What do we do when we start yet another year? If you’re like us you probably have a list of things to do. Maybe some new things, Maybe some things that you didn’t get to last year. Maybe some things that you still haven’t gotten to since 2022. But where do you draw the line? Is it planting the mini vegetable garden on the deck of the apartment you moved into back in 2014? No. If you haven’t gotten to it in 10 years, chances are you’re not getting to it, period. At least I’m not. But I thought, at least in this blog, what are the things I’m most likely NOT GETTING TO in 2024. This is a way I devised to save myself the internal pain of feeling as if I failed, if only because I promised myself I’d definitely get to this particular thing in this particular year. Case in point: my wife and I are planning a trip with friends to Greece in May. I promised to myself, I’m going to learn to speak enough Greek to get by when we’re touring the Greek islands. So I took matters into my own hands on January 2nd. Truth. I looked up the website, Babbel.com. You’ve heard the ads. They make it sound like the learning is fun. So I went on the website, and guess what language they don’t offer? You got it. Greek. Now you think it’d be easy to just look up another company that does essentially the same thing like Rosetta Stone, for example. They have exactly four choices: Spanish, French, Italian and something called “all 25 languages.” I don’t want all 25 languages. I just want Greek, and only for a few weeks at that. I want to know how to say, “…a crisp white wine and a Greek salad please.” Or, “Which way is the beach?” But chances are they will understand me better in English than in my poor attempt at Greek, so why bother? Okay that’s one off the list. See how easy this is? But before I go to the subject of our other comic, a quick story: I’m a young man in Paris. I walk into a bakery, or “patisserie,” in case you haven’t taken the Babbel course in French. I want to ask, “how much is this Napoleon?” I start by saying “Comment est la…” to which the surly French counterwoman replies, “How much is what?” “Uhh, I reply, that Napoleon,” She shoots back, “It’s called a mille feuillle, and for a nice Jewish boy like you, five francs.” For the non-Babbel taking folks among us, mille feuille translates roughly into “a thousand leaves,” which refers to the layer-upon-layer of puff pastry. But what I said was: “How do you know I’m Jewish,” too which she replied with a hearty laugh, “Ohh c’mon, your face looks like the map of Tel Aviv.”

And now onto our other comic, in which Marv gets duped into thinking he has to perform a ridiculous act in order to get his microchip-enabled credit card to actually work. Now a certain cousin of mine (names withheld to protect the innocent) repeated a joke he heard, thinking it would make a good comic. In it, the cashier tells the confused customer the proper way to insert his credit card into the machine. “Strip down and turn around,” she says, referring to the credit card. To which the befuddled customer turns around and starts taking his pants off. I repeated this to John who thought nobody would be that naive. So he came back with, “Turn around and say “Mother may I?” I thought nobody would be that naive either. Until Marv catches himself in mid-sentence and realizes he’s being had. Bingo! A new comic was born. But why is it that the more advanced everything becomes the more complicated it gets. Contactless credit cards, 5K televisions (when is the last time you tried turning on a tv in somebody else’s apartment or even in a freakin’ hotel room? It’s hard.) Oh, and if you ever decide to go green and get an electric car one day (I did in 2023) have fun trying to plug it in when you’re in an unfamiliar location, in the rain, while frantically downloading the instructions on your cell phone. How does an EV Connect plug differ from a Blink plug and what about Volta? And who the hell cares. I’m pretty certain you don’t so it’s time to put this blog to bed. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week. Same time, same place.

Andy and John