Foobonia: Land of the jerks

Have yourself a Merry little Liz-mas.

2009-12-15T15:22:17Z

Mike isn't the only member of the family to have his love life affected over the holiday season; Liz seems somewhat more susceptible to game-changing events that affect her status as a player in the romantic arena as the following examples will attest:

1993: It was at this time that we first started noticing that Elizabeth had a not-so-secret admirer; since Liz was (and still is) as dense as titanium, Dawn actually had to convince her that Anthony had the hots for her.
1997: Liz goes out on a pub date with Blandthony; nothing happens but a slam against Ted and an interrogation from John and Elly.
1999: More awkwardness with Awfulny as their high-school romance starts circling the drain.
2000: Liz spent the holiday gushing about Eric Chamberlain to Mike and Dee after the Secret Wedding; owing to her inability to keep a secret, she helped set up the Big Fat Fake Wedding because the Pattersons and Sobinskis fell like suckers for Deanna's hypocritical boasting. (To my knowledge, she, like Mira and Wilf, does NOT know that her older brother was already married when she bragged about the wonders of cohabitation unlike the rest of the Patterson family who, somehow or another, pried it out of the Crappy Couple.)
2001: "Liz and Eric and Anthony and Terri": We were stuck dealing with Liz making excuses for Eric who, as we know, got wanderlust 'cause someone wouldn't put out. It was at this time that Awfulny announced his engagement.
2003: "Liz versus Thérèse: Part Two": Liz attends a holiday party with, you guessed it, the Caines in attendance; as expected, she acts like a great big martyr because she has to think about someone who ain't her.
2004: "Liz versus Thérèse: Part Three": The Breath, who was busy pouting because Warren put his job ahead of her idiot compulsion to have him where she could see him (Pattersons, by definition, being incapable of trust), went to the New Years party where she again treated Thérèse like Cruella DeVille because the woman still took her wedding vows seriously and expected Anthony's past to freaking stay IN the past. She storms off in a blind rage after being asked to behave with decorum, falls on a patch of glare ice and has the gall to blame the whole thing on a pregnant woman.
2005: "Warren versus Paul": Liz witlessly dangles Warren (who, as we see, is clearly still under her spell) in front of Paul, spouts the stupid Pattersonian gospel about how long distance relationships are impossible and sets up the following year's humiliation.
2006: "Chudsers": As you will recall, Liz, having expected Paul to do all the adapting and changing in their relationship because change is haaaaaaaaaaard and she haaaaaaaaaaaates it, is blindsided by his refusal to be a puppet on her string; after delivering the weakest, lamest denunciation imaginable, she flees South after congratulating a thief on robbing her of something that as little to her as April's opinion on the matter.
2007: "I'm not her but I'm here": In the most hateful part of a loathsome holiday season, Thérèse is forced to grovel pathetically as she apologizes to Liz for breathing the same air as her and Françoise, having taken her marital vows seriously, objecting to the Pattersons' unwelcome interference in her personal life, having post-partum depression and, finally, having reached the limits of human endurance and leaving a situation whose stress would kill Liz.

You will, of course, have noticed the smug, shiftless, witless passivity that unites these rancid tales of bourgeois anhedonia; if our heroine were any more spineless, she could not stand up without mechanical assistance to defeat gravity and if she were any less forceful, she'd be mistaken for being one of the frozen people in Awakenings. It's a good thing that the Pattersons are more efficient in policing April's behavior; I'd hate to have to write a third one of these.

Mike plus Christmas equals romance.

2009-12-14T14:01:05Z

The nifty thing about the catalog is that it allows you to go back to pretty much the beginning of the strip and discover themes that might otherwise have escaped your attention. Since it's pretty much Michael's ninth real anniversary, let's explore how his love life was affected by the Holiday season:

1988: For some odd reason, John and Elly decided that the Pattersons should spend Christmas at his parents' farm in Aberdeen, Manitoba. This was sort of awkward for everyone given the cramped conditions, the fact that Mike and Lizzie weren't used to life on a working farm (which meant having to get up at seven instead of sleeping in like they were used to), the septic tank freezing due to a surprise flash freeze requiring them to use a honey bucket, the need Carrie had for quiet and the clash of personalities. What really made things suck was the fact that thirteen year old Mike was upset that he got dragged away from his friends in general and Martha in particular; Elly's response to that was to come to the inane conclusion that she needed to save her son from Martha's smothering embrace.

1995: The primary cause of drama was that his girlfriend Rhetta wanted to date other people while they were at school; her reasoning was that they should get all that out of their systems while they were in University so that when they got back together after graduation, they could settle down to a steady and quiet life together. Mike's response to this, of course, was to whine "Goodbye" and spend the rest of his life simpering about how a false-hearted woman tore his out and trod on it.

1988: This, of course, was when he declared his love for Dee by shouting it from a rooftop like a crazy person.

2000: The Secret Wedding; I've trod over this ground enough for you to know what I feel about it so I'll simply state my disgust that Dee gave her mother the gift of hypocrisy.

There's a unifying theme that I've noticed: Mike has being in love with being in love in common with Liz. He also shares her superficial nature; the thin layer of charm that people admire covers an endless succession of thin veneers. Once you peel them all away, there's nothing there as evidenced by the imbecilic reasons he gives for referring to his previous two love interests as Jezebels. Since he's a simpleton, he still doesn't know that Martha was the victim of Elly's campaign to drive a wedge between them because she represented the popular girls who got all the boy in high school while Elly, who probably trudged down the halls with a scowl on her face moaning that no one liked her, cried in her pillow because she didn't know why she was unpopular. As for Rhetta, she betrayed him by wanting to see other people when she was 'supposed' to have no social life at all; he, of course, was allowed to tomcat around like an idiot 'cause he was the guy.

