Nor will the insatiable demand for Lisa’s Story ever wane.
In support of the fraud theory and along the lines of Banana Jr. 6000’s “smothered chicken” alternate canon which was shared a couple of days ago, I’d like to think that Lisa actually walked out on Les and returned to Paris, where she’s currently the caretaker of the Duke of Windsor’s former home in the Bois du Boulogne for the City of Paris and Mohamed Al-Fayed, the current leaseholder from the city. The reason fo the ten-year time jump was that Lisa had custody of Summer during that time, but inexplicably wanted to return to Westview for high school. When Summer graduated she and Keisha have actually relocated there as well and that their attendance at Kent State was merely a face-saving cover story for Les. They are currently playing for a team in the Ligue Fèminine de Basket.
Oooh, I like it. Les did tell Lisa “it’s okay for you to go.” So maybe she just left.
“Thank God!” Lisa shouted. She rolled out of bed, grabs the suitcase, and runs out of the door. Les never saw her again…but heard a lot from her lawyer.
I think it was George Carlin who said that church exists to remind children that there is something worse than school. I suppose Les exists to remind us that there is something worse than (and here the combinatorial, factorial, polynomial expansion of the list of evil, foul, dreadful things exceeds the number of particles in the observable universe).
Was this quarantine before or after Lisa blowed up real good?
It sure was.
The only good thing about this getting a Hollywood deal is that Westview High’s drama club dodged the bullet.