The real estate shell game.

The odd thing about the middle years is having to deal with one of the odder side effects of the stupid, soap operatic revenge fantasy in which Ted takes it between the uprights so as to serve as a stand-in for all the stinkaloos who ever stood Lynn up in her life; said side effect is the imbecilic nonsense that required Connie to play what we might call musical houses for a while.

We're going to see the process in motion all over again next January when Mrs Baird interrupts Elly lecturing Phil about how smoking is for clods and savages to announce that she's getting too old to rattle around her big old empty house and wants to move into the senior citizens complex. This, for some irritating reason, traumatizes Lizzie and Mike into trying to sabotage the process because unlike regular children who'd shrug when told this and ask when dinner is, they want her to live in her old house forever and ever.

This coincides neatly with Connie's oafish control freak husband throwing her under the bus by getting a transfer to Milboring so he can step on a relationship that scares him all to death, the poor baby. As Elly blinds herself to the fact that she's just flushed Annie down the commode, she makes the amazingly surprising and not at all ploddingly inevitable suggestion that Connie can move to the Baird place so they can drink coffee and snipe about ungrateful children forever and always.

This not only allows Elly to have her real best friend around so they can compare notes on how horrible children are, it also sets things up so that we can have her drop in on Mrs Baird every so often. This might have been something of a fixture save for the fact that Lynn didn't have the real Thelma in her life any longer so one fine day, John asked what amusing adventure she'd embarked upon only to be told "dying in her sleep of a massive stroke." More on that and what we can take away from her life tomorrow.

On the subject of Liz's berserk button.

My guess is that by now, Anthony has blundered witlessly into a rhetorical ambush that has caused Liz to violently overreact to a question she doesn't want answered with anything like veracity. The question that faces us is wondering exactly what that trigger is. As I've said in the past, the other Pattersons don't like having certain questions asked and don't like hearing certain concepts because the truth clashes with their self-image. Here's a helpful list of said topics that should never be discussed if you don't want to either get screeched at or hit with something:

• Don't make fun of Elly' imaginary ten extra pounds, don't tell her that the ten extra pounds don't exist and don't imply that she's a short-tempered, stubborn idiot who doesn't listen because she likes being angry more than she likes being right and don't tell her that brings most of her trouble on herself.


• Don't imply that John is a self-serving egomaniac who's too fragile to deal with anything other that blind, unthinking obedience from the people around him and don't call him unfair, unfeeling and unkind.



• Don't tell Michael that he's not the special snowflake his bloated ego turns him into and don't imply that he's being cruel to Liz because he's a jealous idiot.



• Don't make the mistake of implying that Deanna has anything like a character flaw and don't do anything stupid like tell her that any idea she might have is impractical and idiotic.



• Don't imply that the only reason that Becky is gross-buckets and evil is that she makes April feel insecure about herself.



• Don't tell any of them that people whose interests collide with their own aren't monsters trying to crush them out of malice, jealousy and family politics.

What this leaves us is wondering what it is that might set Liz off. We start to see hints of it when she accuses the Evil Career Woman of willing her to fall on her arse and hurt herself because she's an unfriendly and jealous ice queen who hates her for no reason. Further hints are to be had when she randomly damns the people of Mtigwaki for their obvious support of Paul and Susan making a fool of her because if they liked her, they would have lynched the two of them. This tells me that the question that might antagonize Liz to the point of violence is "Don't you think you're being unfair?"

As we saw when she squawked about the unfairness of having to look like a civilized human being and not injecting herself into any social gathering Anthony might attend, it enrages Liz when she's asked to consider the idea that despite her not looking out to start trouble, trouble sort of follows her because of factors she hasn't considered (such as Gordon setting up an argument to destroy Anthony's marriage to someone who makes him feel uncomfortable or a town being paralyzed by the awkwardness of the situation). What this means that as I type this, she's probably foaming at the mouth about the unfairness of being accused of taking out her dislike of Thérèse on Françoise despite the fact that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's Liz being a pissy, judgmental loon playing favorites and jumping down an innocent child's throat because she doesn't want to be reminded that she played a big part in wrecking her life.