When you order a Westview High School Marching Scapegoats Band™ Turkey, the band director herself will personally deliver your room-temperature bird…along with thinly veiled threats of violence! Tired and stressed, huh? Are there no volunteers among the band boosters to help with delivery? Why not just instruct your customers to come to the school and pick up their friggin’ turkeys if it’s such a hassle for you?
Tons o' Toms
That’s a lotta turkeys. Uhh… don’t they need to be refrigerated? Or are there live turkeys in those boxes? Nate plays the role of Capt. Obvious and draws a withering response from the One-Armed Queen. I don’t watch any of the C.S.I. franchise, but is it such a popular show that the title has worked itself into the lexicon? TB seems to think so.
Turkey Jive
It’s turkey season in Westview, where a holiday on which we gather with loved ones to give thanks for our blessings is merely another occasion for dread.
Gone Blotto

With all the time he spends with his ass parked on one of Montoni’s stools, you’d think Klinghorn would know every detail of the place, “right down to the nails in the floor“. But the absence of a giant rotating beer sign only registers a vague “crazy sense” that “something’s different”. Together the old friends undertake to remedy the situation by expending the absolute minimum thought, effort and expense. It serves as sort of a metaphor: today’s strip is the equivalent of an empty bottle of cheap beer, hastily put up in lieu of something truly pleasing to the senses.
I’m pretty sure the “Blotto Beer display” is based on the Budweiser Champion Clydesdale Rotating Carousel lamp, a handsome lighted globe that contained a miniature horse-drawn beer wagon that circled ’round and ’round. It made me think of my bartending days, where I had to eject a patron who stood on his stool and counter-rotated the lamp in an effort to get the horses to stand still…
Lastly: Google-image-searching “blotto beer” yields some borderline-NSFW results.
Service Dog Thingy
If “it’s called writing“, how come Batiuk gives us whole strips where nobody says anything? That’s called “padding”.
Below: I edited the last two weeks’ strips to demonstrate that this story could have been told in one week, and still leave Sunday to show Funky being a dickhead at the car dealer.



