Sex cults, svengalis
Karen Grote has done her best with Lottie. As parenting tasks go, it’s been like trying to herd cats made of mercury in the dark.
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Karen Grote has done her best with Lottie. As parenting tasks go, it’s been like trying to herd cats made of mercury in the dark.
She’ll be fine, Karen. It’s everyone else you should be worried about.
Karen, it’s somewhat of a miracle you’ve (a) survived (b) with *only* that much grey hair.
Karen has the Tulsi Gabbard look.
A parent’s job is never really finished. But she knows that. And she isn’t wrong for being worried about Our Manic Pixie Dream Steamroller
Karen’s done a good job being proscriptive, but what about telling Lottie the Do’s? Has she talked up the importance of clean undergarments?
I’m not sure whether to get off at Port Chuffy or Chuffy Central.
Cangleford sounds like an excellent vacation destination.
I thought it was Congleford? Settles better in me ear somehow.
It’s Congleford *** CONFIRMED ***
Indeed! Quite the picturesque under-advertised holiday destinations are accessible via Tackleford!
Buggles Technology Park, where the latest video technology is controversially tested on innocent radio stars.
I got that reference!
All this time, they were openly admitting to their crimes against humanity, and we all just misunderstood…
“Trying to herd cats made of mercury in the dark;” Does that just apply to Lottie or is that just child rearing in general?
It is a superlative simile, regardless!
Hmm. It occurs to me to wonder how much of the stuff Lottie’s gotten up to over the years Karen actually knows about.
And does it make you more or less worried about your daughter if you know that she confronted a child-snatching beast, befriended a troll, got hypnotized by an onion alien, simultaneously solved a murder and wrote a horrific children’s book, defeated a hope-devouring monster (that happens to now be your boyfriend), saved the fairy realm, and almost got sacrificed to power a flood of cursed waters, all before leaving grammar school?
(Not even going to bring up the stuff with the Satanists in Cornwall…)
I don’t think Karen knows any of that, or if she has been exposed to it she is repressing it. Thoroughly.
The mystery kids were in the local press. On the other hand what they got up to was not enormously above normal-for-Tackleford.
Lottie and associates’ status as “the mystery kids” seemed to be widely known, despite Erin’s insistence on getting their names wrong (oh, that reminds me, I left “put a big wet leaf in the pocket of the Queen of Hell” out of that list), and at least some of their exploits made the paper in at least some form. There were coverups for at least some of them — Karen certainly doesn’t know that Mike was the hope vacuum cleaner — but she’s still got to know that Lottie’s been up to a lot more unusual stuff than your average schoolgirl, even your average Tackleford schoolgirl.
About that fairy realm– I have e-mailed Allison about The Big Hiatus, and he said he’ll get around to reposting that eventually.
We don’t know that the fairy realm story “actually happened”, do we? Wasn’t it presented as a story being told, that might or might not have happened?
Yeah, it was basically Lottie telling Shelley what she did last summer. The framing story was set in the brief gap between “Missing Piece” and “Severed Alliance”, but it described events that allegedly occurred a year earlier, in the summer between “Modern Men” and “Missing Piece”. Some of it was certainly embroidered, like Lottie’s ideas of what the boys were talking about when she wasn’t there, and it’s possible it was all something Lottie made up to excuse letting her friendship with Shauna fall apart, but the events described aren’t wildly out of line with other things that have happened in Tackleford, so I don’t see a reason to assume that it’s not a reasonably faithful rendition of actual events.
Fortunately, those cats are wildly radioactive and glow in the dark
And every bit as potentially toxic.
Karen has do a magnificent job. Lottie seems so happy to start this new big adventure.
Has she warned her about terrible white-girl dreamcatcher tattoos?
Esther’s Black Metal Club back tattoo has proved enough of a cautionary example.
I thought that was a ship’s wheel… are nautical tattoos making a comeback?
Yes for a few (several?) years now. Hipsterism found nautical. Sigh.
Ooh, a Passenger Transport Executive, and is the M for a Metro?
I’m a little bit of a public transport nerd so I’m enjoying all these background details. I like the “Go” branding and Tackleford station’s big glass & metal roof too.
Also the 7-segment PWEEP sound effect.
Tackleford’s trams first appeared way back in the early days of Scary Go Round, if I recall correctly, and appeared more recently as Lottie and Mildew made their way home at the end of Circus Windows.
It seems the TPTE may have had a branding refresh – the intertwined circle logo from the ticket machine in that strip is nowhere to be seen in this station.
Did anyone else enlarge the image and attempt to get the ol’ iPhone to read the QR code? Woulda been a cool Easter egg if it worked.
That would be very cool, wouldn’t it…
ol john will have just embedded “watermelonwatermelonwatermelon” or something in a QR generator to get the image…
And there it is, an actual scannable QR code: https://badmachinery.com/comic/very-bijou-solver-autumn-special-concludes/
As a resting actor, myself, I feel offended. Or seen. One of those.
Have we ever found out where Shauna and Mildred have been up to?
Mildred’s been off at college, following the loss of Griswalds’ sixth form to the terrible chain of events she set in motion in the apocryphal Bad Machinery case “The Great Unboxing”. She came back to visit Lottie in “Circus Windows”, as can be seen if you click that “First” up above. According to Lottie at the end of “Circus Windows”, Mildred is currently “travelling”.
Shauna and Lottie’s alliance remains severed, so the only information we have about her is indirectly through Mildred in that selfsame storyline. According to Mildew, Shauna is “rejecting gender norms, working out where to put an X in her name. Classic Wickle.”