TFHackett

We Don't Need No Steenking Forfeit!

“Maybe this specialist, who is a knee specialist and whose waiting room we apparently are sitting in right now, will have some good news about your knee.” Why not just show a sign on the wall that says “Office of the Knee Specialist”? Nah, wordy spoken exposition is a hallmark of FW. But Summer is not listening to Les’ blather. She’s fiddling with a digital device that’s too big to be a Blackberry or iPhone and too small to be an iPad.

“Keisha just Tweeted” her? Everybody knows teens don’t Tweet, but it just sounds even more “now” than “Keisha just texted me” so let’s go with it.

And in case you were asking what could be even more implausible than a high school team forfeiting a tournament game because their star player got hurt, well, here’s your answer. “We refuse your forfeit, Westview She-Goats! We want you to kick our asses, fair and square!“

Kneed-ful Things

Link to today’s F*nky W*nkerbean. If link doesn’t work, try copying and pasting it into a new brower window.

A week’s worth of strips bring us back to the Moore kitchen, and absentee father Les is finally up to speed on what transpired while he was off reliving the college angst we never knew about.

The forfeit of a tournament game by the She-Goats over a rather routine injury to their co-captain has caused massive unrest among the FW snark community. Batiuk has outdone himself this time: his “quarter-inch from reality” has expanded to about a light year. Anyone familiar with team sports played at any level can see the patent absurdity of an entire team throwing in the towel under these circumstances.

In the real world:

The players would want to finish the game, and try even harder to win to honor the injured player’s sacrifice.
The injured player would be mortified, and would dissuade the rest of the team from taking such action.
The coach would never allow his team to unilaterally decide to forfeit a game, particularly during a tournament.

But in the Funkiverse, this is business as usual. Les isn’t a bit surprised by the ridiculous turn of events, and Panel 2 Summer is passing “aw shucks” sidelong looks of love at her bestie.

Cease and Desist

Read it and weep. I did. Click to enlarge

Well, now we know why sonofstuckfunky.wordpress.com (and stuckfunky.wordpress.com) got the plug pulled. Here is the letter that Batiuk’s lawyers sent to the WordPress.com folks. They are not happy with the “unauthorized use of the Funky Winkerbean name, trademark, or comic strips” on the site. They go on to ask the WordPress people to provide them with my name, address, and email address.

I’m still reeling from having the plug pulled, then was feeling great about being able to move the blog so quickly. Now I’m feeling pretty anxious. I don’t have a lawyer, I (obviously) don’t have a deep knowledge of copyright, and really don’t need to get sued.

This turn of events ought to tell you everything you need to know about Tom Batiuk’s sense of humor.

I will collect my thoughts and decide on the course of action going forward. In the meantime, thank you, friends, for your support.

Stay Funky.

TFH

The Knights of Knee

PLUS:

EQUALS:

TB, if you are gonna use the exact same setup for two strips about three weeks apart, then yeah, I’m gonna mash them up in Photoshop and make fun of your work. The players have forfeited a first-round tournament game to go hang in the ER with their injured co-cap’n (and um, shouldn’t she have some ice on that thing?) And co-cap’n, rather than ream out this bunch of quitters, is only too content to lie back and bask in the adulation.

Hello world! Bite me, WordPress.com!

We are back live, hope you are too. Apparently I violated WordPress.com’s terms of service, and they yanked the plug on the old site.

I was able to import all the content from the old site. It’s going to take a little time twisting the knobs and restoring all the settings. One thing I’ve learned so far is that Akismet, a great spam-comment-blocker, is only free when you host your blog on wordpress.com…When I went to activate it on this knew site, I found out I have to pay for a “key”. So you may see the occasional spam comment (you’ll know which ones are spam, trust me). I’ll do my best to stay on top of those.

I’m still restoring the links that appear on the right hand side of this page, along with the rest of the widgets that I had lovingly arranged on the old site.

A very sincere “thank you” to the SoSF regulars who emailed me to find out what was going on when the site went down! It meant a lot to me.

Back to the snark…