Hello Snarks! SoFsDavidO here, takin’ over for a very competent TFHackett as we get up-to-date with Westview’s senior student, Owen Muffinhead in today’s strip.
*sniff* *sniff*– do you smell that? The scent of convoluted, forced shenanigans coming up? We’ve got a whole week of it folks, as it looks like Owen is going to be the Scapegoats mascot in this week’s Very Contrived Plotline!
In an apparent nod to the fact there are other actors in this teledrama than Mason Jarr, today’s strip introduces us to Tawny Peaks, who, until this point, hasn’t said word one to Les (or vice versa) so I have no idea where she’s getting the idea she’s wrong for the part.
White woman in her 30s, somewhat attractive, decently built? Check. It’s not like they’ve cast an American Eskimo for the role. I can only wonder how Lisa was depicted in Lisa’s Story the book but in the comic she kind of moped around and complained about her job or the fact she has cancer. I’m not knocking that, but I don’t think it’s going to take a Jessica Lange-caliber actress to pull that off.
Meanwhile, what’s with Ms. Stalky lately? Don’t tell me she’s into sarcastic goatee’d writers!
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?
ZRRRNK… what? What’s happening? I fell asleep during the last 5 strips when Les was talking about nails. What’s going on in today’s strip?
Oh, C’MON. You have got to be kidding me. They’re still going on about some bent, rusty nail!? Thankfully, the appearance of an old woman who possesses a head the size of King Kong’s appears to be just about to devour Les whole.
Is something going to happen here? Why can’t Les just spout this stuff to Crazy Harry back in Westview? The reactions would be about the same. How is this advancing today’s plot at all? Today’s strip is just cumbersome. Mason is trying to be polite but Les is taking his single-word answers as interest.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this story is fascinating. Let’s try an experiment tomorrow, Snarkers. Recite, word for word, the Pavarotti story to a co-worker, friend, family member or mailman. See if they seem even slightly interested.
I’ll do the same and let you know how it goes.
Son of Stuck Funky 