Get Outside While the Getting's Good. 10/31/25

The leaves are changing, the temperature is dropping and it gets dark earlier and earlier each day. Is that an upbeat way to start a blog or what? If you’re anything like me, you want to get outdoors as much as you can before it’s too cold to go outdoors (unless you live in Florida). Instead of pounding away on a treadmill in a gym, I prefer a walk in the woods, complete with chirping birds, the aforementioned leaves, and obnoxious bike riders yelling, “On your left,” as I panic and move left by mistake. One time when I did that a funny and sarcastic bike rider shouted out, “Your other left.” All of which is a long-winded way to say that Al took his exercise walk outdoors. And just as it’s important to lace on your sneakers, it’s also imperative you strap on your smartwatch. John and I both have our MTD’s (no it’s not some sexually transmitted disease, it stands for Movement Tracking Device — which is a term that doesn’t actually exist because I just made it up). And we have both been on walks when we discovered we left our device at home. So does the walk count if you don’t track it? Of course it counts. What a dumb question. Well to be fair, you readers didn’t ask it, I did. It counts to me but not to my dumb smart watch.

And onto our Halloween comic. Let me be clear. I hate Halloween. Not always, but ever since we moved out of our house and into an apartment in the Westchester town of Tarrytown, which borders on Sleepy Hollow, as in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the headless horseman and Ichabod Crane, etc. For one thing, kids don’t generally trick or treat in apartment buildings. And what fun is it to hand out Snickers bites and “fun size” Kit Kats to a bunch of 55 plus adults? Not much. But that’s not the worst of it. Thanks to local news coverage, Sleepy Hollow has become the national center of Halloween. Out-of-towners come on the Metro North Railroad and spend entire weekends in my town. For the entire month of October! People walk four abreast on the sidewalks, making it impossible to pass them. Cars use up every available parking space in town including some that aren’t parking spaces at all. And that local non-Starbucks coffee shop where you go for a non-Starbucks coffee and a bagel most mornings? Well now there’s a line around the block to get in. Good for the non-Starbucks coffee shop, not for yours truly. Oh, and the traffic is so bad, you might as well not even try to drive. Sooo, I will be a grouchy hermit today, only traveling by foot and constantly saying, “Excuse me,” as I turn my shoulders sideways to get by another four-abreast pack of tourists. And then tomorrow, poof! All will return to normal, but not before I empty the contents of the economy-sized bags of Kit Kats and Snickers that I bought to hand out to the trick or treaters that never came.

Have a great weekend. At least we get an extra hour of sleep on Sunday.

Bah Humbug (oh, there I go mixing holiday metaphors),

Andy and John

On Gender Reassignment and Halloween

Sometimes the subjects of these blogs fit into a neat little headline. Like last week’s for instance. One comic was about filling your car up at gas stations and another about trains, so the title “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” came naturally (even though there wasn’t anything about planes). But, sometimes the two comics have absolutely nothing in common and so I am forced to go with the more prosaic, “On Gender Reassignment and Halloween.” If you readers have any suggestions for a more pithy title, send them in.

Let’s start with Halloween, even though the comic is only remotely about Halloween. I live in Tarrytown, NY, and right across the street is North Tarrytown, which has been renamed Sleepy Hollow. If there was ever a place that went absolutely nuts for Halloween, this is it. Washington Irving, who wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (the one with the headless horseman) has the next town over named for him, Irvington. They have haunted hayrides with high school students dressed up as ghosts and witches who pop out from behind trees and scare the bejesus out of the little kids on the hayride. I have a couple questions here. 1) why is that considered fun and 2) what does bejesus mean? Anyway, suffice it to say that this corner of Westchester County takes its Halloween seriously. Having said that, my wife and I moved to an apartment building 6 years ago with mostly empty nesters so there’s almost no trick or treating involved, and no need to dress up like a haunted figure to answer the door, because no kids are showing up in the first place. But this comic was really about crass commercialism. There are stores (remember stores, they were those buildings with signs in front before Amazon took over?) that cater to one holiday season at a time. There are Christmas stores, Summer stores (patio furniture and beach chairs, etc.) and Halloween stores. But the funny thing is these places run out of costumes or Christmas trees or decorations or deck chairs long before the season they are meant to serve. I mean, who even thinks about Halloween decorations in September? Apparently a lot of people, because when (if you are like us) you finally get around to shopping for Halloween, everything is gone and the store is loaded with Christmas decorations. In October! John and I had a discussion about the clerk at the store, whether he should say we ran out of Halloween stuff after Labor Day or should we say after Columbus Day. Columbus Day won because it was more believable.

Then there was the comic we called Gender Bender. Now everytime we broach a controversial subject we tread carefully, not wanting to offend anybody. But let’s face it, that’s pretty damn impossible. When we were putting this one together, we focused not on the gender reassignment surgery, but rather on Marv’s uncomfortable reaction to it. Our guess is that would be pretty typical amongst people in our particular age group. But who are we to judge? In this case, it turned on the lie everybody says when they run into someone they haven’t seen in many decades…”You haven’t changed a bit.” Doesn’t matter if they put on an extra 100 pounds, had hair plugs, silicone boobs, lap-band surgery or even if they changed sexes, we all say the same thing. But face it, everybody changes. Except for John and me who still have all our hair, which miraculously hasn’t turned grey, all our height and all our physical strength. We haven’t changed a bit. Except for, well…everything.

That’s all folks for this week. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week with two new ones.

Andy and John

New Rules 10/30/2020

With apologies to Bill Maher, we’ve stolen the end title of his show to make a semi-clever headline for the blog. Shameless, I know. And it applies more to the second comic in your scroll anyway, so the hell with it. First off, we wanted the chance to showcase some of John’s other talents. Besides illustrating and writing and animating, he is a renowned pumpkin carver every Halloween. But what if you weren’t so renown and your grandchild wanted to carve pumpkins with you? What would you do then, huh? You’d have to pretend you knew what you’re talking about wouldn’t you? I ask because neither of us are grandparents yet but one of us is about to become one in May, God willing. We will reveal who when the time comes. Anyway, there’s only a short period of time when your kids think you know everything, and if you’re reading this blog, chances are your kids have figured you out a long time ago. (Okay, an extremely long time ago.) But then there are the grandkids, and for a few years, we can still fool them. But some kids are more artistic than others and in this case, you can’t even fool them. So this first Halloween comic is a take at how it feels when the kid figures you out. (In my case I knew I was done artistically when my daughter hit 1st grade. She had to do a diorama about the Wild West in a shoe box for class. When she asked me for cotton balls to represent clouds, I knew I was toast.) I’m sure John’s kids had a higher bar to climb.

Our second spot came out of our New England trip. This is the third and final comic from that trip but it centered on outdoor dining. Our kids are way more responsible than we are during the pandemic, mostly because they don’t want to be the cause of us keeling over. So each night of the two nights we were there, we ate outside. In October. In Maine. At night. And did I mention we were outside? One night the restaurant had large propane lamps and we asked the waiter if he could please move the one over there just a wee bit closer to our table. Immediately there were howls of protest from the table who’d had it moved closer to them before we got there, the bastards. Thankfully they were on dessert when we were just starting, so as soon as they signed their check, boom, we moved the lamp closer. But on the second night, well no such luck. No heat lamps. Because every freakin’ restaurant for miles around had ordered them way before so there are no more to be had. And here’s a public service. You know the kind where you can see flames all the way up the stem? Well they’re not as good as the mushroom shaped ones with the flame only at the top. The curved top makes the heat radiate down towards you. So if you insist on eating outside this winter, remember this tip. And also, buy some stock in a propane gas company. But what I most remembered about our cold, outside, non-heated meals were the attempted smiles on everyone’s faces, as if to say, no problem here, we’re being responsible AND we’re enjoying the hell out of ourselves. The truth was revealed when the waiter asked us if anyone wanted coffee or dessert and the whole table simultaneously shouted, “NO!” before the waiter could finish his sentence. My softly uttered “Cappuccino and creme brulee please” got lost under the emphatic roar of the “no.” John came up with the “anyone interested in our blanket menu” line and we thought that was a more unexpected way to go, so there you have it. But truth be told, I’m still a little peeved about missing out on the creme brulee.

So th-th-th-that’s all folks for this week. Enjoy your no trick or treat Halloween and prepare for your no family Thanksgiving and we will see you (virtually, of course) next week with two new ones.

But first, a long awaited promise to show you a link to John’s pumpkin carving expertise. It’s worth it, if you can figure out how to open it. Which of course depends on my ability to copy and paste it. Here goes:

https://www.facebook.com/outrageouspumpkins

Happy Halloween,

Andy and John