Welcome back, dear readers. We know we promised our previous baseball comic would be our last of this year, but c’mon, it’s the playoffs and as one of us was quietly following in bed late one night trying not to disturb his wife, this light bulb went off. Isn’t that just like what we used to do as little boys with our transistor radios? “Good night mom,” we’d say, “Going to sleep now,” as we turned on the game and placed the radio under our pillows. The only things that have changed are: the games are much slower and finish much later than they ever used to, we’re saying good night to our wives instead of our moms. Oh yeah,one other thing: we’re now mature adults who no longer have to sneak watching the game into extra innings. Well, forget that last one, but at least the games are on much later. This, we realized was perfect for our “Then and Now” format.

The next comic is about crossword puzzles. Both Andy and John still do them, but just the minis. They have both ventured into the longer form puzzles on Mondays and Tuesdays (for those of you who don’t know, the NY Times makes the longer puzzles harder with each successive day of the week), but neither one of us has managed to complete a full Wednesday puzzle. There’s been a great deal of research on doing crosswords and the need to exercise the mind. It’s fun and a hell of a lot easier than excercising the body, let’s be honest. Do they really work on keeping the mind sharp? Who knows, but a dull mind makes a dull comic, so we’ll keep on trying to solve them.

On a sad note, we lost a good friend to breast cancer last week who was also a big fan of the comic. Remember the comic about the woman who had her first grandchild and didn’t want to be called Grandma? Well, that was based on our friend Linda Casper. You will be sorely missed, Linda.

Enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you digitally next Friday with two new ones.

Andy and John