The strip on Thursday is a case in point:
Panel One:
Edda is having another argument with her mother. This time it’s about Juliette’s “sexy gowns,” which she will not let her daughter–who is the same size as Juliette–wear. The mother says “I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
Panel Two:
Set years later, evidenced by Edda’s hair shorter and in a different style. She is weeping and wearing black, and standing, presumably at a funeral, at her mother’s (closed) casket. The man standing there, perhaps Juliette’s attorney, says: “In your mother’s will is a sentence I don’t understand: ‘Okay, it’s time.’ What does that mean?”
I can’t help but feel that this was a mean thing for Juliette to have done…
Any agreement?
I can’t help but feel that you have dangerous quantities of spare time.
Is there a website that I can read this comic, past and present editions? The one that I used to view it on has stopped issuing it.
To Zenster: The irony is that I don’t myself take the newspaper 9 Chickweed Lane appears in in our area. I have a yard customer on Friday morning who serves me lunch and gives me the paper–the Los Angeles Times–to read while the food is cooking.
And I have long been impressed that the characters Ms. McEldowney has created seem much larger than life. 
Actually, Brooke McEdowney is a man. I found this out when I asked him and the LA Time Syndicate for permission to repost his Felinities series on a website of mine. Fortunately I found out from the Time before I sent any potentially embarrassing emails to Mr. McEldowney.
Of course, the joke would have been lost if Juliette had just said, “Over my dead body…”
IMHO, I really wish the creator of this strip would allow the characters to age ala For Better of For Worse.
What the hell is the backstory on this strip?
I ran into it every once in a while on business trips…in the LA Times and Miami Herald, etc. For the past couple months I’ve been reading it on the Web.
Mom is a scientist or doctor of some sort, who is trying to deal with her sexual repression. Has fantasies of swinging through jungles while mostly naked. Her boyfriend is another doctor or scientist, who is even MORE sexually repressed.
Daughter is some sort of super-prodigy…top student, talented pianist, ballet dancer…at a Catholic school, where she struggles with the nuns to express her sexuality. Her boyfriend is an Uber-nerd.
Grandma is a hideous gargoyle.
Several persons dressed as farmers wander in and out of the strip once every four weeks or so.
Brooke McEdowney, my ass. Salvador Dali, more likely.
“Mom”, Dr. Juliette Burber, is a science professor at a university. She is a divorcée raising her daughter alone.
I can add little else to what Ukelele Ike posted. Granted Amos Van Hoesen is probably an “Uber-nerd,” but he loves Edda and she loves him, and apparently that’s all that matters.
The high intellect seems to run in the mother’s side of the family, because of the constant arguments between Juliette and Gran, and Edda and Juliette.
I wish I had known more girls like Edda (with mothers like Juliette) when I was in high school (public, not parochial).
I’ve never thought Edda and Amos were dating; I think they’re best friends who’ve known each other forever. He, of course, is interested in her, but she doesn’t appear to be interested in anyone. And he gets his yearly kiss from her, of course.
I love this strip! I’m glad the characters don’t age; the whole point of this strip is the fantasies of the main characters and how they play out in real life. It’s not supposed to be entirely realistic. I really enjoy watching the relationships of everyone involved. It’s one of my favorites.
Uke, the farmers that wander in and out are Gran’s boyfriend (I can’t remember his name) and his dad. They are taciturn New England farmers.
One of my favorite strips was one where Gran’s boyfriend was involved in something like a “Taciturn Farmer Contest.” The two contestants sat there saying nothing, sweating, showing the tension, until the rival inadvertently said “Ayup.” Last panel is Gran and her boyfriend doing a wild victory dance while the rival clamps his hands over his mouth, looking disgusted with himself.
N.B.: I didn’t know the artist was a man. This better explains the frequency of drawings of Juliette and Edda wearing very little!
I regret I’ve never seen this. Does it happen at Christmastime, with Amos under the mistletoe? Or around Valentine’s Day?
In one strip the first panel shows Amos and Edda, properly dressed, getting married; the second panel shows both of them admiring Edda’s bulging belly; and the third shows them on a sidewalk, wheeling a baby carriage, with a toddler accompanying them. In the third panel, Edda asks, “Amos, what are you thinking about?”
In the fourth panel, he answers, “Uh… I was just fantasizing about out future lives togehter.”
Edda answers, “Uh…so was I.”
This suggests that she had the exact same fantasy Amos did, at the same time.
Hey, why do you think I bother reading it every day on the Web? THERE’S a couple of figures I wouldn’t mind totting up.
Thanks for the background info, folks. Is it supposed to be set in New England? Is that why Gran’s boyfriend is a taciturn farmer? Does Juliette teach at a world-class institution, or a small jerkwater college? In what field of science does she specialize? How come Juliette divorced Edda’s dad? Was he beating them or something? Why do Juliette and Edda seem to have no chins whatsoever?
I have a POWERFUL curiosity about this strip.
Now that you bring this up, Ukelele Ike, I have wondered why Amos seems to have as much of an overbite as just about all the Simpsons characters, as if he is related to Bart, or Mr. Burns, or Krusty the Clown, or Moe, or even the Bumblebee Man (¡Ay!) 
I assume the strip is set in New England, but I don’t know. The name of Juliette’s university has never been mentioned in any of the strips I’ve read. Juliette teaches chemistry. I don’t think the divorced dad beat anyone up, but he’s kind of a jerk; one strip described how Edda was so happy that her dad was finally getting around to taking her to lunch, but that she clocked him when she found that he was also seeing his latest tootsie at the same lunch date. I’d like to observe that this is a rather sexist strip; men are frequently getting the short end of the stick.
As far as the chin question goes, I guess the artist figures that what’s good for the Simpsons is good enough for him.
I don’t know whether McEldowney’s strip has any kind of “sexist” bent, but if it does it cuts both ways. In one strip Juliette meets her ex’s latest girlfriend, an airhead with a blouse full of goodies:
Juliette: Tell me, Bo Peep, how did Jack [Juliette’s ex-husband] guess how old you are? Did he count your rings or something?
Bimbo: I guess so.
[Long silence]
Juliette: Moving on to question number two: Do you have any idea how old you are?
Don’t know about the rest of you, but…
This is the most ANTI-MALE comic there ever was.
Just call the average white male a horny slime-bag, that’s what is says to me.
I hate this motherfucking strip…
How can they get away with this HATE CRIME? I think I’m gonna sue Brooke.
Nah, I disagree. Men don’t come off any worse than anyone else. Case in point:
The one that sold me on the strip as a whole was the one where Juliette and her boyfriend are sitting together on the sofa, and she asks him to fantasize about her. “Just let your imagination run wild.”
Suddenly he’s sitting on the sofa next to a huge, hairy gorilla.
Last panel: Juliette’s seductively asking “if she was any good,” amd he’s collapsing in a giggle fit.
I personally like the strip. It’s oot in our local paper here but check out http://www.comics.com ;they have it and you can get a month’s worth.
In a sense, I have known a family very similar to the Burbers.
A girl I went to high school with–I’ll call her Vickie–was (and still is) very similar to Edda–a talented, highly intelligent beauty. Her mother was no beauty, but quite a remarkable person in her own right; a historian and musician. (There were also two brothers and the father; he, the mother, and one brother have since died. 
) Vickie seems to have made as much of an impression on me as Edda regularly does on Amos, and I will probably regret all my life I could not play Amos to Vickie’s Edda.
dougie_monty, BunnyGirl, Ike, it’s a favorite strip with me, too. I think it’s imaginative and not a little cerebral. I like the way the drawings stretch across panels and the different “camera angles.” And it was this strip that gave me the wonderful phrase “simile poisoning,” which describes a mall rat’s habit of unnecessarily peppering their speech with the word “like.”