Son of Stuck Funky

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.

Les’s ability to quote random Wikipedia articles doesn’t quite pass Mason’s bullshit meter in today’s strip. Les is trying to help, but it’s going to take more than unnatural hand gestures and stories so boring that they made Mason’s skull elongate to get Mason over his anxiety about reading out-loud in a small private room to a handful of folks he already knows.