After an excruciatingly long conversation with the store owner who was just trying to make polite conversation, Crazy Harry delivers a bit of Dialog That No One Would Ever Actually Say and comes across as almost as smug and pompous of an ass as Les.
Again, one has to wonder, why in the hell did Les have his book tour in a pizza joint when he could have helped out an actual bookstore!?
The more the week progresses the muddier the comic’s message is. Is the bookstore owner griping about having to compete with big chain stores like Borders? Is he railing against online bookstores like Amazon, or is his ire drawn to eReaders like the Nook and Kindle? It might just be the economy in general, or just the fact that if you Sell Shit No One Wants that no one will buy it and you’ll be forced into bankruptcy.
Oh God, it’s a real place in Medina, Ohio. And to think they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, though I doubt the owner appreciates looking like a slightly older Charles Whitman.
Epicus Doomus In case you’re the one person on earth who doesn’t already know where this arc is going, let me clue you in: everything old was great and everything new sucks.
Epicus called it; this week’s arc is the exact same storyline as last week’s mindless banter about Blackberries except that now we’re lamenting the fact that people are buying online instead of going to the local bookstore, which is open from 9:30 -5 except on Wednesdays and Sundays when they’re closed. Oh, and come early, parking is a nightmare.
Ah, book stores! Especially mom and pop bookstores, have been in trouble financially since about, oh, 2003. I guess “a while now” means 8 or so years. I appreciate the opportunity to guest blog on here and give SnarkMaster T. the chance to chill for a little but it would appear I picked the week we’re going to be trapped in a small, stifling bookstore with the Unibomber and a misshapen blob of talking dough.
The end of summer means hauling the outside patio furniture down into the basement (unless they do this every evening for some weird reason) and gives us a chance to see what cruel ravages dementia has wrought upon poor ol’ Tony, who, by even conservative guesses, must be pushing 80 by now. Thankfully, the time jump was much kinder to older characters like Dinkle and Tony than it was to Funky. A halfhearted attempt at humor is made, punctuated by a chime-in from the new employee at Montoni’s, who appears to be baked off of his ass.
Oh wait, that’s Summer,who lives with Les, goes to the same school Les teaches at, and works at the same greasy pizza dump he manages.
I know they say running away never solves anything but whoever said that obviously never spent any time in Westview.
Meanwhile, Tony, sliding comically into full blown dementia, complains that Darwin confused him with all of his technical gobbly-gook talk about application programming, probably in a desperate attempt to justify his salary, to which one thinks; hey, boy wonder, if you can’t explain what the hell you’re doing to the average layman then you’re probably not a very good MBA.
Son of Stuck Funky 