Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 23, 2012

I agree with Joanie- GO AWAY, ALEX!

Grandchildren are like arsenic – they can only be taken in small doses.

Joanie, once Alex leave, relocate and don’t leave a note.

Aspies. No sense of boundaries.

The bright Alex correctly sees that Gram’s upcoming speech offers a great opportunity, but the oblivious Alex doesn’t think to help Gram achieve greatness with bright ideas from her younger perspective.

Where is Leo?

You expect Trudeau to do Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE in four panels?

Good Morning DT or I should say : Buona notte e dormire bene. That’s what I am about to do. Talk to you later in the day. Addio!

Doing a four-panel gig is like using a slingshot. Panel 1, place the stone. Panel 2, pull back. Panel 3, release. Panel 4, hit the target.

I’m starting to worry that Alex is gonna somehow screw up the speech.

Emperor to Mozart: I love your music, but there are too many notes.πMozart to Emperor: And which notes, your highness, would you delete?

Pre-register? I had to register for my Fall classes a month ago! And her classes are supposed to start in a few days?? WTH?

So, wasn’t the conversation so much more civilsed yesterday…? Go Team Doonesbury! Maybe we can be even better at avoiding mentioning the problem at all (after, of course, I have mentioned it here…).

So, in the style of a workplace safety announcement:

THIS COMIC STRIP HAS BEEN PROUDLY STARVING TROLLS FOR MORE THAN -1- DAY

Do not be the person who resets that number to zero!

1. Do not respond to trolling posts, in particular those of GuardSGT. All the issues he raises have been answered many times, he takes no notice.

2. Do not bait the trolls by attacking them, either before or after they have posted.

KEEPING DOONESBURY SAFE FOR CIVILISED CONVERSATION.

Ithankyew…

I was lucky. I got out in May 67 and hung around DC for a while for the 67 war. By the time I got back home it was August. Parents said go to college. Nothing else to do and I figured couldn’t get in that late. Didn’t know until I applied to Univ. of Mass that it was then a state law that all vets had to be accepted at any state college or university. I got a letter from them less then a week later accepting me and asking me for my high school diploma and any college credits I wanted to transfer. 23 credits worth from U of C Berkeley for Russian from Monterey. Left a year later with 51 credits and never went back.

@astolatI love it when a plan comes together!

I’m always impressed how invested we can get in cartoon characters, and given some of the negative responses to Alex here, I’d say Trudeau has succeeded in his intentions with her here. Sure, Alex has some growing up to do, but that’s part of the fun. I like watching her interact with older, calmer (more cynical) characters precisely for the interactions her point of view engenders.

This is a comic strip! It could be snowing.My g’daughter is already having Univ. classes.

Okay, I know we’re not supposed to provoke Guard SGT … but his post was, like, word salad.

“… is it vocational school?”πYou’re joking, using irony, of course. It’s graduate school MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a world-class institution in math, science, engineering, …. Depending on the size of the MIT grad school she’s returning to, she may have a drastically different registration, pre-registration, begin-classes schedule from undergrad. πIf the student is bright enough — and Alex is (in spades!) — and they want her badly enough (to assist PIs in their research), the grad school is always prepared to be flexible. But it sounds to me as though she’s following a perfectly normal schedule for graduate school at MIT (or Harvard, Stanford, CalTech, etc.). πDon’t be too quick to judge Doonesbury. When I graduated from undergrad school I got on a plane, flew 4/5 the way across the nation, registered for classes and started graduate-school (professional-school) classes all in a few days.πAlex is in graduate school, folks. It’s a much smaller, much more intimate setting where the emphasis is on research, research, research. πDon’t sell Alex short. She’s headed for a world-class future.

I was a litte confused by the last couple of days. The speech sounds current, but Alex seems like pre-marriage. Is she is grad school now?

I third that motion.

The story arc is about a big national event about to happen, rather than some pertinent national issue. Warren is to address the DNC in a few weeks as the keynote speaker. As other posters have noted, Obama was the keynote speaker at the DNC in 2004. I hear the RNC is in jeopardy due to an impending hurricane. Maybe they should be choosing venues not so prone to hurricanes. The RNC is in Tampa and the DNC is in North Carolina. Both prone to hurricanes and it is the season for hurricanes. Of course, here in the midwest, we have tornadoes. There is always something, as Gilda Radner used to say.

Maybe the hurricane will help the RNC create that “must see TV” experience.

Can’t answer all questions., sorry. GT does jump around. I have to do some brain-work and make some assumptions to stitch different pieces together, but the current arc bitches sufficiently for me.

Oops— Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio, will actually be the keynote speaker, although Elizabeth Warren will also speak at the DNC.

Does anyone else think it’s crazy weird that a tropical storm/hurricane is inching toward the site of the RNC convention just as one did 4 years ago?

Yeah, where’s Leo? Is the marriage over right after the honeymoon?

Sometimes married folks are apart for some time while in grad school. Maybe they haven’t gotten Leo’s living arrangement figured out just yet so that the two can be together.

Or maybe Leo is around but not just at that particular snapshot of their day…

@lookinmside — Whaat? Republicans can read??? WTF, this comic is about reality, not some stupid impossible fantasy.

Puhleeze, get real.