Chaos for Christmas.

2009-12-13T21:09:55Z

The real problem with the way that Elly and her fellows celebrate Christmas is that it's not necessary for them to go to the excesses that eat up their days, cause them to race around like idiots as they unhinge their jaws and yell about how little they have done, moan about getting the perfect gift, whine about gaining weight as they eat until they feel unwell, gaud their house with lights, write greeting cards to people they barely know, send out thank you letters to relatives who will probably throw them away and, above all, spend the Winter paying down the debt they got into. Let's examine the beliefs Elly has and see why she shouldn't believe them:

"Gift cards are impersonal" As I said before, a gift card allows the recipient to get what he or she actually wants. As an example, we have the strip that shows that Elly knows that Phil loves fishing but doesn't know what's in his tackle box; were she to give him a gift card from a sporting goods store, she'd demonstrate that she knows what his interests are without committing the faux pas of giving him something he doesn't like.
"We need to give the children all the toys they ask for." The reason she and John go nuts buying toys is the odd belief that piling up cargo underneath the tree proves how much they love their children; the sad thing is that they end up going into debt as they slowly but surely turn their children into materialistic twerps who also confuse excess with love.
"We need to buy expensive gifts for all the adults in our family." Elly and John seem to believe that there's some sort of federal law that forces them to buy really expensive gifts for everyone they know. Not only do they not need to, it's classier if they don't behave as if they're making a show of being generous.
"We have to send cards and a newsletter to everyone in our address book." The problem with this sort of thinking is that they end up clogging the postal system with letters to people who they barely know and wouldn't recognize if they were in a police lineup; the real fun is that the targets of their largesse end up wondering "Patterson? Is that the doofy-looking dentist with the insane wife with the big ass or our sister's old clodhopper of a boyfriend with the train fetish?" as they put the card on the mantle on its way to the landfill.
"We have to prepare a huge feast and eat until we're violently unwell." Despite what Elly believes, she and her family don't have to gorge themselves for Christmas; the world will not come to a screaming halt if they have a mildly fancy version of their regular dinner.
"We have to write thank you letters to our friends and relations." One of Elly's favorite activities is pestering her children about the need to make fawning statements of gratitude to relatives who send them gifts; given how grasping and materialistic she herself is, watching her lecture Mike about the need to thank Grandma Marian for sending him a package of socks and tightie whities is wonderfully nasty fun.
"We have to run up a huge power bill by having a fancy lighting display." I admit that I sort of like looking at Christmas lights but, even as I admire the skill and dedication people put into them, can't help but feel glad I'm not stuck with their utility bills. I decorate to please myself, not to impress other people. If that means that I don't bother with lights on my tree, that's my choice.
"We have to save all the ribbons and wrap because they can be reused." The problem, of course, is that since Elly has a memory like a sieve, all she's doing is adding to the clutter in her attic and the garage.

The most damning thing of all is that if she were to avoid falling into those traps, she'd have time to herself over the holidays and be able to sit back and enjoy the company of the people in her life. How sad that in all the shopping and the shoving, she's missing what's really important.

Ho-ho-hatred: the further adventures of the Flapandhonk that stole Christmas.

2009-12-12T13:47:06Z

As I said recently, there's been a disturbing change in how Lynn has approached the Holiday season; we started out with an Elly who was slightly more enthusiastic about the festivities than her children; granted, she didn't like cleaning up the mess or her children's pleas of boredom with their toys but, as I'd said, it was a small price to pay for Yuletide joy. As an example of the need Elly had to preserve the mystique, the recent return to Santa was originally her way of making sure that her son didn't associate Christmas with nubile blondes wrapped in cellophane; her later decision, which she regretted, to tell Mike that Santa was less a person than a personification didn't put a serious dent in her enjoyment. For that to happen, we had to wait until the early 2000s; the Elly of old had mutated into the frothingly frustrated mess that flapped, honked and wanted to own horses; that incarnation of the main character was a petty figure who was done with caring about any needs other than her own and filled with the need to show up her rival, Mira Sobinski. April was allowed to set the tone by whining about how Dee's mother supposedly won all the time and how unfair it was that the Pattersons had to share things with people they despised merely because it was the latter part of December. Another example of Yuletide begrudgery was Liz's final confrontation with Thérèse; I'm fairly sure that in Lynn's mind, Thérèse has earned the nasty reputation she'd been given but, for some reason, that didn't translate to the printed page any more than Liz's severe case of homesickness did. What we instead saw was an ill-used and justifiably angry woman forced to watch as the woman whose family ruined her life seem to take away one of the few good things in it: the love and trust of her child. This immediately proceeded the most hateful thing I've seen in years: the Yuletide Meal of Malice. Not only did we have Anthony do what new-ruin Elly did and use Santa's name as a means to frighten a trusting child into compliance with her dictates, we had April exiled to the kiddie table like an afterthought as well as the gluttonous vermin begrudging Mira the ninety or so seconds it took to say Grace because they wanted to wolf down their food while it was still unbelievably hot.

The elephant in the cineplex

2009-12-11T15:43:52Z

When I first saw last Sunday's strip, I expected a certain reaction on Coffee Talk based on what I'd seen before. Let's use the strip that had Elly steamroll Michael into agreeing that throwing away the rest of his Halloween candy was a good thing as an example of said trend. We started with people who think like we do angrily denouncing her for being a bully, ogre, idiot and twerp; this was followed by the usual reminders that it was simply a comic strip and thus not worrying about and letters that explained that we didn't see what we thought we did. The consensus amongst Lynn's defenders is that Elly thought she was helping John in his campaign to protect the family's teeth. This led me to expect that we'd have seen letters that referenced Amber alerts as well as comments from retail workers who resent the implication that they're free babysitters for the Ellys of the world followed by rebuttals that stated that a) Elly was actually in the same theater as Mike only we couldn't see her, b) if Lynn says they're old enough to go by themselves, they're old enough to go it alone, c) let them have childhoods, pickyfaces or d) get a life, they're not actually real unless they do something I like. What we saw was one letter that questioned Elly's parenting chops floating in a sea of letters about everything else. This tells me that whoever's in charge of screening Lynn's e-mail didn't want to touch this with a ten-foot pole but didn't want it to look like the subject was being totally ignored; they're probably waiting for the heat to die down so they can move on.

The miracle crawl space of the Pattermanse

2009-12-10T16:36:46Z

In the strip that ran on 10 December 2009, we saw the first appearance of an architectural oddity that the Pattersons have dealt with ever since they moved into the Pattermanse: the crawlspace in their basement. As forworse has reminded us, it’s simply more than where the Miracle Dress was stored; it’s figured in the Patterson’s lives on at least four other occasions. The first time it became more than where they kept a sump pump to supplement the weeping tiles that allowed rain to drain away from the basement was in the early 1980’s; that’s because Elly cleaned it out for a yard sale the Pattersons were having. Next, Mike fished out a potty for Richard Nichols to use when Elly was sitting for Annie; granted, we had to deal with shy bladder syndrome but he did try to help. After that, they inherit all the junk Connie didn’t take to Thunder Bay with her; given that she was sort of peeved by how her marriage collapsed, this raises the possibility that the Miracle Dress might have been Connie’s to start with. Her reasoning might be that since her own marriage went up the spout and she can’t pass it down, Elly might as well have it. If so, it’s lucky it survived 1994 when the sump pump broke down due to lack of maintenance; they lost a couch, the basement carpet, some drywall, the weeping tiles, John’s clinic records and, since Elly and John didn’t buy flood insurance, several thousand dollars and a little more of Elly’s faith in humanity. The next time it came into play was a few years later when they cleaned it out again to keep the weeping tiles from getting clogged again; again, they wound up carrying out a load of stuff. The conclusion I draw from all this is that it’s not simply a design feature to aid drainage and hide a huge rock the contractor couldn’t remove; it’s where they store all the stuff they’re not sure will come in handy but don’t want to throw out in case they need it.

The Flapandhonk that stole Christmas....

2009-12-09T15:53:37Z

I've noticed something slightly appalling about how Christmas is depicted in the New-Ruin era; instead of being anything like the Holidays that the real Pattersons had where the chaos, clean-up and commercialism was the price they willingly paid for the magic, the current spirit is the one we saw on 9 December 2009. As you will recall, the second panel had Elly wrapping a present with a pained, martyred expression on her face as if buying gifts for her children was some sort of cruel and inhuman imposition inflicted by a medieval tyrant who wanted to deny her help, time to herself, the right to express herself, et cetera ad infinitum. This is, of course, because the Elly of the current strips is a worse person than the real one; the person that used to exist hid the presents because she didn't want her children to spoil the surprise and lessen the general delight. The one we have now is an anhedonic mess who regards the whole thing as an excuse to add more work to her bleak, wind-blown exile from the real world as she thanklessly toils away for a cloddish, knuckle-dragging tyrant husband and greedy children. If this seems sort of horrible, consider that Lynn sees something far different when she looks at what we see as a grim and no-holds-barred look at a bad family having a joyless Christmas; in the strip in her mind, the Pattersons are about to have a great Christmas and be content. It's sort of too bad that she seems to not be able to communicate that to her readers but it's par for the course. We do, after all, have to remember that she didn't show Liz being homesick in Mtigwaki or Michael being a good father to his kids either 'cause she forgot that we can't see inside her head.

John: Santa's dumbest elf

2009-12-08T14:18:50Z

As you know, John rarely gets Elly what she wants for Christmas; he trudges through the shop aisles with a flustered look on his face because he simply cannot figure out what the little woman wants. This, of course, is because he really doesn't have much of an idea of who she is as a person; he assumes, right or (mostly) wrong, that he'd married a gal like dear old Mom so can never seem to realize that Elly might want something expensive and showy like a mink or jewelry because of said belief. It doesn't seem to occur to him that his wife and a woman like Carrie who was raised to not make a spectacle of herself have differing tastes despite both being mothers and housewives. The end result is that he usually buys her something she doesn't want because a clerk told him to get it or an appliance of some description. This reminds Elly that he not only has no idea what she likes, he thinks of her as a housewife first and an individual a distant second. Since he doesn't have a clue and doesn't want to get one, he needs the help of his daughters to point him in the right direction; when they're not there when he needs them, he makes a lot of noise about not wanting to shop for adults (i.e. Elly) because "they" seem to lack gratitude. Despite it being inspired by his refusal to admit that he's socially awkward, stubborn and slow-witted, there actually is something to that sentiment; he's probably sick of asking someone to kindly make lemonade out of the citrus under the tree. If I had to guess about why this theme appears so much, I'd say that someone with an axe to grind wants to bury it in her ex's shoulder blades.

