Too Much Info (TMI) 10/16/2020

We all know about TMI, too much information. It’s like when a little kid asks, “where do babies come from,” and you tell them the real truth, “You see the man sticks his…” that’s classic TMI. All the kid wants to hear is, “The stork drops them off through the chimney,” or some similar nonsense. But this tendency to divulge too much happens in all aspects of our lives. Note the endless shows about politics and what this crucial decision means moving forward, but if each state can do “x”, than that will result in “y”, which will overturn our entire system of justice and our democracy will be at stake. Both John and I have inquired about participating in making phone calls encouraging people to get out and vote. And we got to wondering, how would those phone calls be received by the people we were calling? There are actual training sessions available teaching you how to deal with the recipients of said calls. “1) Engage their level of interest, if it’s high go to b) if not, revert to point a). Nowhere do they tell you what to do if the recipient of your call tells you to go f#*k yourself, which we imagine might occur on a fairly regular basis. Now of course, we are both from the New York area which might account for our cynical views, but it formed the basis for the first comic today. It’s another example of the cliche, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Next up came from a trip my family took a couple of weeks ago to Portland, Maine at the same time John’s family went to Cape Cod. Several good ideas for future comics came out of these mutual trips, but today’s emanated from a Sunday morning visit to Holy Donuts in Portland. I have a very good friend who has a wicked love for donuts. To make you hate him even worse, he’s really thin, not an ounce of body fat on him. But man, does he love donuts. So when we told him we were heading off to Portland, he said, you’ve got to try Holy Donuts. They’re made with real Maine potatoes. Now what is a potato doing inside a donut? I don’t know and I don’t care but it tasted great. Like the best donut I can ever remember eating. But back to the TMI thing. Me, my wife, daughter and son-in-law stood outside the line debating what to order. There were more flavors than I ever knew existed. What happened to the glazed cake donut, or the chocolate donut with icing and sprinkles or, heaven forbid, the old-fashioned jelly donut? When we approached the counter, we read the menu. And not only were there choices like lemon zest or coffee cake or maple-glazed with bacon, there were all those versions in gluten-free or vegan varieties — not the bacon one, of course, which is what I ordered—but all the rest. And lest I forget , one of the flavors I requested was sold out, however if I wanted the sweet potato donut version as opposed to the regular potato version, I was welcome to order it. I declined. But it made for a pretty funny idea for a comic. I have one question about the whole experience. Was the line so long because the donuts were so delicious (they were everything my skinny friend promised they would be) or was it so long because there was too much damn information about the myriad number of donut choices available? Verdict, I don’t know and after my first bite, I no longer cared.

Thanks for sticking around to read the blog and if you like reading it as much as I enjoy writing it, then please tell your friends about it. Thanks and we’ll see you next week with two new ones.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Musings on Plexiglass and Getting Older

I’ve got a friend who made adjustments to his office before anyone was discussing the pandemic. He got standing desks for everyone and in an attempt to encourage togetherness, he lowered the partitions between cubicles. Uh oh, or as Astro from the Jetsons would say, “Ruh roh.” So now he has to do it all over again. John and I wondered what Al would have to do to his Pizza on a Stick franchise, to encourage employee safety. Unfortunately, Al being Al, he forgot to order the plexiglass with a pre-cut slot. Sometimes plexiglass protectors are a giant pain, even if there’s a hole in the plexi. For instance, did you ever try to use your phone to pay in a parking lot? There’s usually a space at the bottom of the glass shield, with a curved coin tray at the bottom. If you happen to have one of those bigger sized iPhones, it’s not an easy fit. Anyway, Al went the parking garage one better and left the space out altogether. By the way, it’s a good thing John is also the artist, since he’s got to figure out how to draw glass so you guys will know it’s glass.

The second comic today happened on Andy’s mid-May birthday. It happened to the one of us that is 5 years older than the other one. We’ll never tell which is which. Okay, we will. Sure John has a white beard and everything but I (Andy) am the older one. While discussing our relative ages it occured to us that John is still in his EARLY 60’s while Andy has graduated to his LATE 60’s. Labels, just labels. I mean, you’re only as old as you feel and I feel like…never mind. John and I both worked for an advertising icon named Linda Kaplan Thaler and when she hit a certain age in her 60’s she said “I’m in my incredibly late 40’s.” I think we will go with that definition instead.

