part one
part two (sort of)
And now a third Shop Rite post! You only get one Star Wars movie this year but I have provided a whole trilogy. Unfortunately I got it at Shop Rite.

Good old African-American Friday. I actually meant to post this that day, but while you were taking a luxurious trip between now and midnight to save $800 on an ex-box, me, I was camping outside Shop Rite to “beat” the rush to save 30 cents on beets and pork and beans.

I commented on this situation previously but neglected to link to the video, which I think is very important.
The Shop Rite Can Can sale happens every year, sometimes twice, and people swear by it. The same recording of the song and the same animation have likewise been recycled, in increasingly edited form, as modern regulations for showing anything outside shoddily edited snippet form require it. According to recently declassified documents, my parents were once invited to spend a week with some let’s call them friends in a cabin in let’s say Maine. One, I will call him Pol, since his name was Paul and I am changing his name to protect his identity, learned that my mother was a vegetarian, but assured her not to worry, since Pol was going to do all the cooking, to “give the ladies a break,” having stocked up at the Shop Rite can-can sale. It should be a heartwarming story but it isn’t because I thought it was the funniest thing I ever heard once I heard it. Shop Rite made me laugh at kindness!

Also, the unseen announcer in this ad from 198x is the same person who still does it. I can only conclude that just IS Shop Rite talking. We do not need to get into the most recent advertising because the latest ends with the on-camera actor proclaiming “now that deserves a happy dance,” one of an ever-increasing number of recent ads inexplicably invoking “happy dance,” and many of them are not even for Shop Rite, possibly indicating a deeper conspiracy that is outside my present jurisdiction.

The “rite” in the name may not merely be “right” misspelled and misapplied… what a fool I have been! The answer is much simpler: Shop Rite refers to an aspect of a ceremony for a religion based on shopping. Without proper shop rites, we will be denied shop salvation.

Shop Rite is so cheap that it doesn’t even give you a chance to call bow tie pasta by its proper name, farfalle.

Shop Rite assumes if it calls the pasta farfalle, none of its intended customers will know the pasta is bow-tie shaped.

Consider that shoprite crumpetitor Shop & Shop has a rinkity dinkity store brand of pasta and a “fancy” brand that is exactly the same but costs more and has a picture of string on it so I’m supposed to think somebody actually giftwrapped this cardboard box of overpriced rinkity dinkety pasta. Imagine if it was your birthday and somebody gave this to you. Anyway, neither of these calls the stuff “bowties.” Also, even though almost everything at Shop Rite is denoted as being marked down, it is often more expensive than the same item at another store. The cheapo Shop Rite bow ties from my trip in 2012 cost 40 cents more than the same quantity box of cheapo Stop & Shop bowties with a less cheap name from this month, and the Stop & Shop is in Madison, the town where my neighbors react with disbelief when I answer no to “this is just your summer house, right?”

Back to bow ties, even knowing that, of course, we are supposed to associate bow ties with classiness, and shop rite is the LAST store you would want claiming responsibility for yours, it is worth observing that- oh deben, something awful just occurred to me. Would you let me see that sign again?

AW NAW! Get it away! Before…

There seems to be a deeper Shop Rite-Bow Tie connection than I ever suspected. I have lost the will to scream. One screams because one wants help and I think none can be forthcoming. This is most worrisome. I may have to go into hiding until next year.

Dessert Island
I think you may be digging in the wrong place.

I acknowledge that I was raised to deal with christ-mas, that today IS the christmas day and that the picture I posted has nothing to do with christmas.

However, neither does this.

I hope you will find this informative.

I contacted expert voiceover artist Gewk Gilkengramen for the narration. Gewk refused in disgust, so I had to bring in this bozo instead from off the street. With that in mind I have also provided moderately readable text that says for the most part the same things.

I will provide more painful details at an ideally hypothetical point in the future.

I posted this on my secret personal facebook page last night.

And when it refers to that night and the night before, it therefore actually means the night before this one and the night before that one. I hope this has been minimally deformative. The personal facebook page is “secret” because I primarily use it to manage my non-secret bimshwel page, and my last personal page got shut down for having a stupid name. Since this one has an even stupider name I seek to minimize awareness of it.

This mostly summarizes what I months earlier shoved not completely relevantly into a long boring post about being tired of watching television that I forced myself to watch. Oddly enough this summary of that paragraph is longer and boringer than it. Although that is consistent with my past behavior and therefore not very odd at all.

Another debate pageant tonight. You do not need to read this, I just need to post it!

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was a guest on the Late Colbert Show last night, remarking on the fact that Mr. D Trump has not been overtaken by “mainstream” presidential candidates yet. What makes Trump not “mainstream?” I hate to accept that somebody who studies this stuff as a lifestyle can look at the non-Trump candidates and think “it is the natural and correct order of things that one of these buffoons be one step away from the national presidency.”
To summarize what I have been squawking elsewhere the past few months, the modern republican party needs to die, good and dead. For the values it espouses, and allows the democratic party to also espouse in an effort to draw support away from republicans, and worse, still look good in comparison to. The worse the republicans get standing for the worst things, the better our wimpy, principle-devoid democrat party looks standing for nothing at all. We should not be forced to see that as the good choice.

I dislike Bernard Sanders less than the other candidates, but first of all that is based on the same kind of internet hype that made me prObama, which ultimately let me down. And also, running as a democrat forces Uncle Bernie into the democrats’ box, which wants its candidates to drop any topic that does not meet that box’s terms of service, and also agree not to oppose Hillary Clinton after a certain point. Indeed, that box wanted everyone to stop opposing Hillary Clinton after November 2011. That ending was written before the story started. We’re living in a perpetual frustrating prequel, like Smallville or Gotham or whatever. Nothing can happen to disrupt something in the future whose status is totally arbitrary, no matter how long the prequel goes on, and how many details develop that we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the ending. Ha ha ha, let’s laugh at Lincoln Chafee for having a funny name and wanting a measurement system with more order and less random numbers to memorize, regardless of how many other countries use it (most of them). And we can laugh at Dennis Kucinich for looking like a character from a Fievel movie. But please don’t dismiss them entirely for that.

What I think we need is a legitimate force to oppose these two parties, even a force with “no chance” to win. I think a lot of us do. And we could use a major news organization, with infrastructure behind it, to not tacitly back the policies of any party. Not just sporadic obscure advocacy that can be ignored for 20 years and later presented with “look at who predicted our garbage present!” Imagine if ABC news worked as hard at digging for facts behind the terrorism threat threats they get from the government as they did at digging for new Star Wars trailers. You’ll have to!

Sanders himself was an obscure advocate. You can look up video of him, in 1991, when he was a US representative, predicting prolonged US entanglement in Mesopotamia if it invaded Iraq, (Dick Cheney, as well). Why wasn’t that a story THEN? Or in 2003? Why can somebody offering an informed reason to not do something that cannot be undone be taken seriously? Because our major news organizations, funded by corporations, would have lost sponsors if they gave weight to anti-war arguments. Anyone found guilty would be forced out, like Phil Donahue. I would say Dan Rather as well but you could point to sloppy inability to defend or back up his own story about George Wuh Bush that lost him his CBS news boatholder job.

Anyway, what I want at this point is for Donald Trump to be nominated by his party and then have the “mainstream” republican candidates refuse to support him. I do not want any of them to be president, but this would undermine the whole convention process, and reveal more publicly how dumb this all is. Reveal that “the people” don’t really decide who they vote for, or even who they are allowed to vote for. Trump represents horrible things, but he is the most sincere reflection of actual American voters in his party, apart from having loads more money. The other candidates present no basis for denying that. If they really believe in telling people what is “right,” they’ll stop pretending we don’t have a gun problem, a bank problem, a pharmaceutical problem, a meat problem, a pollution problem, a pumpkin problem, a church problem, a surveillance problem and on and on. We need to stop pretending persecution, misdirected aggression and divinity of the famous are not core American values going back to the country’s founding so we can actually do something about them.
I do not share the Isis standpoint of “hurry up and destroy the world,” but I also do not believe in condoning mediocrity. Condoning mediocrity, doing something just because a lot of visible, impatient loudmouths demanded it done allowed Isis to exist!

I feel it is owed to my state, Connecticut, personally, after Joe “Mortal Kombat will turn our children into homicidal palette-swapped ninjas” Lieberman refused to back Ned Lamont, who won their democrat senate primary, and ran instead as an “independent” and ultimately got re-elected to the senate by harnessing the collective ignorance and dumb fear of both permitted sides. If we can do that to keep boneheads in office, we can certainly do it to keep boneheads out of office.

Hardly a collection of complete thoughts; I hate being “topical” because there is not time to think about things at length. There is not even time or space to finish or scan that terrible drawing I put on this just so somebody would notice it. But if this was my JOB, I would make certain I did so. I wish we had not created a world that demanded immediate uninformed emotional responses all the time. “Why hasn’t the president condemned Joe Bones’ outrageous remarks yet?” Because outrage doesn’t accomplish anything!

Howdy.

I will have a terrible story to tell you soon.

Excuse me shouldn’t there be a spoiler alert in that ad? You have already told me that Frosty survives the first movie! Imagine watching Star Wars if you knew in advance that the Empire was going to Strike Back.

Everyone’s favorite snowman. I think that’s supposed to be Frosty also. But now that you mention it, I don’t know a whole lot of snow-men.

Ones that are eligible to be my favorite, I mean. Between this and the

creepy cartoon frog “Kandoo” that wipes itself in front of your children we as a nation have enough uninvited smilers sharing this space with us.

Okay buddy the facial expression was actually beside the point and in fact you are making this worse.

Back to snow-men, I used to not like them at all, but then I found out that Battletoads hated them and I decided they might be doing something right. Kandoo of course grew up to be a battle toad.
For favorite snowman I did consider Parson Brown, but I remembered I was only pretending that was who it was.

The only other one that comes immediately to my mind is Bad Mr. Frosty, presumably of no relation to regular “Mr. Frosty is my father” Frosty. But he is no good and is not my favorite. He is almost as bad as a bad-tle toad, despite them declaring genocide on his species. He is a traitor through and through. My source informs me that Bad Mr. Frosty’s buttons and facial features are made not from coal but from leftover Shop Rite logo pieces.

You know, those old stories about Santa Claus giving coal to naughty children are a lie. Coal was a valuable commodity in days of yore. You couldn’t heat your cold Victorian hovel without it. Shop Rite pieces are only good for bad. They will burn your house down without generating any warmth. Fire is a neutral force of nature, but the Shop Rite logo means to harm you, have no doubt. Consider that only the “hop ri” part of the logo is underlined. It deliberately omits S t and e just as an affront to notorious video game artist Ste Pickford. When Shop Rite is around nobody else is allowed to spell their name weird.

Or perhaps it holds a grudge since Ste-drawn Kuros was, historically, the first person to ever get kicked out of a Shop Rite.

part 1 of this investigative series on shop rite
part 3 and I’m not saying that twice

page 41 and 42 of re-drawings of that.

I forgot to change the first frame to explain how the door shut without kumquat being near it like I said I ought to at the previous pertinent posting, and by the time I thought of it I was inclined to leave it as it was and just give an excuse. Consider that the control object has at least three buttons, and two other sections that I have not determined the purpose of. It is possible that a delayed shut was activated with the button pressing I did show on the previous page.
Page 42 is here as well since I did not have occasion to make a separate update for both of these and was interested in trying a slightly different method of rehabilitating the old pages, without switching to another matter before making the next page like I usually do. This way was not an improvement either! And now it has a different visual style than page 41. But page 41 does not look like page 40, which does not look like page 39. Perhaps my signature style is the absence of one.
By this point, the pictures I am redrawing, from 2006 or thereabouts, are scanned at a printable resolution, so I really only need to make them over slightly. When I started redrawing, I looked forward to this point. But now I find the character proportions so unsightly and backgrounds so boxy and empty that I wish I had fully redrawn the thing, so it might have potential to look more interesting. Which is ironic because at the time of the original version, I felt as if I was finally doing things properly for the first time! In fact, I almost like the originals better since they were exactly what I meant them to be at the time. Nonetheless, layout consistency takes precedence, and it is likely that when printed the new versions’ less scratchy outlines and better regulated frame-stuffing will be favorable.