For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for February 22, 2014

Careful with your slang Ellie…

IT’S THE MONEY, STUPID!!Anyone can look good, wrapped in green.

I get the impression that in this family series that Elly is truly in love with her husband. Sort of like my wife and I that have been happily married 50+ years now! Neither of us can even think of what life would be like without the other!!

I live with a dentist. She and her senior partner have a good firm and do excellent work, but they don’t have ‘big dentist salaries.’ Unlike their staff, the two dentists are paid by the patient, and what work they do on each. More patients in a day, more pay. No patients, no pay. And running a dental office is extremely expensive. They have a high percentage of disposable equipment; things that have to be thrown out after each patient. That’s all money. I’m not going to give complete breakdown of all the ways their money goes out before any comes in. But it’s an easy and tempting myth that anyone with any kind of medical practice is just raking in the bucks. Maybe it was a bit different when these older strips first appeared, but expenses have far outstripped income for people in all kinds of work.

Have the trolls fallen down a fortunate hole?

I always used to say a bird in the bush is worth two in your hand.

My favorite pun is the story of the millionaire who bought a ranch for a tax write-off and had his boys run it. He named it focus, because that is where the sons raise meat/ sun’s rays meet.

Oh, DEAR….! ;-)

You have to be careful with comments like this. Men can brush off a lot of teasing, but occasionally something said burns itself into a host of repressed wrongs buried in their cerebral cortex. They are irritated at first, and that irritation swells while the original splinter is forgotten. Before you know it, he hates the very sight of you but doesn’t know why.

As to your question about dentistry being nationalized, the answer is no.

I agree with Lynn – today’s strip is hilarious. And what a great punch line!

So, you think Elly was lying in wait to trap poor old Jon and his “big dentist salary.”It must be so lonely for you, still living in the 1920s.

“Nerd” is the other “n” word.Shame, Elly.Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.

There you go again Ellie. So you are married to a nerd for many years. I guess it works for you.

“Nerd” was less complimentary before the Internet Age.

OK ???? 8^)

Howtheduck: on the occasion you mention Elly was not going out looking for men. She and Connie were just enjoying a girls’ night out together. In any event, John enjoys pornography (as is mentioned quite a few times in the strips over the years – and it is intimated that he likes hardcore stuff), leers after women and teenager girls on an almost daily basis, and generally behaves like a prize prat whenever something with a bust and a pulse walks into his orbit.

I feel sorry for Elly: she and John married while he was still doing his first degree, she gave up her studies to support them – and he then stayed on at uni playing students and completed another two degrees. It was then her wages that presumably bought him the dental practice – and she then worked for him as a nurse as well as doing whatever job it was she had anyway. All this while raising Michael as a baby.

However it is also evident that the two of them love each other and understand each other pretty well.

I love this strip, and I sometimes think that the fact I find a couple of the characters so annoying and unlikeable is actually an indication of how well it is written!