On the Joy of Baseball Day Games and Click Clack 05/06/22

So many things we used to play with as children have now been reconsidered as hazardous. I am reminded of a scene from Mad Men. Sally Draper, daughter of Don and Betty, was having a good time, running around with a plastic, dry cleaning bag over her head. Her mom, Betty Draper, possibly the worst mom in the history of television (June Cleaver she wasn't) calls her daughter over to chastise her. But what comes out of her mouth is “If the clothes that were in that dry cleaning bag are on the floor of my closet, you are going to be one unhappy young lady!” It was with that type of empathy and foresight that the makers of Click Clack must have tapped into when inventing their product. It was two acrylic balls attached at the opposite ends of a piece of string. When you flipped your wrist up and down the balls would click together at the top of their arc and then clack at the bottom. Click, clack, it went faster and faster until, oops, the acrylic balls had a previously undisclosed tendency to shatter, sending shards of sharp acrylic pieces flying through the air. As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?

The other comic at the baseball game, that scene actually happened to me. Or something close to that. I went to a midweek afternoon game, my favorite kind, just me and thousands of brightly t-shirted camp kids, and randomly started a conversation with another guy two seats to my right. The seat between us was empty. Somewhere in about the third inning I heard somebody in the row in back of me address his friend by his full name. I recognized the name so I turned around and saw not one, not two, not three, but four guys I used to work with, including the guy who initially hired me. I was happy to see them but mortified that I was there by myself. I wondered what they were thinking, “Poor guy, he has no friends,” so I started talking more to the guy two seats away in my row. I think I fooled them. But when I told this story to John, he came up with the whispered bribe, “If I buy you a hot dog and beer will you pretend to be my friend?” Now in reality, I didn’t quite sink to that level, but I came pretty darn close. Truth is, I plan to go to a couple more midweek afternoon games this summer, so if I sort of know you, do me a favor and sit somewhere else.

Happy Cinco De Mayo and Happy National Cartoonists Day to the best cartoonist I know, and also the one I work with, John Colquhoun.

Andy and John

Are You Guys Still Talking About Retirement? Yes! 4/29/22S

So here’s the thing. We thought about Marv’s retirement and found we could do 5 comics on it. First the retirement party at work where everyone says how much they love you and loved (note the use of the past tense here) working with you. Then you get to the first days at home. If Marv bears any resemblance to me, it’s that his wife Rachel (in the wake of the pandemic) works at home and was used to having the place to herself between, say 8:30 am and 7:00 pm. And she is very self-sufficient. So when Marv starts hanging around the house wanting to “help” or accompany her to the grocery store, thereby turning a 45-minute trip into a 2-hour ordeal—”Hey what’s that brand of fabric softener you wanted me to find? And what aisle again?”—he ends up driving his poor wife crazy (not that I or John, who works from home, would ever do that). Soon Marv will find the joys of a mid-week afternoon baseball game (no crowds, just you and busloads of camp kids) or the occasional mid-week afternoon bike ride, golf game or movie theater. Sometimes, yeah sometimes, you have to bite the bullet and go yourself, where you will encounter other like-minded individuals in similar circumstances and hopefully nobody you know.

So as Marv expands his world, we expand right along with him, making new friends along the way. With every new phase in life John and I discover, we will have our characters discovering right along with us. I will speak for myself here and not my very busy partner, but after 40 years of working, how much do I miss it? Not one little bit at all. Except for meeting and working with people you like everyday. And now that more and more people are working from home, you don’t even get the “working with people you like” part anymore. But you know what, I like that “working from home” title so much, I am officially unretiring. From now on, I’m working from home, even if I’m taking a nap.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Goin' Down the Rabbit Hole

In “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice goes through the looking glass into the proverbial rabbit hole and starts her adventures. In today’s world, we enter the rabbit hole through our computers, tablets, phones and tv’s. The only difference is algorithms. They take what we are naturally interested in and push us to what other people who are interested in the same thing are also interested in. I realize that sentence made no sense at all. For instance, if you’re interested in combating pollution, you might get served an article about mulching your leftovers, which might lead you to an article on planting a vegetable garden with the previously mentioned mulch, which might lead to a recipe for garden salads. I frequently read about sports but at the bottom of the articles are what’s known as “clickbait,” articles that ask you to guess what these former sex symbols like Raquel Welch, look like today. After 25 clicks you still haven’t gotten to Raquel Welch, but after they send you to Tom Selleck, you decide you’ve had enough. That kind of thing. So John and I thought long and hard about what kind of rabbit hole we wanted to send Marv down. The obvious one was politics, but that seemed too obvious, so we turned to a rabbit hole John may have gone down himself, although he won’t admit to it. Part of it was he was looking for best exercises for guys with bad knees (I looked at that one myself and found an article saying jogging was good for you and another saying it was the worst possible thing you could do, so my rabbit hole was a fairly shallow one). As for John, he moved upstate to a house he built on a hilltop. One of the activities he enjoys either by himself or with his sons or son-in-law is chopping wood. So is it any surprise Marv went down the rabbit hole about wood chopping? I think not.

But when you chop wood, you need something to do with that wood, which brought us to Rabbit Hole, part 2, in which Marv decides he’ll use all that wood he’ll chop (keep in mind he still has yet to start chopping) as firewood. But he doesn’t have a fireplace. Yet. And that’s the thing with rabbit holes, you just keep digging deeper until you have no idea where you are or how you got there. Which is kind of what this blog feels like today. Now where was I? In any event Marv’s trip down the hole is a 3-parter ending next Tuesday, which is when he will finally come up for air (we hope).

Have a great weekend and please avoid all rabbit holes. We’ll see where Marv ends up next week before exploring what else he does with his spare time in retirement. We spend our spare time writing this comic, besides that, what we do is anybody’s guess.

‘til we meet again,

Andy and John