Statistics Saturday: Some Grammy Awards

• Largest Bowl of Anise Hard Candies Fused Together
• Distinctive Tiny Scented Soaps You’re Most Afraid To Use
• Silverware And Plate That Together Make The Most Undefinably Eerie Scraping Sound
• Most Refrigerator With The Crushed-Ice Dispenser You’re Not Allowed To Use
• Room That Most Smells of Cedar Despite Having Nothing Cedar In It
• Scratchiest Blankets Covering The Most Of The Sofa
• Sleekest Television Set Put On Top Of The Widest 1970s Color Television Set That’s Easily Four Feet Front To Back
• Land-Line Telephone That Most Has Push-Buttons But In A Circle Like It Was A Dial Phone Somehow
• Most Boiled Selection of Off-White Dinner Foods
• Room That Least Smells of Cedar Although The Cedar Chest Is In It

Reference: The Rocket Men: Vostok and Voskhod, the First Soviet Manned Spaceflights, Rex Hall and David J Shayler

A note about research methods. Some may accuse this department of focusing entirely on its own experiences and not adequately sampling the full conceptual space of grandmotherly presences. To this we answer no, we called our grandmothers ‘grandma’ and ‘mom-mom’, none of this casual ‘grammy’ stuff for us and so therefore nyah.

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? And Who’s Contesting the Adoption? December 2017 – March 2018

Are you interested in the goings-on of Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.? If you aren’t this essay isn’t for you. But if you’re interested and want to know what the current storyline is, this is the essay for you. Unless it’s gotten much later than early March 2018 for you. If you are reading this later than about June 2018 you’ll probably want an essay at or near the top of this page as a more recent story summary. Unless you’re looking for how things got to those later-essays’ points, I mean. I suppose you know your business.

Rex Morgan, M.D.

11 December 2017 – 4 March 2018.

My last update came fortuitously near the start of a story thread. June Morgan’s childhood friend Margie Tyler had died offstage. Tyler had left her child, Johnny, with the Morgans to adopt. With the Morgans willing and able to take him in, and no known living relatives of Johnny interested, everything looked smooth. That’s where things stood the 10th of December.

June took the kids — Sophie and Michael, both of whom she gave birth to, and Johnny, on whom she’s waiting for court decrees to settle — to the mall. A couple older people watch them at the play area and nudge June for the story of the two boys. June doesn’t tell. After they leave, the strip stayed with the elder couple. So, yeah, they were Johnny’s grandparents. Not Margie Tyler’s parents; her (dead) husband’s parents, Arnold and Helen March. They were estranged from their son, and only just learned they had a grandchild. Now that they do, they petition for custody.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 17th of December, 2017. After the first encounter at the mall, and before the Marches file for custody of Johnny. … Also given that Johnny and Michael are the same age — born the same day, the strip established — but became brothers through adoption I wonder what kind of twins they would be considered. It doesn’t quite seem like any category fits, does it?

The Morgans take the kids to the mall again. They see the elderly couple and recognize who they are. June approaches them. She offers that if they knock it off with the stalking, she won’t bury them in Rex’s medical practice, never to be seen again. The next day, Rex Morgan is barely able to get in to not seeing patients before his lawyer calls. The Marches want to talk.

More precisely they want to grovel. They’d only just learned they had a grandchild, they drove down to town to see him, and they kind of stumbled in to being stalkery. “Our bad,” Helen calls it, in a moment sincerely endearing to me. But on to serious business. They’re dropping their petition. They’re confident the Morgans can take better care of Johnny. They’re sorry for all the trouble they caused. They ask only that they not be killed as an example to the others. Rex and June are happy to agree to this, and they all agree that the Marches should be part of Johnny’s life; an auxiliary set of grandparents.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 14th of January, 2018. After the second encounter at the mall, and after the Marches had petitioned for custody of Johnny. There’s an extent to which the seriousness with which Sarah treats her presumptive participation in the adult world amuses me. Also there’s the thought of how, when Sarah is Like 36, her parents are going to be able to reduce her to embarrassed cackling by pointing out the time she was this age and said things like “I’m keeping track of all this stuff so you can explain it to me when I’m grown up”.

