While we’re waiting for today’s strip to drop, I’d like to add my kudos to the many kudos directed at comicbookharriet for taking Batiuk to the woodshed on a daily basis for the last three (!) weeks, and in the process, educating all of us about some real-life women heroes of the comics.
Tag: Pete
Nocturnal Dietitians
So they left an hour after the fair closed…and then drove a funnel cake to the Bedside Manor? How late is it? Our county fair closes at 10:00, and I’m guessing that is about standard. It’s got to be approaching midnight. What kind of nursing home lets people just wander in at midnight?
And poor old Gramps has been abandoned alone in his wheelchair, completely clothed, in the middle of the night. Where’s the nurse on call? The only reason he’s calm and smiling is from huffing the cheap nitrous oxide they slip into his ‘oxygen’ tanks to keep him passive and pliable. What kind of cut-rate elder warehouse is this? The kind where the miserable staff hide from the patients in their break room snitching jello snacks and swapping pills.
I mean, look at the heavy lidded eyes of the lady in panel one and tell me she isn’t baked out of her mind on a delicious cocktail of the nursing home specials, oxycontin, seroquel, vicodin, and Miralax. Dinkle could come marching in with an entire rock band, and she would barely be able to blink.
Scare Thee Well.
Well Mindy has not only annoyed all the exhausted carnies cleaning up the grounds by sticking around an hour after close, she’s now terrified them by randomly shouting into the darkness.
And we’re supposed to be touched as Mindy waxes all nostalgic about a fair trip where they stood in one place for upwards of five hours and blew several hundred dollars on a Tawny the Not-Talking Tiger rip off?
I just realized that the Tiger is Mindy. They were both handed out as a prize to someone who hadn’t really done anything to earn them except hang around too long being pathetic. Pete was just as enthusiastic to get Mindy as she was to get the tiger. Both are pretending they’ve won something great when in reality they’ve been given a cheaply made air-filled squeeze toy by a bored uncaring carnie clown who is tired of waiting for his shift to end.
Consolation Prize
Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh! This is awful. The only possible more awkward engagement involves a shotgun in one hand and a pregnancy test in the other.
Pete was going to propose tonight? On a night they just sort of randomly decided to go to the fair because Mindy wanted to? He wasn’t going to wait to plan a more meaningful or romantic date? And he was either going to propose without a ring, or he’s got a ring in his pocket, bought off credit, that he now has to return.
And his response to losing his ring money is just awful and pathetic. He just offhandedly tells Mindy this. It’s worse than a non proposal. It’s a non-proposal proposal. “I was going to ask you to marry me, but now that I’ve wasted money I would have spent on gold and jewels that retain some monetary value in the long run I’ve instead wasted hundreds on a stuffed tiger worth 5 bucks. But I still want you to marry me, so I’m basically asking the question in the form of a passive statement.”
My sister was going to get proposed to over Christmas. She and her boyfriend had traveled to spend the holiday with our whole family, and her boyfriend had the ring mailed to my parents house so he could propose on Christmas morning. The ring arrived damaged. SO HE DIDN’T PROPOSE THEN. He didn’t even tell her. He waited to get the ring fixed and then set up a date to propose to her later at the place they first met. He eventually told her the story about what happened over Christmas, sure. Because it’s a funny story. But telling her ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, would have gotten him run out of the house.
You can’t tell someone, “I was going to ask you to marry me, but…” Unless the ‘but’ is something along the lines of “I don’t actually want to marry you.” Otherwise it’s a proposal.
I miss Chien. You remember when they sort of implied Pete and Chien had some attraction during High School? That girl was sassy, and snarky, and smart. She was a stereotyped goth-chick, sure, but in a sea of skinny blondes she would have stood out. And she wouldn’t have squeebled over a stuffed tiger. She would have given Pete a dirty look, and then a piece of her mind. I wish Pete was marrying Chien. Mindy is dumb as a box of rocks.
Murderball most Foul.
At first I thought panel two of today’s strip was incredibly implausible. Why would this game have a hard backdrop behind the bottles that a ball could ricochet off of? Isn’t a game involving throwing hard projectiles at fragile glass bottles while people stand watching dangerous enough already? So I actually looked up a couple pictures and videos of how this carnival game is played. I didn’t see any balls ricochet right back like this, but most of the games I looked at had a hard metal sheet behind the bottles.
And you know what? This game is actually easier than a lot of carnie games. As long as the bottles are standard beer bottles, and the balls used aren’t completely nerfed, this game is less likely to be rigged than the milk bottle toss, the ring toss, or the free throw game.
What I’m saying is, unless Pete is completely inept, he should be able to do this at least once out of ten or so tries.
Which will probably win him a cheap stuffed animal roughly the size of his fist, worth about 10 cents.
Mindy could definitely do better. At both the carnie game and the dating game.
Son of Stuck Funky 