I used to joke facetiously that the maternity nurse brought me to my wonderful mother shortly after birth and said “Congrats Ms. London; It’s a real estate tycoon”. I was the oldest male child in a 3rd generation profitable real estate firm in south Mississippi about sixty miles north of Biloxi. As it turned out, after trying it several years in my twenties, real estate was not my thing and I later learned after indulging in big market media and public relations in Washington and N.Y.C. The shark-like environment of any type was not my thing. It took a major heart attack to figure it out, but as they say it takes what it takes’. They put me “on the bench” and onto Social Security disability.

Would I have joined Twitter had I been warned it might occasionally be akin to a cyber office water cooler or worse high school with adults? The short answer would have been, no, No, NO! Followed up by, Are you crazy? I work at home to avoid those situations. I am however extremely thankful I did not receive this warning until long after I had become part of the social networking phenomenon called Twitter. The heartfelt truth is I would have missed out on events and people that would change my life forever.

In early 1997, I became a cartoonist. Sort of. Before I started this “cartoon journey”, might be helpful to know what I was doing. Finding someone like Charles Schulz was not an easy matter for someone like me at the time who knew nobody in the business. But I felt “why not start at the top and work my way down”? I found a friend of his willing to ask him if we might chat a moment. He surprisingly agreed. It felt “awesome” that other top cartoonists also agreed to wield “trade secrets” with me. Fortunately, I was both too young and naive to know NOT to bother the masters. So when Charles Schulz picked up his phone, I started asking the five journalistic Ws (Who, what, when, why, and where). His (and others) advice turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. I was starting to wax philosophically regarding just what “this business of cartooning” was really about.

There’s no rivalry in Boston bigger than the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, and perhaps no bigger rivalry in professional sports. Every matchup between the two teams is an epic showdown, and we’re about to witness another one.