September 4, 2011: Sunday Showdown!

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Clockwise from the bottom left:

• Loretta's comment makes me wonder if she herself was a tall, striking bimbo in her youth when Leroy first met her and that it was the decades of unrelenting bitterness and regret over marrying Leroy that warped her into the stocky block of spite she is today. It would explain why Leroy would have initially approached her and her overly suspicious and hostile attitudes towards bimbos today. The same could have gone for Leroy; in the bloom of his youth he may have been some chiseled Adonis with a head full of hair before marriage robbed him of his dashing looks. That would really add a fascinatingly tragic undercurrent to everything. Loretta goes up 1-0.
• It looks like Leroy is employing a sort of preemptive "you can't fire me, I quit" approach to his most recent argument with Loretta. I would question whether his course of action is actually effective, but the unhappy look on Loretta's face seems to prove it worked. It was a pretty clever gambit by Leroy. Given prior history, it was likely that he was going to lose any sort of verbal argument with Loretta so he decided to accept defeat in a way that preserved his pride and actually gave him the victory. Leroy ties things up 1-1.
• There are many ways to read Loretta's comment that Leroy has been "idling kind of rough lately", each more unspeakably awful than the last. I'm not even going to venture describing potential disgusting scenarios, but I'm sure they all involve miscellaneous bodily sounds. I also hope against hope that none of this rough idling is related in anyway to sexual health issues. Why do Leroy and the good doctor even let Loretta into the examination room all the time? They know they'll just be getting nothing but insults. Loretta earns the point, 2-1.
• A quick and easy Sunday morning score by Leroy; and he didn't even have to get out of his pajamas or finish breakfast yet! If there was anyone who would find a way to incorporate buckshot into a stack of pancakes, it would be Loretta. I guess that'll be the last time Loretta opts for healthier, gluten free options at the breakfast table. I get a sense that the fourth panel of the Sunday Showdown is often the place where Leroy earns his bread and butter points making fun of Loretta's cooking. If only he had similar luck in the other panels. Leroy ties things up 2-2 as we head to the fifth and deciding panel.
• I am quite disturbed by Leroy's bizarre affection towards kitschy clown paintings and figurines. He must really be into them to be able to put up with the constant barrage of criticism by Loretta. Along with clowns, the talking bass and the dogs playing poker reproduction shows that Leroy has an impressively strong and well defined sense of the camp aesthetic, whether this sense of camp is "naive camp" or "deliberate camp", as defined by Susan Sontag in "Notes on "Camp"" is up for debate. What isn't up for debate however is Loretta's victory in yet another Sunday Showdown, as she squeaks out a close 3-2 win.

Official Count:

Leroy - 88
Loretta - 96

Push - 63