Here’s the thing about smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors and all kinds of other detectors: some awful and evil genius has decided the only time they can fail and go off is between the hours of 2am and 3am. Now thankfully they haven’t been triggered by a life threatening situation. But rather by the damn batteries going out. You know the drill. The battery fails at approximately 2 am, which is extra special when you’re working full time, or when the kids are asleep and it’s a school day. So you get up with your significant other, break out the step ladder, put on a robe, which you forget to tie as you’re climbing on the step ladder, trip over the belt from the robe and then try to detach the housing from the detector. If your experience is anything like mine, you finally get the damn thing off, remove the faulty batteries, and it still shrieks. Ah ha! There’s a little button that looks like a reset button. Let’s press that. Oh no. Let’s not. That makes it shriek at even a higher pitch. So the next and final step is to smash the thing to pieces, right? But what about if it happens in a place you’re renting? Then you can’t exactly smash the thing to pieces. Then you do what I did when it happened this past summer. You remove the whole apparatus and place it in the bottom of the outdoor trash can. Then you go back to bed, and you swear you can still hear it and that you’re awakening the entire neighborhood and that you’ll never be invited back again, and then you do what I finally did. Gave it to my wife who successfully disabled it in about 30 seconds.

Our other comic is about retro. Actually it’s about one of our readers, Susan Richardson. She wrote John that she had an end line “It wasn’t retro when we bought it,” and said, “Here’s a thought, take it or leave it.” We loved it and attached a comic strip to the line. Susan, this Bud’s for you. When did we (or at least John) become so old that the things we grew up with start to be called retro? Bell bottom jeans? Tensor lamps? Lava lamps? Folding snack tables? Dashiki's. All retro. True story. My mother (she divorced my dad when I was nine) had a boyfriend who gave me and my brother tensor lamps, which we thought were the coolest things ever. But when they eventually broke up, he took his lamps back. So when we did the comic about lamps, I implored John, “just not tensor lamps,” and he responded with that three-headed beauty you see in the strip. A few months ago, I saw a “retro edition” game in a children’s toy store. Candyland. It was the first game I remember playing as a kid. So I opened it up to play with my 3 1/2 year old granddaughter. She was not as impressed as I was. Perhaps it was because she was too young to appreciate its “retroness.” Or perhaps, given all the exciting advances with technology, it’s just boring. The game, not me.

In closing (that’s what our rabbi said today during services), you can call us Al, you can call us late for dinner. But please don’t call us retro.

Have a great weekend and we will be back next week with more.

Andy and John