Tag: technology

Ring of Shame

The second most surprising thing about today’s strip: Montoni’s has a modern touchscreen point-of-sale system. you’d expect to see an old-time ch-ching! cash register behind the counter.

The real story here is how Rachel “I’m only a blonde on Sundays” O’Conner cleverly finagles a real engagement ring from her dishwasher fiancé. Fashioning a ring out of Wally’s I.O.U. initially seemed sweet and spontaneous. Now she makes it clear to Wally that she intends to wear that damn thing on her finger every day, informing every Montoni’s customer who asks “What’s this?” that Wally didn’t buy her a ring.

March Madness

Ah, yes: Montoni’s famous solid gold jukebox. Batiuk’s fond of saying that Montoni’s Pizzeria is a replication of  Luigi’s Restaurant in Akron, OH, “right down to the nails in the floor.” But an image found on Flickr shows a rather more mundane ‘box in that real-world establishment. I guess Tom felt that a classic round-top Wurlitzer would add some charm. Sadly though, whoever colors these strips either has never seen a Wurlitzer, or is too lazy or incompetent to color it in any shade but sickly yellow.

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.

Prayer For The Sneering

Link to today’s strip

I’m admittedly as beady-eyed and nit-picky as anyone here at SoSF, so maybe my opinion is somewhat skewed. That said, Lisa’s silly little “prayer” comes across as being rather selfish and short-sighted to me. After all, how did she know back then what would become of Frankie? Perhaps he would have changed his ways and become, oh I don’t know, an ordained minister or a first responder hero or a devoted family man or whatever. Typical Lisa…me me me, always self-absorbed in that annoyingly cloying way she had (and still has despite being dead). In any event, as Nelson Muntz might say, “Haw haw! Your prayer went unanswered!”.

So what did Frankie do, exactly, to merit this non-stop sneering and eyebrow-cocking? His attempt to “cash in” on one of Lisa’s many tragedies? Les did it a few times. Cayla was practically boinging off the walls when the movie check arrived. Summer even went as far as to suggest a 3-D version of “Lisa’s Story”. What makes that any different? I get the feeling that any “outsiders” who dare to enter Westview get chased to the city limits by a group of pitchfork-toting sneering fat guys wearing pizza shop smocks in an old-fashioned car as “Dueling Banjos” plays in the background. What a bunch of hostile pricks.

But forget all that nonsense, as none of it matters anyway. The big news today is that Montoni’s appears to be selling T-shirts! I simply MUST have one, although because I’m not a XXXXL I doubt they’d be carrying my size. If Batom doesn’t start hawking these on his site he’s both lazy and stupid, because he’s sitting on a gold mine with those.

WHSTV

You’d think that producing Westview High’s closed-circuit morning newscast would be a job that a couple of geeks like Cody and Owen could not only do but might actually do pretty well. Naturally, everything goes terribly awry, as typified by the fact that the picture on the TV is upside down. Just more fuel for Les and Linda’s disdain of their idiot students.

Never mind that, though. Get a load of who’s sitting in the front row: it’s Alex, most recently seen dispensing totally worthless relationship advice to lovestruck Owen. Surely there is some retconning going on here: we met Alex at mopey Pete’s book signing in December 2007 (see below), and she appeared to be at least high school age five years ago (I was going point to the fact that she sported tattoos even back then, but apparently Ohio law allows minors to get tattoos with parental consent). She’s certainly old enough for Pete to attempt hitting on, though we know that that’s not the best indicator. Note that her model sheet on the Meet the Cast page is one of the few that does not give an age. How convenient.

Dec. 10, 2007 strip: