We imagine you non-football fans asking, “So what’s with all the football comics?” Well it’s the NFL playoffs now, the thrilling three-week tournament that ends up deciding who will play in the Super Bowl. After many unexpected turns and upsets, it’ll be the Cincinnati Bengals vs. the Los Angeles Rams. They will play in the Rams’ new multibillion-dollar pleasure dome known by the poetic name of SoFi Stadium. But that setting does not do justice to the inspiration for today’s football comic, titled “Shirtless.” No, that was inspired by the night game a couple weeks ago in Green Bay, Wisconsin. You heard us right, night game, Green Bay, in January. As the cameras are often wont to do, they pan the crowd and always, and we do mean always, there is the seemingly mandatory shot of a bunch of guys in their 20’s sitting in the stands, with temperatures in the low teens, and negative-degree wind chills, without their shirts on. By the way, they are always, and we mean always, drinking ice cold beers (face it, even hot chocolate would become ice-cold out there). And we often wondered, what kind of idiot would do that? Then just like that, the answer came to us. Sid, the headstrong son of Al and Joanne, Sid would do that. And that became our first comic this week. But since we load them into the website in the order they’re completed, the first comic comes up second in your newsletter, which becomes challenging when we do a 3-part story. Got all that? Good, neither do we.

Next up (or first on your scroll) came from a therapist friend of mine whose name will be withheld to protect the guilty). She is getting married next week and she and her husband-to-be chose a destination wedding in Costa Rica. When I asked her why, she said something to the effect of, “This way we can invite everybody from both families while being reasonably sure nobody will come.” Brilliant. When I shared the idea with John, he thought a lot of people would be thrilled to come to Costa Rica so we moved the comic wedding to Kuala Lumpur, figuring, who in their right mind would ever go there? I mean, I don’t even know where Kuala Lumpur is. I didn’t even know how to spell it correctly until I asked the Google. I guess I could ask it where it is located. Just did. Of course, it’s the capital city of Malaysia. Duh, everyone knows that. At any rate, it’s far away. As John likes to say, “That’s the beauty part.” Actually John picked this up from a former advertising creative partner who picked it up from her father, but what the hell, the whole thing is pretty ingenious, don’t you think? Instead of spending days, weeks or most likely months worrying about who to invite and who not to invite, instead of wasting precious brain cells trying to make sure Uncle Marty and his second wife Sarah aren’t seated at the same table as Aunt Esther and her tennis pro, Rafael, just throw the damn wedding in Kuala Lumpur. Or Thailand for that matter (except that didn’t work for one married couple because my wife and I actually attended that one anyway).

So that is it for this week. We’ll be back next week with two new ones about who knows what (actually we know but we’re not telling).

Have a great weekend

Andy and John