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The players on the bench in the last panel are presumably Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, Yale players of the late 60s who were the models for BD and Calvin in Bull Tales and Doonesbury. Both had stints with Washington (only pre-season, in Dowling’s case) but neither was signed to an NFL team at the time this strip was published (Hill would come out of retirement with the Browns a few days later).
Well, that was my fourth go round of Bad Machinery (on John Allison’s website, in book form, and now twice through on GoComics. Thank you John for creating this wonderful story and thank you John Campbell for the thorough annotations this time around.
John A said that he would “restore the Bad Machinery archive [at his own site] when it finishes its run at GoComics”, so we assume it’s not going around for a third GoComics run. Hard Yards is available as a very cheap ebook on Gumroad. Wen-Tack (and its other parts) are available as a PDF to John’s Patreon subscribers. Wicked Things and The Great British Bump Off have been published in print and as ebooks through comic and book shops.
The British electorate (of which I am part) elects the House of Commons. The House of Lords is another matter entirely, being mostly appointed for life with some remnants of the former heriditary membership and some ex-officio Church of England bishops.
This is the strip from September 10, 2002, which was during Concorde’s swan song: after the July 2000 crash near Paris, commercial flights resumed in November 2001 and continued until October 2003, with the last flight of any Concorde on November 26, 2003 (which I saw myself). So if you could get BA or Air France to put on an illegal cross-country supersonic flight in the U.S. … maybe.
The players on the bench in the last panel are presumably Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, Yale players of the late 60s who were the models for BD and Calvin in Bull Tales and Doonesbury. Both had stints with Washington (only pre-season, in Dowling’s case) but neither was signed to an NFL team at the time this strip was published (Hill would come out of retirement with the Browns a few days later).