Is anybody listening, and what’s with all the emojis???? 7/26/19

A few months ago we read about a case in which Alexa overheard an actual fight that preceded a murder. At the end of the day the Alexa “evidence” was not admissible in court. But it got us to thinking, is Alexa or Siri or Google for that matter always listening? Or do you first have to activate it by saying the key phrase, Hey Google? In the murder case, the guy never said, hey Alexa, is it okay to commit murder? He just went ahead and did it and yet Alexa overheard. So buyers beware. It’s okay to say, Hey Siri, play me Steely Dan’s Countdown To Ecstasy, or Hey Google, can you turn up the air conditioning. But, is it okay to say things you’d rather not be recorded? In other words, is Siri spying. When we asked “her” that question, she simply replied, “Nope.” And we had our first comic.

The next one gave us fits. It was John’s idea. Thanks a heap John. He saw that it was just World Emoji Day and wanted to do a comic where the only thing said is in emoji form. I don’t like emojis. I also don’t like text shortcuts like LOL. I’ll decide if I want to LOL, OK? On a deeply personal issue, one of us actually experienced today’s embarassing emoji comic in their past, but we will never reveal which one of us puked on a Ferris Wheel. Exclamation marks are another issue (a personal issue for Andy only) but we make exceptions for them in the comic world. Actually , John said they worked in comics when you can’t hear the dialogue, I heartily disagreed. He challenged me to an arm wrestle, and well, guess who won??!!!!!!

In other news, we spoke to a millennial friend today who explained our comic is about transitioning. We told him we were happy staying as men, but he explained we were about the transition from working a fulltime job into a life of retirement which also still includes work, just not as much of it. At least the part that pays. He also said we should be “influencers” for our generation, so consider yourselves influenced.

We will be back next week when it’s time to transition to the beach house. But how do you get the Mets on the beach house tv? Not so easy. Not if you’re part of The New 60. Which of course, is a topic for next week.

Have a great weekend and make sure you read the blog, oh wait, if you got this far, you’ve already read it. As Gilda used to say, “Never mind.”

Andy and John