For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for August 20, 2014

Moving from a child’s point of view… ;)

You are SO overthinking this. Repeat after me. It is a comic strip.

I’ve thought the same thing about each of the 8 Houses/Apartments I’ve lived in. It’s more sobering, the older you get, and the more you realize how many DIDN’T come true, and never will.

To each kid who’s in “My Old Room,” Good Dreams, good luck, and I hope your’s turn out better than mine did.

@Three Fighting Fish (from yesterday):Did Lynn Johnston copy a joke from the Simpsons?Simpsons: When Bart and Lisa went to summer camp, Homer and Marge look sad until the bus is out of earshot, then the Simpsons (along with all the other parents) start celebrating the start of a kid-free summer.FBOFW: When Michael and Elizabeth went to summer camp, John and Elly look sad until the bus is out of earshot, then the Pattersons (along with all the other parents) start celebrating the start of a kid-free summer.I don’t recall ever watching The Simpsons (I’m 68); but, ifis the strip in question, that was published July 26, 1988 (click for strip with enlargeable image). According to Wikipedia, The Simpsons debuted December 17, 1989; so, if either copied the joke (and I can’t say it was original with FBOFW), it would be The Simpsons.

Not all comic strips have to be funny. Some are meant to be thought provoking.

It’s really no problem. You always take your dreams with you.

Don’t worry Lawrence your bedroom is moving too; it just have different walls.

I still think (and dream at times) of the house we moved out of when I was 10, back in 1968.

mabrndt: I went through a battle like that once. In the traditional “armed forces salute”, our community band omitted Semper Paradus. I lobbied for inclusion on grounds that if we ever have peace, the Coast Guard will still be going in harms way on a daily basis. They claimed the chorus opened with “This is the Army”. Finally we got an arrangement with copyright dates. Semper Paradus, 1938; This is the Army, 1940. Faced with that Irving Berlin plagiarized, it became included. (Actually, it is probably independent creation.)

Did this move happen in the original strip?

I was just pointing to the searchable archive, something that may be unique about this strip (if you know of others that have searchable archives, please list them).

I took it as just random kid nostalgia, and that the two sentences aren’t necessarily connected as closely as you think. He’s sad about moving away from his room, he associates it with the good dreams he’s had when sleeping there, and wonders who the next kid to live there will be.

All pretty self-explanatory reactions and natural for a 10 year old kid.

“It is a comic strip, whose punch line is really confusing. How is having a lot of good dreams funny?”

It’s a comic strip, but sometimes its intention is not quite to be funny, but (as Bill Maher said about the “Oprah” show) to “make women nod.”

@Night-Gaunt 49-Tried to use the response function, but sometimes all I get is a blank box with no buttons that says ‘cancel’ at the bottom.-I’m an as yet unpublished writer of mostly short stories and a member of a writer’s critique group. I completely understand what you mean about a character taking on its own life. -I might start out with an outline of where I want a story to go (something I rarely do), but, part way through that story, the character’s actions suggest new directions, or it occurs to me that there are many ways to achieve a story ending and I don’t have to kill off that character, after all. The more I try to ‘force’ a character to stick to a script, in the face of changing story lines, the less interesting and ‘real’ that character becomes…

My daughter and I lived in a custom built 1941 home 15 years ago. We rented it. It had only one other tenant before us. We loved it there. We got a letter from a little girl addressed to “The people that live there now”. She sent a picture of her family and said they had lived there and it was her favorite home and she had a lot of good memories there. We corresponded for awhile. I was sad when we moved. The house was sold and the new owner did some awful things to it. I can’t bring myself to ever drive by it any more. I still have the letter somewhere. And lots of nice memories from then :~)

Thanks. But @Three Fighting Fish posted the question, not me.

Thanx guys!!!!