About taking off your pants…no we’re not about to describe some senior sex ritual. It’s not that kind of comic. So kindly take your minds out of the gutter. We’re talking about how challenging it is to do things you took for granted when you (as Billy Joel once put it) wore a younger man’s (or woman’s) clothes, It’s that moment when you come home from work (do any of you still come home from work?) and slip out of your pants and into your sweats or pj’s. A special shout out to John’s buddy, Billy McGloin, who gave us this nugget. He shared with John his TOPR (Technique Of Pants Removal). According to Billy, you lower the pants leg below your foot, and then, this is critical, step on the pants leg with the OTHER foot. This allows you to remove your first leg without having to go through the annoying (okay, physically challenging) maneuver of having to actually bend over at the waist. It was a really funny insight. And please understand that John and I would never stoop to such a method of undressing because we both have the flexibility of 20-year-olds. Alright, you got me. Maybe I sometimes stoop to the McGloin TOPR, but certainly not all the time. Okay, all the time. It’s a little lazy, but it works. And a cautionary note to all you readers who might be tempted to try this method. Put one hand on the wall to prevent Marv’s fate of falling over. Oh, and if you do fall over anyway, please do not admit to feeling any pain. That’s part of the rule. So when your partner asks you if you’re okay, you just state, “Fine, didn’t even feel it.” And then, after you’ve successfully removed both legs from the aforementioned pants, attempt to regain your feet without moaning out loud. And that, thank you Billy, was the inspiration for our first comic this week.

The second one is almost two ideas in one. The first is part of the The New 60’s reader outreach program, where we give you techniques to make life easier or at least more interesting. If you go back in our archives you’ll find tricks like when you wiggle a finger in your ear, it sounds like Pac Man. We shared with you a failsafe routine for getting your kids to call you back (change the Netflix password) and this week we give you two pointers. The first is how to take your pants off without bending. And the second is how to magnify small print like the kind that’s so hard to read on a menu, a pill bottle or in this case, a snack. You simply take your phone out of your pocket, turn your camera on as if you were going to take a picture of the label or menu, and then zoom in. Warning: when it comes to eating snack packs, we recommend doing this BEFORE you open the package, not afterwards. In Rachel’s case she saw the bold-faced 120 calories and proceeded to dig in to the dark-chocolate covered cherries. Al’s phone trick (which is actually John’s) reveals that the small container has 5 servings. Wouldn’t you want to know that before you started eating? The trouble with after is you are licking your fingers clean and thinking how delicious a snack that was. Dark chocolate, the healthy kind, and cherries, a natural fruit. All that goodness in something that tastes like candy and for only 120 calories? How smart am I? Then Al has to go and ruin it by making Joanne feel guilty about consuming 600 of those little calories. Suddenly they don’t taste so good.

No need to thank us for these two handy life hacks. Just make sure to hold on to the wall for the pants’ trick and to magnify labels before consuming the contents. This way you’ll be happy you learned these tricks. The other way, you’re flat on your back and you just consumed 600 calories and you’ll be cursing us out, and we wouldn’t want that. We’re sensitive. Or at least I am.

That’s all for this week. We’ll see you next week with a four-part series. Stay tuned.

Andy and John