The Pattersons versus Santa Claus.....

2009-12-07T17:45:34Z

One of the more depressing parts of reading the strip is Lynn's more or less faithful interpretation of when her children started thinking of Santa as not a physical entity that lives at the North Pole and delivers gifts but as a personification of seasonal generosity; bearing witness to their replacing child-like wonder to a more mature appreciation of the people around them is a depressing-but-necessary part of their growing up. The odd thing is that Elly started out thinking that her kid brother had 'killed' Santa when he made his broad, arch, obvious and sexist remark about wanting a hottie for Christmas right in front of Mike; that's why she took him to see Santa a second time. Since Mike thought that they went because Santa didn't hear his whole list when Phil took him, it seems to me that her concern was misplaced as was her belief that it was Phil who did the deed. That's because a year later, Mike first started noticing that things didn't add up Santa-wise and he asked Elly if there was a real Saint Nick; ever one to make her life harder, she gave him the truth despite John's objection that she should perhaps have waited until he was ready to handle it. John foresaw something she did not: that Mike was of the age that he would interpret their earlier insistence on Kris Kringle's reality as a lie meant to make a fool of him. Unlike his wife, you see, he was aware of the fact that when an adult is forced to break a promise to a child, that child thinks that said adult lied to him out of malice. He could thus see a time when Mike would use his knowledge as a tool with which he could make Lizzie's life worse; he didn't know if he'd mock her for still believing or try to ruin the surprise but he did know that Mike could have waited a while for honesty. The reason that Elly might have sabotaged herself is that she sort of resented it that she was made to think about other people; if she can't be happy, she's going to make damned sure no one else is.

On unaccompanied minors in the Foobisphere

2009-12-06T12:27:56Z

I remember once having written a blog entry that assumed that the Pattersons' love of having small children wandering around unescorted was an artefact of the Declining Years, a symptom of Lynn’s having lost touch with how parents behave. Sadly, the New-ruins have cured me of this belief. We’ve, after all, seen a lot of reprints that depict the same insouciant disregard of the boring fact of where the children are. The strip that appeared on 6 December 2009, wherein Elly used a movie theatre as a baby sitter, was simply the latest example of this annoying, distasteful and dangerous trend. There are, after all, a lot of impressionable people out there who, for reasons unknown, regard the strip as some sort of parenting manual so they might actually regard this as being the harmless sort of behavior Lynn wants to think it is; since we live in a world of Amber alerts and Megan’s laws, this is, to put it mildly, a catastrophically bad idea. When I look at Mike and Lawrence cheering on Blaster Man, I can’t help but wonder what sort of real-life bad guy might lie in wait for them and the rest of the audience because I have a brain, a brain that remembers a boy named Adam Walsh. I also remember the law; Elly simply cannot use public places like cinemaplexes, malls and the like to baby-sit her children for her while she goes off and does whatever; to do so invites charges under the Criminal Code of Canada as well as public censure. What really disgusts me about the whole thing is not only that Elly doesn’t seem to think that bad things can happen when she's not looking, a belief that never went away even after John had to fish a frightened child out of a freezing river, but that she seems to think that she’s too important to have to actually supervise her children. Since she adds hateful immaturity to her nauseating and raging narcissism, asking her to do her duty elicits moping as if doing what she must is doing her children a huge favor which will require that she own their horses later on in life.

The fall of the Great Provider…..

2009-12-05T19:32:33Z

As said at the end of yesterday’s post, John’s constant exposure to Elly seems to be corroding his character and doing a number on his decency. An example of this is how he reacted to the following exchange:

Panel 1: John holds a jam-jar full of change in the air and asks Elly what it’s for.

Panel 2: Elly sheepishly states that she saves it from the grocery money so she can spend it on things she needs.

Panel 3: John points out that he’ll give her money for whatever it is that she needs; all she has to do is ask.

Panel 4: He’s taken aback when she says that she knows that but, by doing things her way, she feels that she’s earned it.

His confusion stems from his being what they used to call the Great Provider back in the day; in the post-war years, this figure made sure that his family wanted for nothing by answering their every need as soon as it was expressed. He went to work, paid his dues and carried the weight for his wife and children. John, as we’ve seen, started out as this dull, grey and benign figure; Elly’s constant reminders that she thought that he wasn’t taking her seriously had a destructive effect on all. He wound up believing that he shouldn’t hand out money to any of his family because they would thus feel demeaned and that his wife, who raised the kids and should know, was right to assume that the children owed them all the money they spent on them; this made Elly feel good about her false economies and entry-level jobs but it was sort of tough on his kids who’d rather not have learned the value of a dollar THAT early in life.

John and the Missus: How to marry an atomic bomb.....

2009-12-04T20:25:26Z

The problem with Elly blaming all of her bad decisions on John is, as clio_1 pointed out, that it makes a grown woman who has free will present herself a helpless puppet of fate. Lynn's lack of any real sympathy for women seems to have the odd symptom of making them all into helpless children who either suffer from the baleful domination of bad men or huddle under the protection of the good. The idea that women are actually responsible for their lives is not something that she wishes to acknowledge as it means that she can't blame anyone but herself for her woes. This tendency would tend to interfere with the on-going attempt to turn John into a supervillain and thus make a mockery of the new-ruins. One of the strips that Lynn probably has no intention of reprinting shows us John's basic dilemma:

Panel 1: As Elly stares off into space, John makes the palms-out gesture and says "Now, let's see....You want something but don't know exactly what...."

Panel 2: "...you're dissatisfied but don't know why and want to get away but don't know where."

Panel 3: Elly asks him if he's mad at her.

Panel 4: As he walks off, he says he's not really sure.

Simply put, he can't know who Elly is because she not only won't tell him, she doesn't really know who she is either. All she does seem to know is that she can never seem to be satisfied with her life and that someone else is to blame. We thus end up having to look at a clumsy, stubborn, slow-witted goofola who doesn't have much tact dealing with a volatile mess who needs to have someone to scream at when she's feeling lost and confused or someone to bully into complying with the notion that he or she owes her when she feels wronged. Since she doesn't know why she's upset, he and the kids have to absorb a lot of cheap theatrics and manipulation; since he's a gullible dunce who's been conditioned to obey mother figures, he believes her bullshit stories about what the kids do and acts accordingly. What makes things worse is that the sullen doorknob made this happen to himself; just as he doesn't question the outdated values he believes in because he's not smart enough to ask himself why he believes them, he was dim enough to believe the false Elly he dated was the real deal. Anyone stupid enough to fall for HER sales pitch is not worth our respect so he sort of deserves to live with a walking, talking fountain of sulfuric acid. What is even worse is that trying to adapt to her insanity is making him a worse person in his own right; he started out as the Great Provider who'd hand out money as needed to all comers but, after being constantly yelled at by his insane wife for 'being demeaning', turned into a skinflint who thought that he had to make a six-year old vacuum a car to make him feel self-actualized.

The hypocrisy of the Liographies.....

2009-12-03T17:35:59Z

As I've mentioned before, the parents of the people featured in the Liographies are an appalling lot of petty tyrants. Since the author seems to love the idea of creating conflict by making her subject's father's into smirking bullies who seem to believe that it's God's will that they cruelly oppress the helpless victim-subject in order to make the character sympathetic, we end up having to read about a flotilla of moral monsters and the spineless wives they cow into helping them abuse others by working on their self-esteem. Where they move from being merely an example of banal nonsense filled with cheap theatrics to a hypocritical load of hogwash is when they posit salvation by Pattersons as the person's only hope. That's because the John we're seeing right now is the same sort of abusive monster the Liographies assail; first off, his cruel remarks about Elly's appearance and intellect have turned her into his accomplice. Second, he honestly seems to believe that his children owe him every cent he's spent on their behalf and that it's God's will that he get to collect. Third, he deliberately makes his children's life difficult and bullies them into admitting things that in their hearts they know to be lies so as to avoid disproportionate retribution. Fourth, when they rebel, he isolates them on a farm away from friends and family while telling his relatives exaggerated tales of their wild behavior. Fifth, when asked to question the viciousness that festers inside him, he burns with rage. Or at least that's the official story; when you realize how much Lynn still resents the fact that Rod is still better liked even after the divorce, you get the idea that her tendency to build Elly up by tearing John down kicked into overdrive thereby turning a boorish-but-well-intentioned dunce patriarch into a Complete Monster.

The Strip Catalog: Way-station to the end of the new-ruins...

2009-12-03T04:58:47Z

As we've all seen, the latest feature to appear on the For Better or For Worse homepage is an online catalog of strips that goes pretty much back to the beginning of the Patterson saga to the Settlepocalypse as well as into the New-Ruin era. We're allowed to search for a keyword, to look at selected plotlines, to select strips at random and to search for a punchline. The only feature that is not currently available is a search by a date range but it was probably assumed that the typical end user wouldn't know when the strip he or she was looking for actually occured so it was probably deemed unnecessary to implement it at this time. The reason that this appears now is that it probably took a lot of time to fulfill a need that had been apparent for some time; most of the letters that come into Coffee Talk are probably requests for a particular strip and now they're able to point the readers into the right direction at the click of a mouse. It also reassures the readers that even though she must leave them, Lynn isn't really going anywhere; they'll always be able to find her online.

The Grift of the Magi:

2009-12-01T17:33:37Z

As we saw yesterday, Elly really seems to hate being asked to buy gifts for other people; it, to her, is just another form of the seemingly endless sacrifices that she falsely believes are asked of her. To start with a generality, we should examine her refusal to give someone gift certificates so as to save herself having to think. The word she uses to describe them is "impersonal"; what this, of course, means is that she doesn't want the person she's giving the gift to to think that she slacked off on searching for the right gift. In her mind, braving the scrum is proof of her generosity; where she strays from the path of common sense is that she really doesn't know what to get the people in her life and thus can be made a fool of by an enterprising clerk on the make. As an example, let us look at Phil; she has no idea what fishing gear he has, she won't go to a record store because she's sore at him because he's "wasting his life" as a professional musician and won't ask for a hint; the end result is that he has to put on a plastic smile and say that he actually wanted the Foobiverse equivalent of a Jovan Musk gift set. Does he really want it? Not really. Does he think that she put any thought into her giving? If he's like me, he'd assume that she panicked and grabbed the first plausible thing because she knew nothing about him. The most important question of all is "Would a girt card have been a better idea?" The answer, of course, is "Why, yes, it would have been." With a voucher or card, he could get what he needed when he needed it instead of dealing with the disappointing results of Elly's lack of concern and poor sales resistance. The same sinister process took place when she went somewhere she had no real business being: Therese's baby shower. Just as she and John love to remind her children that they owe them something in return for room and board, she loves to harp on how people should accept whatever needless thing her empty brain can conceive of giving them. It also explains why a sister of the saleslady from Cathy was able to convince Mike to buy a Valentine's Day gift for about ten or fifteen people.

The ignorance factor........

2009-11-30T22:45:27Z

In a letter she recently sent to Coffee Talk, hoppytoad79 made an important point that explains a lot of what we've seen here in the New-Ruin era; to put it bluntly, John has no idea who the Hell Elly is. As she points out, he doesn't seem to notice or care that the cruel remarks he makes about her weight, (lack of) intellect and appearance are like a punch to the gut, he doesn't realize that being a stay-at-home mother is as hard, if not harder, than his dental practice, he regards her wants, aspirations and desires to be an obstacle to the unquestioning performance of the wifely duties that he expects of her and generally doesn't think of her as someone he needs to as such respect, let alone get to know as a person. His smug ignorance of the people around him does not stop with the little woman; he also doesn't know who Michael is. Since Elly is 'supposed' to keep the kids away from him while he sits on his ass and reads his paper, all he sees is a loud, noisy little boy who doesn't give him the respect he believes due to him. He has no idea how threatened his son feels and has no inclination to care; what he wants is immediate obedience from the little boy in the striped shirt. Lizzie is even less well know; all he expects of her is that she be cute and not make noise. This is bad enough but one is forced to realize that John is equally unknown to those around him; since he will not discuss his hopes and dreams for fear of looking soft, Elly has no real idea who she married. She doesn't know that he married the first woman he ever really dated seriously to avoid a dating scene that made him feel awkward just as she doesn't know that the most he has the courage to do is ogle pretty girls. She also doesn't know who Michael really is because she doesn't want to get to know him because he's too young to be worth it. This tolerance they have for not knowing who one another are, this aggressive lack of curiosity as to the irrelevant details of each other's boring lives causes that odd compartmentalization I've commented on. The end result is that the Pattermanse is not inhabited by a family as we understand it but by a group of strangers who share a surname.

The revenge effect.....

2009-11-29T19:44:34Z

I remember reading a book by an Edward Tenner called "Why things bite back"; the man's topic was a phenomenon he called 'the revenge effect'. One of the examples he gave was the introduction of kudzu to the Southeastern United States; the Soil Conservation Service introduced the plant in order to combat erosion, improve the soil by fixing nitrogen and provide forage for grazing animals. What they didn't know at the time was that conditions in the area were perfect for the runaway growth of what some people call 'the vine that ate the South'. A similar process is taking place as we speak in Milborough; this is because someone is about to learn the wrong lesson from the Connie-and-Phil debacle. As we know, the romance between the two of them is strictly one-sided and would have been doomed to failure if Phil had lived on the other side of town; Elly and Connie, however, do not see things that way. Since they're dimwits, they ascribe the failure to absence making the heart grow wander and thus come to the wildly inappropriate and astonishingly ridiculous conclusion that long distance relationships can never work because a love interest has to be within a fifteen minute drive of his or her partner. Since Liz was raised to believe tosh like this, she couldn't see that she could very easily kept things going between her and Anthony despite their being hundreds of miles apart; had she done so, the two of them could have avoided drawing Eric, Therese and Paul into their wake and spreading misery because Elly is too dumb to come to a correct conclusion.

Creator Breakdown a gogo

2009-11-28T17:39:45Z

The real reason that I'm sort of disappointed that my prediction that we would return to the Evil-because-he-was-able-to-get-away-with-things-Elly-didn't-have-the-courage-to-try-Phil and Clueless-because-she-needs-a-MAAAYYYYYUUUUNNNNN-Connie show is that it's yet more proof that Lynn simply doesn't care about the continuity of the new-ruins. So far, we've seen the following plot points be advanced only to be retracted because they make the straight reprints harder to explain:

The age and number of the Nichols children was the first change in 'history' to be reconsidered; as we know, Lynn started out with the idea that Christopher was Mike's contemporary and Richard Lizzie's. Since she doesn't want to spend the next few years changing dialogue, she simply 'forgot' that she'd changed the number and age of Annie's kids and set things back to right.
Her attempt to correct the premature disappearance of Deanna, as I said when it came up, raised a lot more questions that it supposedly answered; we were, after all, asked to accept Lynn's interpretation of how house sales worked without being allowed to point out the absurdities.
Mike started out taking a bus from kindergarten, which Lynn called preschool, and then started taking the bus for the first time when he got into first grade.
Elly supposedly already took an extension course only to drop out but now is the first time this has happened.

This is sort of a marvel, in an odd way; anyone can forget details but it takes someone special to be that apathetic about it.

Escape to the House of Bebop, Part 3: The Amazonian Catfish Mystery.

2009-11-27T16:19:52Z

It's hard to believe that it's been three weeks since I put forth the notion that Connie would head off to Montreal to pursue a very reluctant Phil Richards despite it seeming that she'd moved on; it seems longer because we've had to trudge through so much of Elly's self-willed martyrdom that it's hard to have to contemplate Connie's brand of the same sickness. Since we thought that the issue had actually been resolved, its reintroduction raises a lot of issues that don't do the characters involved much credit. Said issues all point back to the obvious question "Why does Connie think that she stands a chance of snagging Phil?" The answers that seem most likely to your humble(!) servant are as follows:

Phil, despite Elly telling him to stop being an ass, is deliberately leading Connie on out of sheer hateful maleness; he will most likely be revealed to want to create chaos in order to have an innocent, trusting woman fawn over him.

Connie, despite constant reminders from Elly that she's kidding herself, has somehow convinced herself that his polite gestures are less the result of his being raised to be kind to his sister's friends and more an indication that he, despite his statement that he doesn't see her as a love interest, 'really' means that he cares as much for her as she for him.

Elly is stirring the pot and feeding Connie inflated estimates of what Phil's real feelings are because she's tired of his having a freedom she lacks; in her mind, it's high time that her shiftless kid brother grew up, got a real job and quit playing bees and bops in bars.

Elly is stirring the pot by saying things that confuse and embolden Connie because she's too dim to know that her idiotic remarks create a hope that cannot be fulfilled.

There are, of course, other scenarios that explain why this will happen; what it doesn't do (unless, of course, you chalk things up to poor story-telling and simply accept the oncoming horror) is explain why she had to revisit something that she changed for the better. I had hoped she'd flesh out the story by explaining why Mira was evil wrapped in a kielbasa, not by making Connie even more pathetic when she chases after Phil and Ted. This, of course, is owing to her following the mores of her creator. She is, after all. engaged in this doomed pursuit because she, as a 'good' woman wants to have a man to validate her by marrying her and give her children so she can have a real identity; Phil, as a 'bad' man, simply wants sex without all the emotional baggage Lynn insists that he carry. If Connie were to simply want to have icky, awful sex with the Token that meant that she was Taken, she'd be an earlier version of Evil Therese and thus not worth our sympathies. Since the woman is racing around looking for love in a lot of wrong places while ignoring her own happiness and peace of mind, she's laughable in a sort of seedy, disgusting way. People who sell themselves short like her generally are.

Return of the underminer.......

2009-11-26T20:53:46Z

You can't read the strip for as long as I have without noticing something that howtheduck picked up on years ago; he noticed that Lynn believes in a strict segregation between adult and child behavior. In her world, adults should act like adults and children like children. This is, of course, why Elly is in a blind panic about the prospect of being a stay-at-home mother; she clearly seems to have dreaded violating the laws of Foob and Whatever-God-the-Pattersons-believe-in by taking an interest in the things her children do and how they think. The 'proper' role of a parent is to sit back and stare at her children while they do whatever useless, boring, not-at-all-interesting-or-worth-parental-attention things they do; intervention is only permitted if they distract mother's attention from busywork. Lynn likes to contrast good parents like Elly, adult Michael and adult Deanna with a bad parent to show us how we are to live; beforehand, we had Mira as the (designated) cautionary example; as we know, the 'misguided', 'overly-indulgent' woman delighted in trying to undermine Deanna's authority by interacting with Meredith and Robin as if they were worth paying attention to and their concerns worth acknowledging; since someone with an axe to grind is trying to make herself feel better about how she missed out on her children's growing up because of the demands of her career, the result was to turn them into a pair of hellions who spent their days dreaming up new ways to annoy their parents. Now that we're in the new-ruin era, John, who has Mike and Lizzie eat cookies for dinner and who plays with them is, of course, trying to ensure that they become spoiled, demanding and tyrannical to undermine Elly and make work for her. This is so they can join the Nichols children in turning out weong because Annie paid them attention and thought their activities worth her interest.

On volunteerism in the Pattersphere.

2009-11-25T19:17:07Z

Since many of us started following the strip in the nineties or so, we labor under the misapprehension that the Pattersons have never given more of their time to a cause than lip service; this is something of a mistake because Lynn appropriated Rod's instinct towards public service and assigned it to the Elly of the late eighties. As we will eventually see, she spent most of her free time either in a meeting or shuttling between them. What Lynn really thought of volunteering is fairly easy to determine by examining the role Elly played; she was a hand sticking leaflets under wiper blades or ringing doorbells, a bottom sitting behind a card table holding a fund-raiser's jug and a voice mouthing slogans or cheering on Mike's hockey team; what she wasn't was a brain deciding goals or formulating policy. That part of her life came about as the result of volunteering, though; I am, of course, discussing the programs she ran at the local library. The odd thing is that giving of herself gave Elly no peace of mind; she and Connie spent their time whining about it taking time away from their families, about how they had no time to themselves and how they missed out on sunsets. This, of course, was the beginning of the end for that as it foreshadowed how Elly would later opine that Lilliput's was stating to own her; slowly but surely, Elly "realized" the family-unfriendly moral Lynn had planned all along; that's because in her view, volunteering is a well-meaning but essentially futile activity that disrupts family life. Having all the programs she worked so hard to maintain be scrapped after she got fired due to budget cuts was simply the final nail in the coffin. Elly could then safely moan that since nothing she did had any lasting impact and since the problems of the world never really went away, the only thing open to her was to post a sign in the bathroom reminding April that they conserved water so don't take too long in the shower.

Elly versus the weather......

2009-11-24T13:31:19Z

I'm going to start this entry by making a confession: I'm not really all that fond of Winter. Like a lot of Canadians, I associate it with cold, blustery days and clear, chilly nights, icy roads and sidewalks, snowdrifts, windchill, freezing rain, the possibilty of freezing pipes, slush, bundling up like Nanook of the North and still feeling half-frozen, plow drivers who seem Hell-bent on trying to bury people alive and a lot of other fun things. Where I differ from Elly is that I can take the stress without scrunching up my face or thinking that the sky is mad at me. I mean, it's Winter; nobody really likes it but we've got to be like John and make the best of things instead of standing in the hallway frowning and bellowing at Farley for shaking all over the carpet because we'd rather NOT have him come in the garage and do that, oh no, not US because that would mean that John was right all along. At this point, of course, you'd probably tell yourself that at least when she goes on her kid-free vacations, she can calm down; you'd be dead wrong, though. When she goes down South, she complains about it being sticky hot, how they pretend that they don't understand English no matter HOW LOUD SHE SHOUTS and whinges about catching tropical diseases. It seems, at least to me, that the only place Elly would truly be happy is some vast, featureless, climate-controlled corridor with nothing to distract her attention or stir her baffling, ill-focused discontent.

Of evil underbites and the prevention of fun.......

2009-11-23T23:07:46Z

In an earlier post, I commented on certain facial expressions that Lynn liked to draw; I'd listed the Bug-Eyed Glare of Existential Horror, the Sticky-out Tongued Laugh of Malice and the Unhinged Jaws of Disproportionate Hostility; the neat thing about the new-ruins is that there's a new expression: the Scrunched-up Face of Rage; lately, it seems that we cannot go a week without seeing Elly with her eyes narrowed in anger sporting a severe and possibly evil underbite. The strange thing is the cause; we generally see this happen when the children are enjoying themselves. As howtheduck noted, the Elly of original history simply avoided having fun with the children based on the lunatic theory that her brain would erode and she'd become a babbling infant were she to do so; now, she seems to be actively trying to prevent them from having any fun at all. The reason, I think, is that since she's upset for no reason that she can articulate, the only way she can be less miserable is by spoiling other people's fun. The problem with this is that she ends up hating it when she wins; most of the Middle Years are spent watching Elly wring her hands and ask why it is that Michael sits in front of the box instead of reading or playing or taking an interest in the world. Since she doesn't want to face up to her responsibilities, she'd rather not admit that she was the mad scientist who made that monster.

Elly Patterson, Media Watchhamster......

2009-11-22T20:16:27Z

As we've seen, the reason Elly gives for not wanting to be a stay-at-home mother all her life is her belief that if she cannot hear adult conversation, her brain will certainly atrophy and she will spend her days thinking about childish things; once this devolution to a babbling infant-woman who can only talk about skinned knees, school assignments and similar pointless things is complete, John will have 'won' by making sure that no one will take her seriously. This, of course, is owing to a belief that nothing a child has to say is worth taking too seriously and an over-great preoccupation with same will make her a lesser adult. The same sinister process occurs when she tries to foreshadow Jack Thompson and control what media her children are exposed to; she seems to believe that the motherhood police will bust down her door and take away her license if she allows her children exposure to the fart jokes, gross, messy stuff, horseplay and other macho stuff she was raised to believe was silly, disgusting and wrong. Since she doesn't have the will or brains to question Marian's teachings or the ability to learn from experience, she's in for a life of screaming over not much. As for the obvious solution of sitting her arse down and reading with her children, that's a non-starter; like I said, she thinks that if she were to sit down and read Pokey Little Puppy with Mike, her cerebral cortex would melt and she'd be just another yammering infant talking about nothing that matters or needs to be listened to. Also, since she's sort of out of it, she doesn't realize that her children have picked up on the fact that she thinks that they have nothing worth saying.

Elly's expectation gap

2009-11-21T23:06:30Z

As we've seen, Elly's imaginative capacity is severely stunted; this is because she's fairly narcissistic and has trouble coping with people who are not exactly like her and with unfailiar situations. Since it's next to impossible for her to empathize with someone else owing to her inability to step inside their minds, she makes the odd assumption that in a given situation, they should want what she would want, know what she knows and do what would make her the happiest; this means that she seems to never have the right answer to the question "What did you expect would happen?" as the following examples will attest:

The current arc is an example of this; what Elly clearly expected to happen is that the teacher would download the ability to write and the inspiration needed to express herself into her brain like a computer transferring a file. This, as I said yesterday, was owing to the assumption that any skill can be learned simply by following a set of instructions; the fact that she had to practice writing over time to get into the habit and had to have something to say came as a nasty shock.
The constant discovery that a six year old boy likes such things as playing in the dirt, rude noises, loud games, gross-out stuff, sports, running, jumping and talking loudly instead of sitting very quietly and not doing anything like she would if she were in his place is, as evidenced by her responding to it by looking as if she had seen an unusally bloody fifty-car pileup, fairly traumatic.
During the rare periods that she does try disciplining her children, she's always traumatized by the knowledge that they resent it; this leads to her pulling her punches when she should be trying to be consistent. The end result is that her need to be liked makes her life worse.
This also explains why she never quite got the knack of pet ownership; since she can't imagine herself as being a life-form that cannot understand any more of spoken language than the tone of a speaker's voice and can't wrap his shaggy mind around what causation is, she can't realize that Farley will never want what she wants because he can't think like a human being or know anything more about a situation than that the human is angry again.
It even explains her flaking out when it comes to childproofing; as I've said before, she seems to think that since she herself would not drink drain cleaner, swallow a tack or stick a barette in a wall socket, her children would have her knowledge of the risks and not do so either.