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Weak XXI

21 May 2016

No. 5,779 (cartoon)

Why do you view me with contempt?

I have excellent eyesight.

22 May 2016

Farting in The New York Times

According to The New York Times Style Book, “farting” is now an acceptable word to use in formal copy. Kids these days; oy.

Feh; it’s getting harder and harder to be a curmudgeon. Or perhaps easier and easier, depending on one’s perspective.

23 May 2016

Geographic Highs and Lows

Hubert just got back from Alaska and is raving about Mount Denali, much to Toni’s annoyance. She pointed out that it wasn’t exactly hard for settlers to find even without asking the indigenous people who’d lived there for millennia. She added that the mountain looks exactly like it did in the very first photograph, so why would anyone travel all that way just to see something that’s static?

“One person’s mountain is another person’s molehill,” I suggested.

That annoyed both of them. Having found common ground, we started talking about the Mariana Trench, and so often happens in such situations.

24 May 2016

Gyeondyo

It’s an old problem: what to do when you find yourself in an alcoholic fog the morning after the night before? In Korea, one improbable solution is Gyeondyo.

Gyeondyo, Korean for “hang in there,” is ice cream purported to mitigate the effects of an alcohol overdose. E-Mart Company Limited is marketing Gyeondyo-bar, a grapefruit-flavored ice cream concoction containing less than one percent raisin tree fruit juice.

The juice has proved marginally effective with drunken rats, but I fail to see the benefit of the ice cream. More importantly, why would anyone need a marginally effective remedy for alcohol poisoning when it’s easily preventable?

And then there’s the possibility that I’ve completely missed the point; that’s always a safe bet. Perhaps this is just another case of people using one poor choice to justify another. Maybe I should concoct alcohol ice cream.

25 May 2016

Open Here

The delivery woman just dropped off my new electronic doodad. The cardboard shipping box has “open here” printed on it, but where else would I open it? Whether I took it upstairs or even clear across the city, the box would still be “here.” I opened it without incident, and was grateful that the box wasn’t labeled “open there” or “open someplace else.”

26 May 2016

Born on Third Base

Most of my friends are generally happy, and thus rich in the most important of currencies. Many of them are monetarily rich as well, but there’s not necessarily any correlation. Some of my wealthy friends inherited their fotrtunes, but they’re smart enough to appreciate they simply won the biological lottery.

And then there are the stupid people. Paul Krugman nailed one of them when he wrote, “Mr. Trump is a clear case of someone born on third base who imagines that he hit a triple.”

Nicely put!

27 May 2016

Hiroshima, Not Detroit

President Obama went to Hiroshima without apologizing for the American nuclear attack the killed over a hundred thousand civilians. Of course he didn’t. After fifteen years occupying Afghanistan and Iraq as well as thousands of deadly drone attacks thither and yon, he wouldn’t have time to do anything else if he apologized every time a U.S. attack killed innocent civilians.

Obama was more pragmatic. According to news reports, most of the discussions involved asking Japanese bureaucrats how he could salvage Detroit. They replied with variations on, “That’s a most interesting question,” which, of course, is Japanese for, “fuck off.”

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart