bayoustu
June 9, 2011 at 1:32 am…TB is just rusty at depicting anything other than despair, dejection, fear (and/or loathing), grief, pain, consternation, anguish, hopelessness, and — of course — cancer.
True, Stu! But on the other hand: what other cartoonist renders middle-to-late-middle-age-male ass better than our Tom Batiuk? Just look at the back porches on Bull, Tony, and, in today’s strip, Funky:
Crazy Harry and Funky are laughing way too hard about Les’ “problems”, but Les’ bizarre reference to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 instantly turns their mirth to bafflement. Sure, it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye walks out in a huff.
Better call the “Wahhhh-mbulance”…Les has got hurt feelings!
Today’s strip repeats the formula from yesterday’s: flashback vignette from the “Classic Era” followed by a friend of Les saying something that nobody in the real world would ever say. “Rethink my entire world view”? “Game-changer on a galactic scale”? The hyperbole-as-punchline is irritating enough, but made even moreso by the fact that Les’ lifelong friends are completely uninformed about his relationship status.
Epic run-on sentence in panel one. Apparently it’s impossible to describe Puppies Behind Bars without using a run-on sentence. How anyone would conflate PBB with Doctors Without Borders, though, is beyond me.
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.
Son of Stuck Funky 
