Tag: media

Ominous Donut Box

So today Batiuk takes a shot at PBS for being obsessed with the pandemic, for some reason. I’m guessing it’s solely because it was low hanging fruit for what qualifies as wordplay to Baituk. it I would have gone with “Coronavirus News Network” myself.

This is very odd too, because it seems to be implying that the news was covering the pandemic too much? I mean, maybe some were, to a certain extent, but the vibe of “Stop talking so much about the pandemic that’s brought the entire world essentially to a screeching halt for over a year” is very strange to me. I really think Batiuk wrote this in early March last year and assumed the virus would blow over in a month.

The first panel is kind of hilarious to me. “I tried to avoid the news as much as I possibly could…but it just kept chasing me down and forcing me to watch it!”. If you don’t want to watch the news, don’t watch the news.

This arc really makes me feel that “recovering addict” is the perfect character type for Batiuk’s style of melodrama. You can milk a ton of cheap drama and pain out of it without anything really having to happen. Funky will never drink again, because that would be drama, and that doesn’t happen in this strip. But he will moan and complain, you’d better believe it.

Sunday morning, praise the dawning

Link to today’s strip.

As twas ever thus, Sunday’s strip was not available for preview.   I’m going to guess that we’ll get a reprise of the previous week, with Funky and Holly gasbagging about texts and/or Cory, but as a guess, it’s just that.  The actual strip could be anything.  Funky and Les jogging, comic book tribute, anything at all.  Anything except good, of course.

Normally, I’d stay up long enough to add to the day’s analysis, but unlike Tom Batiuk, I have a real job that requires that I fulfill certain goals.  Unlike Tom Batiuk, if I fail to fulfill these goals, I could get fired, which would not be beneficial to me, though I would assume it would cause Mr. Batiuk some amusement, and perhaps some satisfaction.

But until the time when he has control over my life, I will continue to deny that to him, and I’m off.  See you folks on the funway, which is already in progress!

People Who Need People

[Dionne] Warwick, for years an aficionado of psychic phenomena, was advised by astrologer Linda Goodman in 1971 to add a small “e” to her last name, making Warwick “WARWICKe” for good luck and to recognize her married name and her spouse, actor and drummer William “Bill” Elliott. Goodman convinced Warwick that the extra small “e” would add a vibration needed to balance her last name and bring her even more good fortune in her marriage and her professional life. In retrospect, the extra “e,” according to Dionne, “was the worst thing I could have done… and in 1975 I finally got rid of that damn ‘e’ and became ‘Dionne Warwick’ again.”

Perhaps Mason’s sudden-onset name change mania isn’t a symptom of his bipolar disorder. Recall how Les fed him that story about Pavarotti’s superstitiously carrying a bent nail for good luck (before planting one for Mason to find, in order to give him the confidence to get through a table read for Lisa’s Story). It wouldn’t take much to convince such a gullible sap that tacking an “e” onto his surname could bring good fortune…or maybe even “a new interview with People magazine“! Because, you know, that project he was involved with the last time People mag came knocking? Les and his fucking “kill fee” put the kibosh on that.

Threat Level Lisa

Link to today’s strip

YouTube (registered trademark, BTW) better upgrade their servers, pronto, before Boy Lisa follows through on his “threat” and crashes them with the tens of hits that video would certainly generate. Some arch-villian Frankie turned out to be. Ditto for his doughy henchman White Lenny, who is a real wuss compared to Black Lenny, who at least knew how to lean menacingly. Derin would have probably gotten the same results by simply throwing “Lisa’s secret journal” at them. Those corners do hurt, you know.

OK, so who had “they make a video of Summer reading random pages from her dead mother’s thirty-something year old journal that just happened to be discovered exactly when it fit into the story which forces Frankie and Lenny to give up when they threaten to air it on YouTube” in the “how does this arc end?” pool? Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.

Les' Story

I don’t know how Hollywood works, nor do I pretend to know. Some of you readers, though, seem to have some insight into the movie-making process, and it’s fun to compare and contrast that with Les’ Hollywood “experience”. I know even less about the network news business, so I’ll just share my musings about today’s strip.

For starters, how long has Cindy, I mean, Cynthia Summers been an anchorperson? Guess she’s no longer “embedded“. And is it just a little premature to be reporting this “news from Hollywood,” considering that not even one page of the screenplay has been written? Do plans to make a made-for-cable-TV movie even qualify as “news from Hollywood”? And are news anchors allowed to report hometown gossip as “news”?