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

Smart Devices 12/18/2020

Smart devices. They all promise to make our lives so much better. But are we smart enough to use them? There are smart refrigerators that tell you when you’re running low on milk, smart toaster ovens that know what you’ve put inside them and how long to bake or broil said item, smart watches, phones, tv’s, and I’m not smart enough to go on with more examples. Our first comic this week deals with a smartphone. Now if you are like me or John, you’ve gotten rid of your landline because it was just an expensive relic that did nothing more than receive useless junk calls. As time went on, my wife and I started ignoring our landline when it rang and our friends and family only called our cell phones. Eventually, the robocallers or bots caught on and now our smartphones get as many junk calls as our landlines used to get. Ahh, but we were smart, so we thought, so we’d outsmart our smartphones. First thing we did was sign up to the National Do Not Call Registry. Total waste of time. Next option was to immediately hang up after each call from Bluffton, Tenn. or Portsmouth, NH, where we didn’t know a soul. Then go into last call, info, and finally, block caller. Also not worth a hot damn. Because as soon as you block this particular number, whoever it is just calls you back on another number. As the pirates used to say, arghhhhhh! So we made a comic out of it. If anyone has any suggestions about how to defeat these seemingly endless crank calls, we’d love to hear about it and we’ll post it on the site, but until then, just don’t answer.

Next up is the smartwatch. I wonder if this happens to you. Almost every night I’ll be sitting on my couch around 10:30 or 11 when I feel a bump on my wrist. Inevitably it’s my watch, telling me it’s time to breathe. And immediately I think, do I really need a reminder telling me it’s time to breathe? Isn’t that sort of obvious? I mean, don’t you need to breathe to be able to sort of, ‘ya know, live? Oh I know, they mean deep breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, but still, soooo annoying. What’ll it do next, tell me when it’s time to stand? Oh wait, it already does that. This next part is no joke. Kara Swisher from the N.Y. Times wrote that she bought a new watch to test for a column she was writing. The watch measured her pulse and told her, among other things, that she seemed upset at 4:46 pm yesterday and happy at 9:27 pm. Can’t you see it now, an ad for an antidepressant or Tito’s Vodka at 4:47 followed by a promo for a new romantic comedy at 9:28? The more and more devices are thinking for us, the less and less we are being asked to think for ourselves. Now if only someone can come up with a program to write this blog I can lie down and take a nap. John, who cannot be replaced by a bot, is busy working on our Christmas Card.

Have a great weekend and Happy Holidays,

Andy and John