So the young, spry John and the creaky, old Andy wish you a beautiful, corona-free, weekend. And we will be back at you next week with a couple new ones, ripped from the pages of whatever it is we experience.

Andy and John

On not sweating the small stuff 2/21/2020

Andy’s daughter Ali recently gave him a gift on Valentine’s Day, four colored glass straws. This was a marked improvement over the metal straw Joanie brought home. And an unbelievable improvement over the biodegradable paper straws that Andy was using to drink his beloved iced coffees and iced teas. You know the kind. They collapse if you suck on them too hard and then when you try to pinch them back into shape, they tear, requiring you to put a finger over the rip so you can create some form of suction. In other words, a major league pain-in-the-ass. Now if you’re not in the loop environmentally, you might ask, what’s so bad about plastic straws? Well they are used only once and thrown away. Yet they stay on the planet FOR-EV-ER.

But still…when you’re used to a flexible bendy straw your whole life, it’s kind of off-putting to place a piece of unyielding metal in your mouth. And what happens if you’re walking down the stairs on a hot summer day, sipping your iced tea through a metal straw and you trip on your flip flops? Huh? So as we confront this new environmental nightmare, we thought, straws are one of those things you can still find at grandma and grandpa’s house, along with Mallomars and chocolate-covered raisins, but we digress. John was likely scarred during childhood from those paper straws you had to poke into the milk cartons which collapsed during the first sip, and he struggles with the memory. Andy, a full 5 years older, had to tough it out by pinching the carton open and going straw-less. At any rate, we thought the different generational reactions to a plastic straw belonged in a New 60 comic. We hope you agree.

Next comic up was inspired by Andy’s recent visit for a routine check-up. The first thing you do is get weighed with your clothes on. Now, Andy has his secrets. No breakfast that morning, don’t wear jeans, wear khakis or something light, empty your cell phone, watch, car keys, gum, toothpicks, take off your belt, suck your breath in (we know it doesn’t work, but still…) and gingerly step on the scale. When Andy told John of his modest strip-tease, John immediately thought, let’s strip him down to his underpants and only the nurse stops him from going “The Full Monty” (that means totally naked and is also a title of a movie in which two out-of-work, overweight dads, decide to become male pole dancers). Now let us reassure you that neither John nor Andy have any thoughts of that type of career change, but we thought it’d make a good story for the “Marv” character who is always trying one diet after another. But John couldn’t resist drawing Marv in his tighty whities (and he also couldn’t resist calling them “skivvies”).

So there you go. See you next week with two new ones and we may even reveal Shellie’s new condition to our hapless men.

Have a wonderful weekend

Andy and John

Adventures in driving and grandparenting 1/24/2020

First on your feed this week is a lesson in grandparenting. When Andy pitched the ending, John said, “I don’t want to do the dumb husband/smart wife thing.” Andy replied, “Why not,” and John said, “We need to be less obvious.” The guy had a point. But the other point was that this exact incident happened to Andy, his wife Joanie and their daughter Ali who was about 2 at the time. They weren’t about to go sleigh riding, they were about to go to an unveiling. Outside. In February. In a foot of snow. And Ali, always the fashion maven even at 2 years old, wanted to wear her black, shiny, patent leather, party shoes, while her dad was trying to force her boots on. She was wailing and kicking, anything to avoid putting on those rubber boots. Suddenly her mom Joanie entered the room and suggested the compromise you saw in the comic. Ali immediately calmed down and put on her party shoes, and THEN her snow boots.

The challenge for your intrepid cartoonists was how to end this and John had the thought of coming up with some ancient wisdom. It turns out both Andy and John had separately worked with Pat Morita, the famed master in The Karate Kid. So a Jew from New York and a Protestant from Long Island put their heads together came up with some ancient Chinese wisdom instead. Which makes for a more intersting ending. But as Andy says, the guy is still a dummy. And he ought to know, because that guy was him. One final note was that Joanne’s final comeback, “You learn well, grasshopper,” is a nod to the show “Kung Foo” starring a white man, David Carradine, in flowing robes. Those were certianly different times.

