Tag: Becky

Orchestra’s Witnesses

Another school levy must have failed, because Lefty is now soliciting Westview residents during the summer in today’s strip. I guess that sweet band turkey revenue was just not enough to cover the cost of new feathery hats, Dinkles brand shoes, and those things that marching band members wear over their shoes.

The financial situation must be really dire in the Westview school district, because the band has weathered at least a dozen failed levies. It has typically been the high school’s sacred cow. Nate probably shouldn’t have allowed Les to meet with parents back in May, which undoubtedly cost the school district whatever bit of support it might have had.

It almost makes me wonder: How many guitar and flute tunes are there anyways? How many do Emily and Amelia know? Is Lefty going to pull out and in of every driveway in Westview? Is every single person who answers their door in Westview over the age of 75? Did Lefty come up with the punny name for this scheme before coming up with the scheme itself?

OK, I know the answer to that last one…

And with that, I yield the keyboard to a towering figure in the annals of SoSF, the one and only DavidO. As always, I appreciate you all putting up with me for a couple weeks.

Ugh-mblebrag

Oh, of course today’s strip is going to drag the Bedside Manor band back into this. I had my fingers crossed that something else would happen, but really, who didn’t see this coming? Hopefully we’ll get the lucid Mort Winkerbean this time.

I hope the Bedside Manor ensemble’s ill-fated record deal involved a lot of Sousa marches, or at least a slow-paced take on The Ballad Of The Green Berets, because they’ve got less than a week to rehearse. Looks like Dinkle’s about to write a check that his baton can’t cash.

The background characters almost make up for it all, though. Almost.
Let’s see… we’ve got Wooly Willy, Hawaiian giraffe-man, the no-neck dad from “Dustin”, and a blonde smart enough to hide her face so she can always deny having been an extra in Funky Winkerbean. I would much rather be dropping in on their conversations.

Back To Square One

Oh good, TB doesn’t have Lefty lollygag in explaining her community band problem in today’s strip. Yeah, it’s a stupid problem and it could have easily been explained in yesterday’s strip, but we also very well could have spent a week getting to this point. Unfortunately, I expect we’re still spending a week with these two.

Ah, the national community band competition… a great American 4th of July-ish tradition. Yes indeed, it’s up there with Coney Island hot dog eating contest and the international stingray decoration show and that thing Jimmy Smits used to host on public television.

In the reality that is recorded on the internet, I was able to find two things comparable to Lefty’s competition, but nothing exactly like it:

Note your cuts of meat

Hello folks, billytheskink back for another round of kicking off our daily deconstruction of the Batiukverse. As always, I hope to facilitate a strong discussion by highlighting key aspects of each comic and offering a basic analysis to be exapnded upon in the comments. When today’s strip sends that plan off the rails in a few seconds, I will likely resort to comparing the characters to various basketball players from the 1970s or reciting the specs of vintage Macintoshes.

Harry Dinkle is hosting a barbeque, which is a new thing for him… I think. Probably a new thing, given how overdone those hamburgers look. The phrase “Harry Dinkle barbeque” sounds like a setup on a hidden camera show aimed at 7-year olds. What a Harry Dinkle barbeque entails however, making poorly-timed complaints about the community band, sounds like a setup on a hidden camera show aimed at nobody.

Anyways, did you know?
– That the Macintosh IIfx, released in 1990, ran at an impressive 40 MHz and would remain the fastest Macintosh in existence until the release of the Quadra 840av in 1993. Originally priced at $9,900, the Macintosh IIfx cost roughly as much as a new, base model Ford Tempo in 1990.
– That Harry Dinkle did not become the “World’s Greatest Band Director” until after he changed his last name from Dinkl?

Who’ll Stop The Rain

Link to today’s strip.

Gah, six panels to extol some piece of software–not long after Harry decided that software was worthless for anything human beings do.  Tom Batiuk must be really impressed with some app he’s recently downloaded, because otherwise this episode would end with a smirking Dinkle saying something like, “Well, you could just look outside,” or “My system of yelling at them is better,” or some terrible pun.  That’s the best thing about today’s strip–Loathsome Dinkle doesn’t get a single line of dialogue.

I recall (from comments here) that the Battle of the Bands was always rained out.  So we’ve gone from showing a running gag every year to just talking about a running gag?  Huh.