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Weak XXII

28 May 2018

No. 861 (cartoon)

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Neither do I.

29 May 2018

Maggie Kazmierczak

I just got a nice form letter from a woman named Maggie Kazmierczak; she works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I support the organization’s work, but I couldn’t focus on the message. All I could think about is how can she go through life with an eleven-character name that no one outside of Poland can spell?

I have enough problems with my relatively simple surname. I’m not interested in my family history, but I’ve heard that one of my ancestors changed the traditional European spelling to the phonetic spelling, “Rinehart,” when he got off the boat at Ellis Island.

Big mistake.

Ever since then, people have tried to wedge in a “d” or an extra “h” to make some variation of “Rhinehardt.” Oh well, things could be worse; just ask Maggie Kazmierczak.

30 May 2018

Earth First Toilet Paper

A few decades ago some redneck hippies—or maybe they were hippie rednecks—parked their rusty Volkswagen van in the driveway of my old home in Oregon and drank all of my beer. And that was fine; they camped out in my living room for a couple of days and brought more beer than they drank. Things were simpler then.

They were some of the founders of Earth First! and I’ll never forget them, especially since Mike Roselle—rhymes with hell—still owes me a hundred dollars.

Earth First! and Greenpeace—the organization I was working with at the time—had and have a lot in common: more theatre than action, more symbolism than reality, more good intentions than accomplishments, et cetera. Earth First! and Greenpeace have become pathetic caricatures of the original promise.

Please forgive the extensive foreplay, but I needed to explain why I’m so delighted by the advertisement I saw for Earth First toilet paper. I appreciate the mockery of a mockery; who wouldn’t?

I look forward to buying Earth First toilet paper. I’m sure it must be made from spotted owl down and ancient redwood trees; what’s not to love?

31 May 2018

Severed Feet

Here we go again for the fourteenth time: someone found another severed right foot in a hiking boot washed up on a Pacific beach. Why this is a complete mystery to anyone is a complete mystery to me.

Why can’t the authorities round up everyone with a missing right foot and ask them what happened? It wouldn’t be so hard to search the Internet for someone selling only left hiking boots. And in case it’s murder, surely practitioners of the mortuary arts could provide evidence of any missing extremities.

I may be overthinking this. If someone’s missing a foot and a boot and not complaining then it’s obviously not a problem. As Marcel Duchamp observed, “There is no solution because there is no problem.”

1 June 2018

Things Could Be Worse

I had a wonderful time at Alexia’s party in spite of a bit of a kerfuffle. Hubert was fishing for sympathy, but Toni didn’t take the bait.

Hubert told her that his partner left him and took most of his money. Toni pointed out that things could be worse. He added that next week was the last week of his contract and that he couldn’t find another job. She continued being relentlessly optimistic by insisting that things could be worse. He added that that was a problem since he was also losing his health insurance and was worried about an abnormal lump that could be cancerous. She responded by maintaining that things could be worse.

“How can you keep saying things could be worse!” he blurted out.

“It’s true,” she replied calmly. “All that stuff could have happened to me.”

I’m too lazy to note the tedious details, but things did indeed get worse after that.

2 June 2018

Kathleen Dehmlow 1938-2018

Kathleen Dehmlow had an unmemorable life followed by a most memorable obituary. The remembrance starts off predictably by mentioning her date of birth and that she had two children before getting to the juicy bits.

In 1962 she became pregnant by her husband’s brother Lyle Dehmlow and moved to California.

She abandoned her children, Gina and Jay who were then raised by her parents in Clements [Minnesota], Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Schunk.

Her dumped progeny, who apparently paid for the commercial eulogy, got the last word.

She will not be missed by Gina and Jay, and they understand that this world is a better place without her.

Brendan Behan was right, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”

3 June 2018

Distant Moonlight

I ruined the perfectly fine moonlight walk Anastasia and I were enjoying by discussing a recent article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I pointed out that if the moon looks farther away than it used to that’s because it is. In purported fact, it was forty-four thousand kilometers closer a billion and a half years ago. (For all of you nitpickers, Alberto Malinverno and Stephen Meyers said 1.4 billion years in their paper, but I prefer big round numbers and dislike decimal points.)

And that’s just the tip of the lunar iceberg. Way back then, our days were five hours and fifteen minutes shorter. I wonder how all those microbey things found time to both evolve and get the recommended eight hours of sleep?

Anastasia interrupted before I could regurgitate more data.

“Don’t you think it’s time to look forward, not back?” she asked.

I had to agree, and wasn’t disappointed after looking forward to a glass of wine or several when we got back to the studio.

4 June 2018

The Perfect Companion (Dream Home Heartache Revisited)

If you’re looking for an “intimate” (nudge-nudge ...) relationship then Harmony just might be the woman for you. Except that she’s not.

“She” is fifteen thousand dollars of silicon encased is silicone, and has over a third of a million interest categories including “funny,” “talkative,” and, ahem, “affectionate.” Realbotix markets the cheap robot “the perfect companion,” and it probably is for someone who’s looking for a submissive mechanical idiot pressed from the very same mold the Drumpf cretins use for all of their wives.

Yuck.

Anyone who’s looking for a lifeless, soulless, spineless golem certainly doesn’t want to be with a real woman, and I suppose that’s the point. I wonder how the negotiations are going to license James Brown’s Sex Machine?

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart