ON POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND WAITING

“Patience is a virtue,” claimed English poet William Langland in 1360. That’s a long time ago. But today, some 662 years later, we are asked to be constantly patient. Waiting on line at the drugstore, waiting online while that stupid beachball from hell keeps spinning on your computer screen, waiting for a fellow texter to respond, waiting for a table at a popular restaurant (“as soon as that table pays the check, the table is yours”) and most annoyingly, waiting in the doctor’s office which is where we take you in our first comic (second in your scroll). I don’t know how many times I have sat in a waiting room stewing, thinking, “I’m gonna charge them MY hourly fee and deduct it from the final bill!!!!” Yeah right. But this time Al figures, “Screw it, how about I make the doctor wait?” It works in a comic strip, good luck trying it in real life.

Our second strip deals with political correctness. Now surely, if an entire race or culture finds a term insulting, we should do our best to avoid using it in the future. But the rules keep constantly changing. For instance, we no longer should refer to a “master bedroom,” because “master” is a term that dates back to slavery. We should now refer to it as the “primary bedroom.” Just yesterday, I found myself in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and stopped at a Chinese restaurant named Koi. First of all, every other place named Koi, is a Japanese restaurant. But what struck me most is what was written underneath Koi on the restaurant’s sign in the parking lot. It said, “Koi, Oriental food.” Now I know you can’t say “Oriental” anymore unless you’re talking about a rug, but here was a Chinese restaurant with a Japanese name using the offending term (I wasn’t offended, I was too busy enjoying the chicken with black bean sauce). Similarly, John was listening to classic rock and wondering, what if he was walking along, listening to some playlist on his headphones, singing out loud, and Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” came up. Would you sing the politically correct version instead? Incidentally, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” along with “Lola” were way ahead of their time, dealing with cross-dressing and transsexuality (Fran Lebowitz once said, “Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football.”) But I digress. The point is that these two avant-garde songs still had phrases that today seem completely out of touch. So what’s a confused 60-something to do? Don’t ask us, we don’t have a freakin’ clue.

Have a terrific weekend and we’ll be back next week with two new ones.

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