Spread the Word. How Easy Is That?

Finally we learn who the Lady Mudlarks were playing the past couple of strips, as well as the outcome. Vic either must have said “Co-Co-Rina” off-panel yesterday or unnamed Lady Mudlark randomly tagged Corina with it. Painfully apparent that the Thorpiverse exists in another dimension as she hasn’t been called the painfully obvious and not entirely inappropriate “Corinavirus.” Of course the obvious question is “If Vic Doucette slaps a wacky nickname on you and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it stick?”

It will if The Contessa has anything to say about it. There’s precedent for guys coming out to girls’ games if it means that those girls will keep talking to them. Throw in a pat on the arm and they’ll get the bleachers packed. Maybe the nerd on the left in P3 will have added a few more whiskers to his scraggly mustache (which earns him a Pantheon of Hair tag and earns The Chief kudos for the accurate teenage boy facial hair) in time for the next game when Vic whips people into a frenzy.

Soggy Milford Breakdown

I was out of town yesterday so wasn’t able to get a post up until now. Mea culpa. I spent most of the day in Delaware, where I didn’t find a Wing-T but I did find a Milford. Doesn’t look like Gil found a Wing-T either.

Thankfully Whigham cut away from Marty’s bukkake video on Friday to show us this grind. Wing-T or no, the run-heavy Mudlarks should have thrived in these conditions, no? No! One has to wonder if this was due to fallout from Gil’s little reaming out of his QBs last week. Team Rappson may have thrown lookout blocks when Thayer was under center while Team Thayer did the same for Rapp. The Jeffs laying a WWE-worthy body slam on either Rappson or Thayer is just icing on the cake.

Doubtful we’ll hear any analysis on the bus ride home, not with it raining inside the bus like it is. (Nice of Weird Al to body double for Rapp so he wouldn’t have to make that trip.) Monday-morning quarterbacking will come on Monday, if it comes at all. With a second conference loss, winning the Valley is out of reach for Milford. How will Gil save face, salvage the season, and stifle the controversy? I wouldn’t bet against emergency QB Leonard Fleming starting from here on out. Then the Mudlarks can truly be called Leonard’s Losers.

Corina’s Shakin’, Not Stirred

Boy, Central pretty much sucks at everything this season, don’t they? Too bad we didn’t see how badly they sucked at volleyball. Then again we haven’t seen much more volleyball action than Rapp has – just that one panel about a month ago. We should get to see some more soon, though, since Corina has made that a prerequisite to getting down the base path with her.

That is Corina, isn’t it? The coarsening of her profile in P1 looks like a throwback to Berrill’s style and that’s not her usual mullet she’s wearing, either. Next panel she looks like a completely different person as she has a seizure describing Becca’s performance against Central. Finally all hairs are back in place as Rapp hates to see her leave but loves to watch her go.

Now it’s a matter of time to see which of the dueling QBs shows his face first at a Lady Mudlarks volleyball match. I’ll laugh if it ends up being Leonard Fleming. Heaven knows we need a good laugh right about now. Hope you TWIMers had a fun and safe Halloween, shook one, not stirred one, in Sean Connery’s memory, and remember to turn your clocks back before you turn in tonight.

I’m Coming Out, So You Better Get The Perky Started

Hey y’all, it’s your old pal teenchy, subbing for Rob tonight. Have we ever had a dedicated volleyball arc? The closest we’ve come during my tenure here was last spring when one of Mimi’s softball players, Linda Carr, got burnt out on playing for the Valley Elites while not being TCFS so she quit the Valley Elites but went off to college to play volleyball anyway. Valerie Okumbe was a player (and rejector of infamous locker denizen Jamar Gaddis) for Milford (not the Valley Elites) in 2009, but she was never actually shown playing volleyball. I defer to our TWIM statisticians for additional background.

So we may finally get a bit of a fall girls’ sports angle, if only to showcase new resident jerkface Corina Karenna. Frizzy-haired girl Becca (who gets a Pantheon of Hair tag from me) asks an innocent question and gets called “perky” for it. Dark-haired girl Susan drops a hint that she won’t let Corina off quite so easily, even as Corina flips her a comeback (and the bird) as she strides off down the hall. Here’s hoping some of Mimi’s “bigs” tape Corina to a locker, Jamar Gaddis-style.

It’s Different for Girls

As robmize and you faithful TWIMers pointed out yesterday, this turned into a farce pretty quickly. Players in jeans, an umpire in a zebra shirt, one team’s pitcher coming in to pitch for the other, and now this. Since story arcs always end on Saturdays, I was hoping for the ten-run mercy rule to be invoked today. No such luck; we’re gonna get dragged through this for at least another week.

Confession time: I have owned at one time both a baseball catcher’s mitt* and a softball catcher’s mitt. They are indeed two different creatures. I probably could’ve gotten away with using my regular fielder’s glove to catch softball and, eventually, I did, sending the softball mitt on to someone playing at a more competitive level than I.  Has it been that obvious that Lotus Cortina Anna Karenina has been catching with a softball catcher’s mitt? Click that last link and look at the ball in the pocket of her mitt. It’s proportionately large in there, innit? There was nothing to lead us to believe she wasn’t catching a baseball in that “softball trapper,” a term so loaded with innuendo I ain’t even gonna try to touch it.

 

*Two, actually. My first was an Howard Elston Elston Howard model, my second a Bob Boone.

It Helps If You Chant “MEAN MACHINE” While You Read This

Once again Neal Rubin has driven the Milford High Activity Bus off the road and into the ditch. What was being set up as some kind of indictment of school zero-tolerance policies has morphed into some weird-ass pickup game challenge that’s equal parts The Sandlot and The Longest Yard. As farfetched as it is I have a hunch it will come to pass, since Gil’s Mudlarks will probably miss the playdowns as per usual.

This comes off as more ego gratification for the walking ego that is Mike Knappe, but I’m picking up broad hints that there’s a bigger message being sent here: don’t fight the system, accept the hand you’re dealt, and when life gives you lemons, suck on them. Not the best of timing there.

I’m sure Rubin’s got his reasons for going down this path but unlike the Caretaker, I ain’t got eight years to hear them.

The ‘Arder They Come

Late in the day before I realized that robmize was taking the weekend off and left Friday to our devices. So I don’t have much to say here except that the first kid we meet in juvie Valley Modified is Ardis Carhee. Googling “Ardis Carhee” gave me exactly one result:

That ain’t Michigan, but maybe it’s near Luckey, or Haskins. Whatever.

What’s Ardis in for? Obsessive-compulsive desk polishing? Nah, just messing with you. He’s probably in for some violation of a Tilden zero-tolerance policy, like bringing a church key to class to open a can of Johnson’s Wax to polish a desktop. Tune in tomorrow to find out what’s up with Ardis and what plans these rude boys have in store.

 

 

Breakfast in Milford

Random thoughts today:

It appears Rubin is doubling down on making one of the plot lines this spring “What is The Mayor eating for breakfast, and what kind of container is he eating it from?” How he plans to make this relevant is beyond me this morning. Are Knappe’s chronic lateness and need to talk to everybody in the halls symptoms of ADHD? If so, did B/Robby Howry leave some Adderalls stashed in the Mudlarks’ equipment room that could help?

What’s going on with the Milford baseball jerseys? Baseball uniform numbers aren’t usually centered below the team name. Maybe these are leftovers from Milford’s aborted lacrosse program. And what’s with dude whose number ends in “2” behind gesturing speaker guy’s uni? Is he wearing his jersey tucked into a skirt like in A League of their Own or into shorts like the ’76 White Sox?

Finally, poor Hiawatha James, the Pete DeWindt of his class. ‘Watha looks like he wants to be anywhere but in the Milford locker room. Maybe it’s the prospect of catching only one pitcher all season (Gil didn’t mention any others besides Godleski). Maybe it’s the hairdo he’s been saddled with. Maybe he cares as much about The Mayor’s breakfast choices as the rest of us do.