Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XVI

16 April 2018

No. 9,361 (cartoon)

You’re a star to me ...

I’m flattered.

... dim, fading, and gone by dawn.

17 April 2018

The Bee’s Knees

I’ve never been interested in real estate, but Dr. Vitulano changed my mind when she showed me the small apartment building adjacent to her place. It was cramped as is typical for Sans Frisco housing, although none of the roommates could be said to be living cheek to jowl.

There wasn’t a cheek or a jowl in sight; Dr. Vitulano assured me that’s typical for a beehive. She went on to encourage me to learn about the workings of the colony, the social structure, and a unique reproductive situation.

That sounded like too much work, so I instead suggested a Bee’s Knees cocktail. The Prohibition Era drink only requires three ingredients—gin, fresh lemon juice, and honey—and just one of the frames dripping with bees and viscous with honey was much more than we’d need to get started and finished.

We agreed that we should grab a bottle of gin, visit Shirin, and harvest a lemon or several from the tree in her backyard. That also seemed like too much work on a lazy afternoon, so we ended up just watching the neighbors.

18 April 2018

Best Dedication Ever?

I concluded when I was in fourth grade that the only math skills I needed were addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I’ve been right so far; that’s why I never once looked at Joseph J. Rotman’s book, An Introduction to Algebraic Topology.

That was a mistake for reasons that have nothing to do with algebra. Rotman’s dedication was the best part, and it didn’t contain a single number.

“To my wife Marganit and my children Ella Rose and Daniel Adam without whom this book would have been completed two years earlier.”

19 April 2018

Bicycle Day!

’Twas seventy-five years ago today that Dr. Albert Hofmann took the first lysergic acid diethylamide trip—figuratively and literally—by ingesting two hundred and fifty milligrams of the synthetic crystalline compound. He then hopped on his bicycle any sensible person would. That’s why the nineteenth day of April is and always will Bicycle Day.

Brian and Annette invited me to join them for a Bicycle Day ride, so I met them at noon in Golden Gate Park. They were sitting on the grass beside their bicycles. Over the next fifty minutes, a couple of dozen friends joined us and sat beside their bikes. I stood straddling my GeoMetron for nearly an hour before I had an obvious epiphany: everyone but me was on drugs and sitting on the lawn beside their wheels was their version of an LSD ride.

I must confess that I too was high, but on my favorite drug: caffeine. I sped off alone and left everyone else mesmerized by the drifting clouds.

20 April 2018

Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow’s Clever Crime

When I was twenty or so, I spent a snowy, miserable winter reading, rereading, and rerereading Colin Fletcher’s guide to backpacking, The Complete Walker. Decades later, all I remember is a maxim that’s served me well: take care of the grams and the kilograms will take care of themselves. Fletcher was efficiently fanatical about weight, including putting different brands of underwear on a portable scale while shopping to find the lightest.

Fletcher died a decade ago, but Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow is carrying on his tradition. The Australian cut the microchip out of his Sydney transit card and implanted it under the skin of his left hand. That clever move allowed him to do away with the weight and bulk of the card and still pay for his train rides.

He was too clever by at least half for the Luddites running Transport for New South Wales. The Opal card is something of a sacred object to them, and users are not allowed to, “misuse, deface, alter, tamper with or deliberately damage or destroy the Opal Card.”

The authorities charged him violating the Opal card terms of use. The magistrate found him guilty and fined him two hundred and twenty dollars.

“The law hasn’t caught up with the technology,” Meow-Meow said philosophically, “That’s all this case was.”

I’m looking forward to hearing what else Meow-Meow has up his sleeve, so to speak, if only for the sheer entertainment value of his name.

21 April 2018

Majestic Fecal Time Bomb

Imelda says depressed people see the world through shit-colored glasses. I’ve never been to Nepal or Tibet, but I imagine Mount Everest must be such a wondrous place that no one there wears spectacles; they’d be redundant.

Every year climbers leave behind over twelve thousand kilograms of feces on the slopes.

“The peak has become a fecal time bomb,” wrote Grayson Schaffer, “and the mess is gradually sliding back toward base camp.”

“The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps,” concurred climber Mark Jenkins.

I find the story inspiring. If thousands of people, cooperating over decades, managed to pollute one of the most remote and inaccessible places on earth, humans can do anything!

22 April 2018

Nabi Tajima

Nabi Tajima was the oldest person in the world until she died yesterday. Everyone on the planet was the youngest person on Earth at one point, but only a few have duplicated Tajima’s dubious achievement.

I wish I knew what she did to live that long so that I could do the opposite.

Tajima was born on 4 April 1900, and now everyone born in the nineteenth century is dead. I wonder if the world will be a better place when everyone born in the twentieth century has perished? I’ll never know since I’m part of the problem until I’m part of the solution.

23 April 2018

R. Mutt Lives!

There are a number of reasons that Quemando los dos Extremos is my favorite Sans Frisco taqueria, but the bathroom ain’t one of them. Like most public toilets, it’s a vomitous chamber of stomach-churning bits of feces and nauseating puddles of urine.

That didn’t stop someone with an indelible marker from claiming the disgusting space as his. I have no idea who he is; I can’t read his signature. Yep, someone has appropriated the installation as his using a stylized script that indecipherable to an old honky like me.

I wonder if it’s a reference to Fountain, the urinal Marcel Duchamp doing business as R. Mutt created in 1917?

Nah.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2018 David Glenn Rinehart