Gizmo’s from Norwich
That’s the flag of Norfolk. Norfolk is a county in England. It’s very flat. It doesn’t contain any motorways. Annoying, because you could really burn it up on that good flat track.
[UPDATE: apparently that’s actually the flag of EAST ANGLIA which encompasses both Norfolk and Suffolk and maybe a bit of Essex and some of Monmouthshire maybe? And I am now banned from all these counties.]
Chekhov’s furnace. Something (or someone) will have a date with destiny, mark my words. Hope it’s nothing (or no-one) we like.
Could be handy if there’s a body. Just saying.
It’s probably out of commission. You’d have to hire an HVAC specialist to fix it, and then you’d have to add them to go pile of bodies to go into it.
This could very quickly become an old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly scenario.
Hey, Ailee is from New Jersey! Being from South Korea is not mandatory!
Even more to the point, the gloriously-named “Chad Future” is not only from Detroit, but he’s Italian-American.
Mind you, unlike major star Ailee, I had never heard of Chad Future before perusing this Wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_K-pop_singers
(there is no category list for K-Pop Singers From Norfolk, alas)
He’s also 40.
Is there a cutoff age for being in K pop?
Having never heard of either Ailee or Chad Future, I now feel old as F. Still love John’s work though.
The only Ailee I know is from Sluggy Freelance.
OH NO
On some level I have to respect Nero’s hustle.
Is Nero going to try to get Glenn to join the band, since New Zealand’s closer to South Korea than Norwich is?
I like it! Westlife, but in a language I can’t understand, seems actually bearable to hear blaring from children’s phones on the bus.
K-pop, seriously? Well, Nero is cute and that’s really important, but is he good at playing, singing and dancing? Will Glenn join the band or will be the manager?
Good point! K-Pop has incredibly high standards! Not only must he be able to sing (in at least two different languages) and dance (and sing while dancing), but he should also excel at, well, basically everything else imaginable, from calculus to archery.
True Story: About a decade or so ago, there was a major scandal in K-Pop when it was rumored that one particular rapper took four whole years to graduate Summa Cun Laude with a degree in Engineering from Stanford. FOUR years!
…it turned out that the rumor was false, a scurrilous lie planted by his jealous cousin (!); he had, in fact, graduated with his First Class degree in only three years after all.
Whew! That was a close one!
Oh man, well, he has the right look for it?
His gaze in the 3rd panel – he can definitely master those k-pop fanservice tricks
More convinced than ever that the Options sachets contain mind-altering experimental drugs.
Wow, an entirely English K-Pop band without a single corpuscle of Korean ancestry. I’m beginning to fear that Nero may be worse boyfriend material than Black Metal Simon was for Shelley.
Maybe they could do a collab with Dreckly!
Fluffy pink dressing gown? Check. Pink Granny slippers? Check. Vaguely ruffled pompadour fresh out of the shower? Check and check.
All signs point to Himbo.
And you didn’t even mention the matching diamond ear studs
Norwich, a Fine City, or at least it used to be. A few years – or possibly more – the council officially changed the motto to ‘England’s Other City,’ a quote that was impressive when it was coined and it was basically just London and York, but less so when it’s putting you lower on the list than Milton Keynes.
The good people of Norwich have never, to my knowledge, taken to the change.
My maternal ancestors came from Norwich. Family legend is that they even had charge of the Norwich dragon at one time, I believe.
(That’s less impressive than it sounds.)
“That’s as far east as you can get in the UK!”
[Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth have entered the chat]
When house hunting, my favorite part was always checking out the basement.
I lived for three years in Newport News, where the water table is about 3 inches down and no one has basements. How can people live their whole lives that way?
Heh. I grew up in Tampa, where the water table is “Stomp hard on the ground,” in a house which optimistically had a split-level half below ground.
We had to dig our own extra drainage pipework and install a sump pump which we had to run outside and start whenever it started to rain heavily
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but that’s the flag of East Anglia. THIS is the flag of Norfolk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk#/media/File:Flag_of_Norfolk.svg
Liam, I did my best and I failed; this is my life
I’m not great with lines of longitude, but East Anglia might be more east than Norfolk. Hurray
The eastest point of all is Gasworks Road, Lowestoft, which is in Suffolk and just the faintest smidge easter than Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, both being in East Anglia.
I *knew* it! Nero’s whole presence here is a false-flag op!
Regret to say we might have to ban you from Cambridgeshire as well, once we’ve decided if we’re in East Anglia or not.
Oh. I guess there might be an edge of Himbo here after all.
Also Ailee being from NJ fills me with a mix of pride and “Wait what?”
I’m not really all that proud of the place of my birth and first 18 years.
Every time I see the words New Jersey I hear Simon and Garfunkel singing “Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike”. Dates me, I know.
“They’ve all gone to search for Ameeeeerrrica…”
Or maybe it’s “all come to search…”
Been so long since I’ve listened to that record.
I mainly listen to Yes’ excellent cover version of it. Even have it on a 45
Someone, from New Jersey, once told me that you could always tell what sort of person someone was if you knew which turnpike exit they came off of.
K-pop is also a style, I guess… it shouldn’t be a surprise to people that most of the prominent American ‘folk’ singers were city slickers who went to posh colleges (i.e. Joan Baez). Nero is just following in the proud tradition of western pop music: it’s just words, man, play the music
Did Lottie have that shirt especially made for Glorb?
I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed by the fact that I identify with Glem more than any other SGR/BM character before, but I can’t deny it. He has a practical-yet-sans-initiative approach to life that I recognize in myself.
Is Nero the only one who’s used Glenn’s actual name correctly in like, a year?
Everyone but Lottie (and people in the comments, of course) uses his name correctly, on the whole.
Lottie doesn’t do it on purpose, she was traumatized by Jobby.
And yet, she started getting his name wrong as soon as she met him, before he introduced her to Jobby.
Give this to Nero: He either has the grace to feign interest in the furnace, or the curiosity to actually find it intriguing. Either way, that’s a point in his favour.
Sadly, a coal furnace might actually be interesting to him from a historical perspective. Ipods were invented before most of my students were born 🙁
I listened to a podcast where a guy from Scotland talked about how everyone laughed at him for rapping with a Scottish accent, so he had to learn how to speak and then rap without it and he managed to become a success.
Strictly East Anglia is the kingdom of the Angles, Essex being Saxon Territory, the two mobs sort of combined to form the Anglo-saxons.
It’s interesting that the English call themselves Angles (English, from England, Angle-Land), but the Welsh, Scots, and Irish all call the English Saxons (Saeson, Saxanach, etc.).
We Scots only call the English Sassenachs when we’re being polite. (It just means non-highlanders actually, so people from Edinburgh and Glasgow are, to be pedantic, also Sassenachs.) I won’t tell you what we call English people in the heat of an argument, though. That wouldn’t be nice. And anyway, I live in England now, and have lots of lovely English friends.