As a reader I’m a bit torn on this. I like stories that involve people acting thoughtfully. Senior citizens concluding that, sure, they would like to adopt their grandchild but they really aren’t up for it? That’s sensible behavior. I’m glad they do that. The Morgans concluding that while their relationship with the Marches started creepy-to-bad, they’re better off taking this couple into their lives? There’s also good sense to that.

But. One of the motifs of Rex Morgan, M.D. before Terry Beatty took over writing was that people kept giving the Morgans free stuff. A massive publishing contract for young Sarah. A too-great-to-believe Victorian Mansion. That kind of thing. It’s fun to daydream about getting great good fortune dropped on you, but when the characters haven’t done anything particular? A contested adoption looked promising as a story. The Morgans could still adopt Johnny, but they’d have to do more than be someone his previous mother trusted when she was dying. And now here’s that promising conflict skipped.

It’s not that I don’t buy this ending. Nor even that I don’t like it. It seems to me the settlement that leaves everyone happy and that’s even probably best for Johnny. The problem is the choice to go for this is made by the Marches, off-screen. The viewpoint characters haven’t done anything to influence this, apart from June telling the Marches not to spy on them. (Coincidentally I watched the 1979 movie Kramer Vs Kramer this week. It too leaves me unsatisfied, by an important choice about custody of the kid being made off-screen.) I’d have liked to see more of the Marches wrestling with their decision, and maybe the Morgans working to emotionally earn Johnny better.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 18th of February, 2018. Something the comic strip has featured more since Beatty took over writing duties is to illustrate stuff as Sarah might. It’s always fun when a comic strip’s artist breaks away from the normal format, and the kid’s diary is a great excuse to do it. (Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate used to showcase the title character’s own-drawn comics a lot, but that seems to have fallen away in recent years.) Not quite ready for me to ask: is Sarah of the age to write sentences like “A kid really ought to have grandparents, don’t you think?” (No reason kids don’t sometimes write above their level, especially if it’s a phasing they might have encountered and identified as A Way Grown-ups Speak.)

Still, all agree. And all agree that agreeing is swell. The week leading up to the 18th of February was about the March’s first proper play date with the Morgans. It goes swell, everybody amiable all around. The Marches bringing toys and new crayons help. Sarah, writing in her diary, remarks on how she knew “getting new grandparents would mean extra presents”. It’s the sort of innocent avarice that I remember from childhood.

The 19th of February the new story started. It’s following the Morgan’s babysitter Kelly and her genial but basically clueless boyfriend Niki. Their friend Justin chokes on a sandwich. Before anyone can remember if they know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver he vomits it up and decides he’s done with lunch. He doesn’t want to go to the nurse. Kelly also mentions to Niki that isn’t not necessary that Justin hang out with them all the time. Niki doesn’t understand because while he is genial, he is also basically clueless. At the coffee shop after school, Justin gets some pastries and seems to be choking again.

It’s too early in the story for me to make any guesses where it’s going. I mean, I would expect Justin’s strange choking to matter again, but because otherwise why should Beatty have spent screen time on it? (I wrote most of this paragraph before reading the Sunday installment, but I think it still stands, especially once I deploy the next sentence here.) Don’t know yet, for example, whether Justin is really choking or whether he’s making a joke about earlier in the day. And perhaps the story is something about the challenges of the partners in a relationship also having their own friendships. But (so far) less time was spent on that than on the sandwich. So all told there’s nothing for me to make plot guesses about. Shall try to check back when there is news to report. And I’ll try not to grumble about a soap strip having the plot advance on a Sunday forcing me into some rewrites.

Next Week!

Oh, wow, you do not know with what levels of confused and only partly ironic nerd rage I say this. But I have been dying to get back to Milford and Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and yes, Marty Moon is only a part of it. Send help.

And before then? Mathematically-themed comic strips over on my other blog, if that’s your taste.