Bucket Lists 11/4/22

If you are a loyal reader of this comic and blog, you’re probably old enough to have a bucket list. These are the things you want to do and places you want to go before it’s all over. The name, of course, comes from the thought “...before I kick the bucket.” And just like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two bucket lists are alike. Now I must admit that a close family relative of mine has Bhutan on his bucket list and that was the genesis of this idea. As always in this blog, names are omitted to protect the innocent. He is, was and will always be an adventure traveler. My wife and I spent a memorable Labor Day Weekend with him several decades ago. We were becalmed (another word for trapped) on a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay for 3 days in temperatures approaching the 90’s. We were roasting and if you went below deck it was murderously hot. Finally our adventurer jumped in the Chesapeake to cool off, and was instantly attacked by a school of jelly fish. When we returned home, I wrote an article called “Inward Bound.” If the sailboat was like the program “Outward Bound,” then I wanted to do a program based on the opposite. Instead of being becalmed on a sailboat for 3 days in 90 degree weather, you’d be stuck inside the Ritz-Carlton with air-conditioning, cable tv, and room service complete with french toast for breakfast and steak frites and a nice cabernet for dinner. If I can ever find the article, I’ll repost it as a blog.

When I pitched the idea to John, he immediately got a smile on his face. We googled Bhutan and came up with two important facts: their favorite sport is archery and the entire country is vegetarian. And they also rank high on the World Happiness Index. Put it this way, if you can be happy watching archery and eating vegetables, you are not likely to have the same bucket list as me.

And speaking of bucket lists, do you guys remember the show “Green Acres”? A husband (Eddie Albert) and his wife (Eva Gabor, sister of Zsa Zsa) were thinking of moving to the country. It was at the top of his bucket list, not even at the bottom of hers. The theme song was a classic. Here’s how it opened:

“Green Acres is the place for me/Farm living’ is the life for me/Land spreadin’ out so far and wide/Keep Manhattan just give me the countryside.” To which his wife replied:

“New York is where I’d rather stay/I get allergic smelling hay/I just adore a penthouse view/Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue.”

I consider it one of the funniest (and telling) theme songs ever written. Except for the closing, which was the height of sexism and could never get on the air today. Here is how the argument gets decided:

“You are my wife/Goodbye city live/ Green Acres we are there” (And she spent the rest of her life living on a farm in Hooterville with her husband and a pig named Arnold).

At any rate, Al comes back with a bucket list of his own and next week, in the third and final installment, we reach a decision, and no, it’s not sexist like Green Acres. We promise.

Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week with the conclusion of the bucket list series and another new direction.

Andy and John

April Fools 04/01/22

April Fools. This time we decided to fool ourselves into thinking the strip was internationally famous. What do internationally famous cartoon strips do to make money? They make stuffed toys out of their characters, right? There’s stuffed Snoopy dolls and stuffed Charlie Brown and Lucy dolls but who the hell is going to want to take an Al Bondigas lunchbox to work? Or drink their coffee in a Marv Mandlebaum mug? Who even goes to work anymore? Which of our female fans would want a Joanne or Rachel purse? So we put on our thinking caps. We’ve already made old people jokes in past comics, with New 60 hemorrhoid pads, dental adhesive, etc., but what could we do to fit a more active lifestyle? And the answer came. Tada. Pickleball! It seems like every other person we know is taking up pickleball. Apparently, it has nothing to do with pickles. It’s a cross between tennis and ping pong (so why not ting tong?) and the court is much smaller so it doesn’t involve much running. What is does involve is a lot of lunging, but what could possibly go wrong with that? So we came up with New 60 pickleball paddles. If Al or Marv were bugging you in the comics one week, you could take their faces and mash them into a pickleball. How much fun would that be? We added bibs for any occasion because both John and I confessed to one another that we seem to be spilling more food on our shirts that ever before, so bibs, they’re not just for babies anymore. Heck, you have old guys wearing adult diapers, so why not a bib? And finally, New 60 sunscreen with an SPF of 1,000. This came from watching people of a certain age at the beach. They wear huge floppy hats, slather themselves in sunscreen and sit under umbrellas all to avoid the sun they seem to be worshipping. New 60 sunscreen. At least it prevents you from doing the t-shirt thing which leaves really ugly tan lines.

And then we turned our attention to a particular breed of sports fanatic. One so crazy that they want to watch every game their team plays. I have this affliction and have passed it on to my son, unfortunately. When you go out of town or go out to dinner, you record the game to watch it at a later date. Then you have to avoid hearing the score so it doesn’t ruin the experience of watching it. I go into an SIMP. What is that, you ask? It’s a Self-Imposed Media Blackout. Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it doesn’t. Many years ago, when my son was about 10 or 11 years old, our family went with two other families on a beach vacation to St. Martin. The trip was great. We were scheduled to fly back home on a Sunday, the very day the NY Giants were playing the Philadelphia Eagles. The last game of the season. The winner goes to the playoffs, the loser goes home for the winter. We were on a plane that day. I had already set the recorder to record the game at home before we went away. The trick was now to avoid hearing the outcome. As luck would have it, the plane was delayed, and then delayed some more. Then it went to pick up more passengers in the Dominican. But the plane had to circle there endlessly before it could land. In fact, it used up so much fuel circling that it had to touch down in Miami before continuing to our final destination in NY. As the plane touches down in Miami, some douchey guy on a cell phone yells out, guess what everybody, the Giants won!!! This was past midnight now and I was ready to kill him. Here’s the really crazy part. When we got home, we watched the whole thing anyway, wrapping up past 4 in the morning. Before you report me to child services, it’s important to note that the kids were off on Christmas break for another week. But this was the genesis for Al, trying to avoid the Knick game. I’m hoping to get over this habit when I grow up.

That’s it, ladies and gents. We’ll see you next week with two brand new ones, hot off the proverbial press.

Andy and John