The City Youth Program Is Getting Larger!

After Gil and Heather exchange some awkward football tosses, Gil reveals his gambit for giving Heather Burns an opportunity to keep her hand in coaching without crossing any ethical boundaries. HA HA HA! Ethical boundaries! Oh, that’s rich. Gil is drafting Heather to help Wick Harmon grow the city youth program. Apparently, they don’t hit much there but they spend lots of time teaching city youth about archaic offensive schemes that were in vogue back when Ike was carrying his own golf bag.

I googled Wick Harmon and got lost looking at many varieties of Denis Wick Harmon style trumpet mutes. I don’t know much about brass instrument mutes, or the Harmon style mutes in particular, but apparently the first name in that particular style of brass instrument mute is Denis Wick.

Metapost nonsense: I guess now that Heather Burns is a fixture, she should have her own tag (category in WordPress speak). I added the tag and went back and tagged all the posts from the summer “plot”. Retrospective tagging may never happen. We can kick it around at the next editorial board meeting.

Maybe Heather won’t be a fixture if her editor takes a pass on her after her review period when she doesn’t get around to doing whatever else it is she’s supposed to do besides transcribing lineups. Wait! Heather has a nose for a story! What’s all the buzz about Tevin Claxton and his potential to create some more chances for Chance Macy!?

I Love Ducey

Now’s the time all America waits for; that one evening each week where we all sit down to watch the latest hijinks from American’s favorite wacky redhead sports reporter. Wacky… redhead… sports… reporter…

Wait, what?

Okay, Whigham, start ‘splainin’.* As for the rest of you gentle readers, why do you suppose Marjie’s a redhead today?

1. She noticed John Jawor had dyed his hair yesterday and didn’t want him to feel self-conscious so she dyed hers in solidarity.
2. She’s going to cosplay as Velma Dinkley at Central City Comic-Con this coming weekend.
3. The Milford Star has a one-blonde-per-staff quota and since Heather Burns has all but gone through new hire orientation, Marjie got the hint that she’s old news.

You know, maybe it is time for new blood at the Star. When your sports reporter starts writing on her laptop screen with a ballpoint pen, you gotta think she might no longer be the sharpest knife in the drawer. When all she can do is regurgitate the lists of player names Gil spouts to her, someone who knows how to use the Google is at the next level. When she dares contradict the all-powerful Gil Thorp when he wants to publicly shame a small-time golf hustler, she might want to polish up that résumé.

Tune in next week when Heather Burns spruces up her new desk in the Star newsroom while a mysterious redhead applies for a night shift waitressing job at Janet’s Diner. When Maureen asks, “Hey, hon, you look familiar. What’s your name?” the mysterious redhead replies “Margo. Margo Duchesne.”

*Contrary to popular belief, Desi never said to Lucy “you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”

Idiots 101

Boy if we had any notions that Rubin knew squat about golf, this summer storyline proved it. We’ve gone over the ludicrous dialogue enough already; suffice it to say all todays panels are are the cherry on the horseshit sundae.

P1 – Nobody puts their clubs in the car like that– you put the club end in first, then the bottom of the bag is the last part in. And for gods sakes– Hendricks knows the way out! Did he just go blind? I know his eyes are shut as he dutifully deposits his bag in his trunk ( as everyone does after every round Ive ever played) but jesus, has he been fuckin LIVING at the course?? Did he forget where the door was?! Imagine living with these douchbags for 3 months. I’d rather live in that cornfield where his ball was, along with a thousand others. I havent gotten over Gil searching a cornfield for what MAY be Carters ball– any goddamn golfer with any time in the game knows no matter how good you are you can still yank one into the cornfield. Scratch or no scratch. And the cost of the ball– I dont belong to a country club but the pro CARING about the difference between a $4 ball and a $1.50 ball, when dues for these places are thousands of dollars… is just lunacy. Who the hell buys balls one at a time anyway??

I’ve been playing golf since 1978, and not one of these statements made in this storyline has ever been made by me or anyone I’ve either played with, or come in contact with, or said on a TV broadcast of a tournament.

P2– Well gee, Heather needed the lowest possible course in college to do research that any 12 year old could do. So all the pro did was bring Carter into the room and BS him about pressing charges and writing a check. I really found a couple things hard to believe– that 15 years later he looked that similar that Heather knew it was him– I’ve seen what 15 years does to some people. Next, why would Carter keep THE SAME raincoat in his bag for 15 years? You play golf a lot your bag wears out too, and getting a new bag means tossing the old junk in the old one out. And my old raincoat literally made me wetter after so long, so I got another one. AND WHY KEEP A COLLEGE RAINCOAT ANYWAY? I keep an old winter hat from my college– in my closet so it doesnt get worn out. Who cares about raincoats??

P3– so the pro was just BS-ing Carter– well, so much for any credibility HE has. If I’m Carter I dont send him shit– I move on to the next club where everyone there has a goddamn brain and an IQ above 65. And I go about my business and keep on raking in the dough, and nobody will give a fuck about my $1.50 balls or my damn raincoat or my handicap. Getting away from these morons is the best thing thats happened to Carter. As Green Day sang— Good Riddance!

What Is It About Industrial Solvent Sales That Leads People to a Life of Crime?

So much for Carter’s – I mean, Carson’s – stint in the Witness Protection Program. Little Miss Investigative Reporter Wannabe has joined the MCC (why else would she be wearing the same colored polo shirt as everyone else? Maybe it’s a Bemidji State polo shirt), thrown on no fewer than six of her extra jangly bracelets and blown his cover. Time for him to hit the road, create another alias and sell stolen golf shoes from the trunk of his car.

It’s been a long day at work (meta) and it’s not over yet so yhs is firing off a late post. I could spend the rest of the evening trying to analyze this so it makes some kind of logical sense but why try? Rubin is throwing exposition left and right to make this golf cheat – clearly the lowest form of humanity in the Thorpiverse – look like even more of a criminal. The Milford Country Club is not a court of competent jurisdiction but here it carries more weight than the Supremes. Do we even have to point out that being charged with a crime isn’t the same thing as being convicted of it? By the end of the week Carson/ter will have been found to be behind the art heist from the Gardner Museum and the ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut.

How did Hendry/ricks get younger looking from P1 to P3? Is he going to de-age with each accusation until he turns into a fetus, or was he really this age to begin with? Come to think of it, couldn’t these photos of him online have been deepfaked? We know Google exists in the Valley so the “1959 with cell phones” excuse can’t last for much longer.

Really, instead of looking all deer-in-the-headlights and throwing up the jazz hands, all he had to do was stonewall, call Heather’s little screen grabs “fake news” and he’d have been in the clear. After all, if you repeat a lie often enough, doesn’t it become the truth? Tens of millions would agree.

One Short of a Foursome Again

At Casa Thorp, Gil quickly moves from leaning in behind Heather Burns before Mimi comes back into the living room delivering three Red Bull and vodkas. That ain’t all she’s delivering: with that crop top along with the less formal sweatpants with built-in camel toe, she’s bringing the fan service in on that same silver platter.

Before Heather loosens up and gets ready for this threesome, she has to drop the bombshell from the last threesome she had with Gil: that there was no such person as Carter Hendricks until two years ago. Before then, he was known as Jami Thorp Rupert Hall. No, he’ll end being someone else – Henry Carter or some such – who played for Boise Bridgewater Bemidji Ball State in his color-shifting rain jacket.

Now that that’s settled, can we wrap this up and give Heather her Milford Star by day, Milford Mudlark by night dual life ASAP? NFL preseason got fully under way tonight and so will high school football in a lot of places over the next couple of weeks.

Free Eats. Now Scram!

I have to start today’s post with an apology. To the real Vic Doucette, I apologize for writing that your surname was spelled more pretentiously than Michael Doucet’s. I’m going to venture a guess that either your family picked up the “te” or his family lost the “te” somewhere during the Acadian deportation and diaspora*. I’m also now wondering whether strip regular Marjie Ducey‘s surname is a corruption of yours.

Today’s strip is one of those that would benefit from an audio file. As it is we have to take it as canon that strip Vic is a small kid with glasses that magically change size a big voice, not unlike the previously mentioned Dave Zinkoff. Knowledge of hoops trivia would seem to be less relevant to the PA announcer’s job than, say, some knowledge of the rules of the game. Calling a free throw attempt as a one-and-one when the team is not yet in the bonus could cause confusion for the easily confused, leading to unnecessary substitutions, raining frogs and heaven knows what else.

Since we never (at least in my memory) have heard from Mr. Staley (possibly of the Decatur Staleys?) we have no real standard against which to hold Vic’s work. Suffice it to say if Rubin holds true to form, Vic will join a line of nebbishy boys with oversized egos whose antics will throw a stick in the spokes of the wheels that roll the Mudlarks to second place in the Valley. With that in mind, here’s a clip of the real Dave Zinkoff to give us an idea of what a basketball PA announcer should sound like.

*I found myself going down this rabbit hole this morning and had to pull myself back out to finish this post. Interesting reading if you don’t know the history already.

The Harding, They Fall?

The Lady Mudlarks are squaring off against the Lady Raiders from Warren, Ohio. Neal has been pitting Milford against teams in Eastern Ohio lately. Maybe he’s going to retire to Cleveland.

As much as we sometimes gripe about a lack of sports action in Gil Thorp. I must admit that three panels of nothing but sports action can leave me with little inspiration to comment. The floors are shiny. The ponytails are out in force. Alexa looks like she’s actually executing a layup in the first panel. The other two panels show aggressive defense. OMG, it’s like fundamental basketball. That’s good, right?

Well, good luck Alexa and gang. Repel those Raiders!

Alexa, What’s The French Word For Boredom?

The first “actual action” of the basketball season is the Lady Mudlarks!  It’s this season’s breakout star, Alexa Watson, swatting away shots like nobody’s business. 1-0! We’re off to a terrific start.

Now for the drive back from Austintown, (part of the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area), Alexa is hitting the books hard. She might be finished with French and be ready to move on to German given the long drive back from the home town of the celebrated Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini*.

The really do illuminate the insides of those school buses.

Chris Schuring and the boys team are headed for Springfield (which one? we’ll never know). Chris has decided to go the David Puddy route and just stare for the ride of indeterminable length. He might have a book on tape, designed to take up the travel time. Is it Hop on Pop, or Infinite Jest? Curious onlooking Mudlarks would like to know.

Hopefully, all the TWIM readers get where they need to go safely to spend time with their loved ones for the holidays. Merry Christmas, all.

*Just as I can’t think of Youngstown, Ohio without thinking of Ray Mancini, I can’t think of Ray Mancini without thinking of the song, Boom Boom Mancini by the late, great Warren Zevon. Here’s a video of Zevon performing the song in a Boston train station in 1995: