Tag: Linda

Buck Stops Here

Happy Labor Day, kids, and a hearty thank you to billytheskink for helming these last couple weeks!

God damn you, Tom Batiuk.

Three weeks of buildup to the Coming Alumni Band Reunion, two of those spent in the car with Funky, Holly, and her awful mom. Then a week of “practice” which takes place entirely off-camera. Followed by yesterday’s mawkish, verbose, and seemingly out of sequence Sunday strip, and then…do we at long last get to chuckle at the spectacle of an elderly, oxygen-huffing marching band? We do not. We get nothing, we lose, good day, sir!

And of all the dangling plot threads to pick up, TB decides to trot out Buck Bedlow, showing up as he always does, unannounced, at the Bushka residence. Buck, you’ll recall, showed up a year ago, to facilitate Bull’s rehabilitation from bullying, belligerent gridiron failure to enfeebled, doddering legend. The two erstwhile rivals reenacted their gridiron glories on Bull’s lawn. After they viewed Dinkle’s video demonstrating that Bull did indeed get the ball over the goal line on the last play of his last game, Buck presented Bull with a framed, fake sports page touting Westview’s “win.” This was followed by a trip to snow-covered Scapegoat Field to dig up a piece of turf from the end zone.

Bull’s wife Linda seemed to appreciate the visits, but probably thought she’d seen the last of Buck that night he revealed that he was in the same state of mental decline as her husband. But Buck was back a couple weeks later. And now that football season’s underway and the leaves are falling (hurtling, actually, judging by panel 1), here he is again. Linda doesn’t even attempt to hide her disdain.

Sweet and Splice-y

We’re still in Crazy’s AV lair in today’s strip. When did Crazy become some sort of AV guru, a guy who owns shelves of different media players? I don’t even remember if he ran the projector back in Act I but now he’s going on about Bull’s sweet splice repairs. I’m a noted Betamax enthusiast who can talk at length about the late 80s rise in use of VHS cases and labels for Beta cassettes but I don’t say things like that.

One might wonder why Bull, who has both a fairly high opinion of his AV skills and lots (lots!) of free time, doesn’t simply buy or borrow the equipment and convert these tapes to DVD himself. One might also wonder why Bull, if he has such skills that he can splice videotape in a “sweet” manner, was never tasked with putting up any of Westview High’s legendary badly taped signs.

VHS… Quantity!

Well, whaddaya know? Linda finally gets Bull out of the house in today’s strip… and they promptly go in search of a way for Bull to continue to stay inside for days watching videos of himself losing high school football games.

They want DVDs? Crazy can convert things to digital files for storage on a computer and upload to Youtube, you know. He may even throw in some background music and artsy wipes!

Crazy seems a tick disturbed that the Bushkas have barged into his AV lair, demanding that he provide hundreds of dollars worth of services (presumably) gratis. However, when you are known as the guy bakes tapes and buys head cleaner, you are pretty much asking for weirdos to walk in on you with crates full of videocassettes. Not to mention that the outside of his place looks like this:

VHS

Press “Eject”, Linda

Oh, so now Linda wants Bull to do something other than binge videocassettes and relive his days as the best player on a winless high school football team? In today’s strip, she has finally decided to stop enabling him and wants him to do something he has not done since, uh…
– his retirement ceremony in 2016?
– he dropped that glass of water (a glass glass by a water cooler)?
– the tennis match where Les triggered his CTE?
However you want to define it, it has certainly been awhile.

Well, with a broken VCR, maybe Bull and Linda will finally get to doing all of that stuff they planned to do in retirement while Bull “still can”…
Or maybe they’ll go and find a way for Bull to continue watching the ’77 Scapegoats get their teeth kicked in so badly that the Centerville team that starts kneeling the ball in the 2nd quarter.

What do you all think is more likely?

And continues…

Today’s strip continues Nate and Linda’s inane conversation about Tank Wedgeman. It’s illuminating that these two administrators (one of Linda’s myriad responsibilities makes her an administrator, right? She’s got a hand in literally everything in this school) can’t imagine stopping the bullying, instead simply waiting it out until the kid graduates. Who cares about all the kids he victimizes in the meantime.

These strips remind me of something I mentioned way back in the Gay Prom storyline. (can we believe it’s been nearly six years?) In that strip  Nate spoke of “the intolerant” rather than “intolerance”. The issue I had was that Batiuk seemed to be framing homophobia in the context of people rather than ideas. Good people would think the way Batiuk did, and bad people would think differently. It wasn’t a matter of examining different perspectives and/or how a person might end up with problematic attitudes or behaviors. It was just an issue of The Bad People, or “the intolerant” in that strip. There isn’t any point in trying to deal with Tank’s bullying. It’s just who he is, and it won’t stop until he’s gone. They don’t engage bullying any more than Nate engaged Roberta’s issue (that we can only suppose is homophobia because Batiuk never allowed her to voice her specific objections).

It’s pretty disgusting ordinarily, but it’s especially so coming from two characters who are supposed to be educators. Hell, I think of all of Batiuk’s characters, he thinks Linda and Nate are the two most admirable teachers at the school. Unlike Les, they seem to approach their jobs in education with some form of enthusiasm, so it’s remarkable that they don’t seem to recognize teachable moments. If I’m reading Batiuk’s timeline correctly, these two have at least thirty years’ experience each, and yet bullying appears to be something they have no response to, nor think they need to deal with.