Our second comic was inspired by a friend of Andy’s named Kyle who was a little late to Andy’s apartment to watch the conference championship football games last Sunday. What happened was Kyle had left his house but had forgotten his phone. He went back to get it and wanted to send a text from his car, saying he’d be late. He was hoping to encounter a red light so he could stop and text but every light he reached was green. When he finally got to a red light, he pulled out his phone and…the light turned green. When he finally arrived, midway through the first quarter, he announced, “If you ever want to avoid running into a red light, just try to send a text.” Andy said, “You are late but forgiven because you just gave us a new comic.”

That’s it for this week. We will see you again on Super Bowl weekend. Until then, be well and keep on reading.

Andy and John

Communicating about communicating 5/10/19

At the New 60, we always try to draw on experience. An experience either one of us has had, or an experience one of our friends has had. Or something we observe in a total stranger. The first comic this week has to do with something that pisses everyone off, regardless of age. Waiting on hold. Especially waiting on hold for a big institution like a credit card company or a bank or, in this case, an insurance company. You know in advance you’re going to have to wait forever. This was the second of a two part comic. We thought it would be fun to have Marv wait from last week’s comic until this week’s. So the germ of the idea came from one of us having to dispute a bank charge. You have to make the decision, is this going to be worth the aggravation I know I’m going to feel? And if you make the decision to go ahead, you tell yourself you won’t get aggravated, at least not this time. Until you do. As Marv stews, so stew we (does that even remotely make sense?).

The second strip (after 4 decades in advertising, we are always tempted to say, the second spot, which is how you refer to a commercial in the biz) deals with one of those occurrences we both have had. When it’s something that happens to us both, we realize we might have an idea that resonates with our audience. In this case, we are talking about the twin phenomena of losing your hearing bit by bit (no, I will not put closed captioning on my tv!!!!) and of a couple communicating with each other by shouting from different rooms. It’s usually the sound of one person’s voice, the hearing of only a few key words, honey, will you, favor, 8? Followed by the mandatory reply, WHAT????

Ain’t love grand? Read ‘em and laugh. And have a wonderful weekend.

The New 60

Phoning it in 11/30/18

No, we’re not actually phoning it in. We’re doing a “Then and Now” about the ubiquitous, sometimes obnoxious, and always interruptus … cell phone. When we got the idea I thought it would be great to show all the things you used to do and show how they’re done now. But John said no, I have a different insight. It doesn't matter what the current technology happens to be, we’re still doing exactly the same stuff we used to do, only now it’s on a phone. Better angle. That phone brings joy and pain, and like the people in your life that are most important to you, there are times you can’t live with them, but god forbid you try to live without them.

A good case in point was involved the Landorf family dog, a wheaten terrier (we called him a Wheaten Terrorist) named Otis. Unfortunately Otis grew increasingly aggressive after he turned 7 or 8. He became agitated when I went to work. And would bark in a menacing way. Every morning I had to go downstairs, put him in a cage, get my work bag and coat, come back downstairs and take a biscuit. I’d let Otis out of the cage and toss the biscuit across the room. He’d chase after it and I’d open the door to the garage and quickly shut it behind me. Until one day when I left my cell phone behind. Rather than deal with my dog, I spent the day without a phone. But soon thereafter, we were without Otis. Trust me, we tried to make it work.

The motivation for the next comic came from the midterm elections. We noticed a raft of younger and younger candidates. They overcame long odds and beat their much older and more established opponents in the primaries and then went on to win their respective midterms. So many of them sounded so mature and reasonable and full of energy. We were mutually impressed. And then we wondered if either of us could have run for congress when we were in our twenties. The answer was a resounding no. (Something about getting into a car after consuming two pot brownies probably disqualified me).

We had fun thinking that one up and recalling all the intelligent things we did in our 20’s.

At any rate, we hope you enjoy this week’s strips (take your minds out of the gutter) and we’ll be back with two new ones next week.

Have a terrific weekend (even if you’re a Giants or Jets fan)

The New 60