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Weak IX

26 February 2013

No. 2,808 (cartoon)

Why did you slap my face?

To see how you’d feel.

Rather nostalgic.

27 February 2013

Metric or Die!

Joey’s back from covering the gang wars in Los Angeles, and whew boy!, it’s worse than I ever imagined.

Mexican drug gangs are imposing the metric system on their U.S. turf, and the local gangsters are fighting back. The Mexicans are using nine-millimeter bullets, and selling drugs by the gram and kilogram. The domestic dealers use mainly thirty-eights, and sell drugs by the ounce and pound.

Any innocent bystander who uses the wrong unit of measurement can get killed or worse. When talking with strangers who could be from any gang, they refer to distances as “a few blocks” or “a half hour away instead” instead of using kilometers or miles, and never use grams, liters or ounces to describe weight or volume.

28 February 2013

Baby Oil

Olive oil is made from olives. Fish oil is made from fish. And baby oil?

Everyone talks about overpopulation, and some people are apparently doing something about it.

1 March 2013

Wave Intervals

I ran across a “Beach Hazard Statement” on the Internet today. I have no idea why bureaucrats bother with such warnings. A few years ago authorities caused a traffic jam by issuing a tsunami warning; thousands of people headed to the beach to look for a wave that never appeared.

Today’s announcement also mentioned waves, relatively benign ones.

Timing ... fast moving long period ... twenty to twenty-two seconds ... waves will arrive late this morning. The period of the waves is expected to decrease to eighteen to nineteen seconds by Saturday.

Wow! I had no idea that waves waved at such regular and predictable intervals. When I was a boy, I concluded that ships beyond the horizon generated waves. I may have to revisit that supposition.

2 March 2013

Not What It Never Was

For reasons too convoluted to even consider explaining, I took a shower at Katia’s this afternoon. I got an unpleasant surprise when I looked in the full-length mirror in her bathroom: me. My body isn’t what it used to be. I’m not terribly disappointed, though; my body never was what it used to be.

3 March 2013

Sister-Kissing Music

For reasons I can’t begin to understand, Michelle’s listening to hillbilly music. She’s particularly intrigued by the title of one song, “I’m My Own Grandfather.”

“How could you be your own grandfather?” she asked.

I’d only thought about the question for a few seconds before my brain started to hurt.

“It’s an Appalachian thing,” I explained, “and we’ll never understand.”

“I suppose we should be thankful for that,” she replied.

Why people listen to sister-kissing music, this I will never know.

4 March 2013

Gratuitous Photo of the Weak: Decades of Work

After living as a pseudo-nomad for decades, I’ve been pulling things out of storage to either keep or discard. And so, I got a huge shipping container used for transporting large computer servers and filled it with thousands and thousands of negatives and color transparencies going all the way back to my teenage years.

Now what? These archives are too good to ship to the landfill, but almost all of it isn’t good enough to keep. Although I’ve enjoyed an incredibly wonderful life, I wish all these images were digital instead of analog; that way I could store it on a computer drive and never think about it again. I suppose that’s the equivalent of sending everything to a digital landfill, but it sounds much nicer.

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©2013 David Glenn Rinehart