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Weak XXXI

30 July 2019

No. 6,745 (cartoon)

I like art that looks like art.

Then it’s not art.

31 July 2019

Steve Sawyer 1956-2019

Steve Sawyer was on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior with me during nautical adventures on the Atlantic and Pacific waaay back in the halcyon days before the organization got old, fat, and stooopid. No one died; good times!

Steve smoked dozens of unfiltered cigarettes a day; he said he wasn’t worried about his health since only some people got cancer. He was right; not everyone does. But he did; he just died from lung cancer.

What a brilliant friend! What an idiot! Goodbye Steve; I shall miss you, as will your wife and children.

1 August 2019

An Entheogen Cuppa

My friend Norwood is the author of a couple of eponymously titled books on tea, including James Norwood Pratt’s Tea Lover's Treasury and James Norwood Pratt’s Tea Dictionary. The man certainly knows his fine beverages; that may or may not be why we usually drink mostly wine when we visit. I thought there wasn’t much more he could say about tea after half a century of writing, but he cheerfully informed me that I was wrong.

He’s developing the idea that tea is an entheogen. After a trip to the dictionary, I understand he’s proposing that tea can be a psychoactive chemical that catalyzes spiritual development if not enlightenment proper.

Absolute genius!

Any charming, erudite person can sell a cuppa fine tea, but now that he’s on the verge of peddling enlightenment, he’s got it made! (I can say that with certainty since he had it made decades ago.)

2 August 2019

Execrable Moonlight Serenade

Annalee has two guest rooms, and after a series of unfortunate events too tedious to mention, I spent last night in one of them. I can sleep comfortably almost anywhere, and I did, but only until three in the morning.

The accursed visitors in the adjoining room decided the middle of the night was the right time for an amorous encounter. They woke me up by playing some soft music at three in the morning to cover up sex sounds, but of course it didn’t work, making the sleep deprivation doubly annoying.

Oh well, I can pick my friends but not their guests.

3 August 2019

Another Day, Another Slaughter (El Paso, Texas)

A paranoid racist idiot murdered twenty-two people at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas. The news report I read noted it was the seventh deadliest such killing spree in the United States since 1949.

It seems normal for these atrocities to have scorecards like a sporting event; this is the only country in the world where someone might think like that.

4 August 2019

Another Day, Another Slaughter (Dayton, Ohio)

Another idiot murdered nine people at a shopping center in Dayton, Ohio before police killed him thirty seconds after he fired the first shot, hence the relatively low body count. That’s a better score than yesterday, I suppose.

I admire cleverness and laziness, and I aspire to be as good at both as are the writers and editors at The Onion. I more or less copied what I wrote about yesterday’s tragedy to describe today’s, but the staffers at America’s Finest News Source have mastered cut-and-paste journalism. They’ve been using the same headline for years: “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

It’s evergreen as the folks in the newsroom say, alas.

5 August 2019

More Entertainment

A tabloid news Internet site reported, “R. Kelly Charged with Two Sex Crimes in Minnesota.” That would be unremarkable except that the headline appeared on the “More Entertainment” page.

Oh my, that makes three days in a row that I’ve whinged about journalism or lack thereof; time to get off that dead horse and set out for new horizons.

6 August 2019

The Mopping Threshold

I’m helping my friend Dr. Gilmore prepare for the monthly dinner party tomorrow; he assigned me to clean the floor. (That seemed like a curious request; it’s always been my practice to do the cleaning after all the guests have spilled their drinks and dropped their food. But it’s his soirée ...)

“I swept the floors,” I reported, “what’s next?”

“Did anything look like it needed mopping?” he asked.

“How should I know, I’m a guy!” I replied. “I figure that nothing needs mopping unless I see something like dried vomitus starting to flake.”

He told me that I was wise in the ways of domestic engineering. What a compliment, especially coming from an hombre like him!

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart