When I was a kid, I was nuts about GI Joe dolls. I had one that was awesome -- it would talk whenever you pulled on his dog tag chain. He'd say things like "We must hold this position!" and "Man the machine gun!" and "We can only do the best we can with what we have where we are!"Mary has gone completely non sequitur. She's just saying anything that pops into her brain.
Today's Full Strip
21 comments:
Is Mary going to pour that coffee into Gina's cupped hand?
Ding! Ding! Ding!
We have a winner!
For stuffing the most inane platitudes into a single verbal emission.
What the heck is this suppose to even mean? You can't change anything, you're stuck? Ever hear of moving, lady? Gah! Something inside of me just died!!!
I'm not taking any more advice from Mary. I tried to hold my cofee cup as she suggested this morning and spilled hot coffee in my lap. I wonder if you can sue a comic strip character.
So Gina is only about 25? I don't know how I didn't think about this before, but she was 14 when she was cruelly ripped away from Bobby, right? And it's been "more than 10 years", so about 25 or so? Lord have mercy, she looks at least 15 years older. Must have been a rough life of whiskey, cigarettes and random men while in Witness Protection.
I can only begin to imagine tomorrow's strip if Moy works 9/11 into this idiocy...
This is the laziest strategy to extend an already agonzingly drawn-out plot that I have ever seen. Here's the formula: two characters in booth at diner. Coffee drinks in front of them. Girl in ponytail whines about some aspect of the same dull story. Old lady with indeterminate hairdo mouths platitude in response, which may or may not apply to the situation. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Is Mary paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld ... or was he (God forbid) channeling Mary?
"Why worry, weary waitress, while
who, what, when and where
waits?
Whatever will be will be."
Wise and Worthy words.
It will be good to have the usual Sunday respite from further development of the story line. It will take me until Monday to parse Mary's latest platitude.
I think I've figured it out. Bobby became a firefighter in New York. His first day on duty was September 11, 2001. Bobby was last seen heading upstairs in one of the towers...when his body was found, inside his helmet was tucked a photo of him and Gina skateboarding in happier days.
Gina will find this out with a simple search on the intrawebs using a computing device back at Apartment. It will all be summed up in tomorrow's strip and then she and Mary will spend the rest of the month back at Diner tearing their hair out and keening. Over coffee.
--Beagle Vet
My sentiments exactly, Anon@10:36! I couldn't get the other Donald out of my head either after reading the strip this morning. Indeed, what we must truly fear are not the known unknowns, but the unknown unknowns!
I still think it's the caffeine talking, but whatever. This story is far from over. Maybe, sadly, the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 will only kick off Gina's personal and so-much-more-tragic-than-anybody-elses 9/11 story.
Somebody just keeps pulling Mary's string.....geez. Next thing you know, she's going to start talking about going to the beach with Ken!
Anyway, not everybody changes. I mean, here it is ten years or so later and Gina looks the same, rigid, laser-precision ponytail and all! I'm guessing that Bobby Black is still skateboarding around New York City, a deflated basketball under one arm.
Phoebes and Beagle Vet, I doubt that 9/11 will be tied into the storyline. Seeing the usualy rapid pace that storylines usually go, it would have been somehow incorprated into the strip around the time that LiZa was texting Dr. Drew like mad.
This exchange between Gina and Mary reminds me of Lord of the Rings.
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Of course, I don't mean to compare Moy with Tolkien (even if their plots both go on forever).
AHA! Just as we thought! On Jill Black's ill-fated left at the altar 'wedding day' (December 18, 2010 in the Worthiverse), there, front and center, wearing his Boys' Wearhouse wedding finery- little Bobby Black.
@ Peggy Olson - I agree! Moy came darn close to plagiarizing that Gandalf platitude. But for pace of story, I might compare Moy to Michener.
Hey, Mary's loopy platitude brought Donald Rumsfeld to my mind, too! Maybe this is Moy's sly way of referring to 9/11... heavens, of course not. What was I thinking?
All we need now is for Mary to break into a few verses of "Que Sera, Sera" ("Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see..."). Does Mary have an inner Doris Day to channel?
I like how even Mary's pearls mimic G.I. Joe's chain.
I think it's more like:
Mary: "Grasshopper, we can only do what we can do, when we do it, where we are"
Gina: "Thank you Master. I must now run off in haste, before I drown myself in this bottomless cup of coffee."
I sense a special guest visit...Doris Day!!! "Que sera sera whatever will be will be..oh wait, I ordered a tuna melt..."
In panel one it looks to me like Mary has stood up, coffee in hand, and is desparately trying to make an exit! (Kind of like when your guests have stayed waaaay too long and you have to get up early the next a.m... you stand up hoping, HOPING they take the hint!)
But alas, in panel two her face looks quite dejected as she has plopped back down hopelessly mouthing her platitude. Her heart's no longer in it. Even Mary's patience has it's limits..."will Gina's shift NEVER start? Oh,why did I get myself involved with this loser!?"
Not Frodo, not G.I. Joe. . . those of us who accidentally read the rerun Calvin and Hobbes today (Monday, February 27, 2012) learned in the first panel that Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Do what you can with what you have where you are." Sound kind of familiar?
Calvin, not known for his scholarship, names his source. Whereas Mary, known magpie of maxims, probably forgot if it had been the Dalai Lama or Elvis. In any case, she paraphrases, so everything's hunky dory!
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