Bad Machinery by John Allison for August 15, 2024

  1. Wileecoffee3
    Need coffee  3 months ago

    High hemlines, check, but I see no evidence of gum being chewed.

    If Blossom was there, she might even say that she was there to kick (donkey) and chew gum, but that she was all out of gum.

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    face.less_b  3 months ago

    And what a snake pit it is.

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  3. Selkiedad
    John Campbell  3 months ago

    So we’re back at Hugo’s. The girl with the bandages is Tania Dwyer, whom you may recall as the one that Blossom hospitalized at the beginning of the case. The other four are her hangers-on. One of them — the black girl, I think — is named Miranda. I don’t believe the others ever got names.

    The guy at the counter with the black hair and sideburns has a name, though. That’s Tim Jones. He’s the guy who put out Mr Knott’s eye, with a lollipop launched by a Rube-Goldberg machine he’d built to help tutor Ryan in science. He’s one of the oldest Tackleford characters; one of the three, after Shelley Winters and Rich Tweedy, who appeared in the very first Bobbins strip.

    I’m not entirely sure what Tim’s situation is at this point. There was a long Bobbins story, “Hard Yards”, which ran parallel to the last several Bad Machinery cases, starting before “Space is the Place” and ending after “Severed Alliance”, which is the next (and last) one, and Tim featured heavily in it, but it’s not always clear exactly how events on that side of the fence line up with things on this side.

    Shelley Winters turned up pregnant at the end of the previous Bobbins story, “Into the Woods”. “Hard Yards” covered the term of her pregnancy. Tim is the father. Shelley is not his wife; Ryan’s little sister Riley is. Ryan, Tim, and Shelley have been friends since Mr Knott had both eyes. Riley threw Tim out of their house in Wales before “Into the Woods”, because he blew it up (actually it wasn’t him, it was their daughter Scout from the future), and he came back to Tackleford and lived in the woods for a while, then moved in with Shelley (and knocked her up). He lived with Shelley for a while after that, and then maybe round about this time, they got in a fight and she threw him out, and he actually ended up crashing in the Havershams’ garage for a bit — he and Neil are working on some kind of unspecified garage science startup thing. Mildred does not approve.

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  4. Gorfpride
    DiopticTurtle Premium Member 3 months ago

    I love John Allison for all the times I he casually flings out a word like “internecine” and sends me over to Google to figure out what the heck it means

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    scyphi26  3 months ago

    Because plans for revenge always go so well for everybody.

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    6turtle9  3 months ago

    Mean girl revenge. This ought to be good, and by good I mean tragic.

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    Aladar30 Premium Member 3 months ago

    Tania looks better than I thought. I fear Blossom is doomed, Tania will have spent the long months immobile in the hospital preparing a perfect plan to destroy and humiliate her.

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    GaryCooper  3 months ago

    “Those four”? Aren’t there five girls over there?

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