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Weak XLV

5 November 2019

No. 2,583 (cartoon)

You forgot to take your amnesia pills, didn’t you?

I can’t remember.

6 November 2019

Orbital Wine

On Tuesday, University of Bordeaux researchers working with Space Cargo Unlimited launched a case of wine into orbit, ostensibly to study how wine ages in minimal gravity.

Yeah, right.

The vintners’ foray into near-earth orbit is a transparent marketing ploy to justify exorbitant prices for fermented French grape juice. The orbiting advertising angle is so obvious I can see it from earth without binoculars: “Bordeaux wines are out of this world!” (As are the prices; that’s their raison d’etre.)

The crewmembers of the orbiting dormitory know that the experiment is not an experiment at all, so of course they’re going to drink all of the wine and fill the bottles with purple sugar water. No one will care; the only useful data from the exercise will be to find out which vintage pairs well with freeze-dried kangaroo.

What a great “experiment!” The space workers will enjoy free wine (my favorite varietal), and the château owners will get fatter and richer; that’s their job description.

As for me; I’m happy here on my favorite planet instead of floating above it imprisoned in a cramped apartment without a shower, and hundreds of kilometers from the nearest produce shop or liquor store.

7 November 2019

Encantado Shadow

There I was, just strollin’ down Encantado Loop, minding my own bidness as usual, when it jumped out at me: Kablaam!

Tarnation, ambushed by another accursed New Mexican visual cliché!

I had no choice but to snap a photograph of my long shadow on the boiling asphalt with the giant saguaros in the background. The trite image still serves as a generic desert postcard, even though the pavement was cold and there isn’t a saguaro within a hundred clicks of here.

8 November 2019

The Job of Art

Devorah showed me the handout her instructor gave her in her tenth-grade art class listing the five uses of art: Ceremonial, Artistic Expression, Narrative, Functional, and Persuasive. She then dutifully asked what function my art served.

“The job of art is to remain gainfully unemployed,” I replied.

“I’m afraid that my teacher’s not going to like that answer,” she replied.

“That’s perfect!” I explained. “One of the first steps in finding your own way is to flunk out of art classes; that way you’re almost certain to avoid the poison of art school.”

She told me that I was wrong and that she has her own plans. There may be hope for Devorah after all!

9 November 2019

An Unthinkable Scandal!

Keanu Reeves pulled off the scandal of the decade in Hollywood, something so beyond the pale that he was punished with a tsunami of damning publicity for his audacity. The outrageous behavior didn’t involve drugs, violence, embezzlement, debauchery, or even the traditional rite of passage orgy with a bevy of eighteen-year-old would-be starlets. No, just the opposite.

Reeves did the previously unthinkable when he was spotted holding hands—wink wink nudge nudge—with a woman too old to possibly be his daughter. Why, she wasn’t even ten years younger than the balding film star! Even more, she was an accomplished artist in her field, not some trollop who remained freakishly attractive at the ancient age of forty-six, as if she’d made a satanic pact with Beelzebub himself.

Reeves’ kamikaze courtship was too much for Hollywood. Studios withdrew film offers, his agent dumped him, corporations canceled his endorsement contracts, and his former friends and colleagues shunned him like the pariah he was. His temerarious cost him everything, yet the disgraced former star is reportedly perversely happy. Perversely: that says it all.

10 November 2019

Nuclear Waste Whale

I spotted a bizarre marine mammal in the middle of the desert, except it wasn’t. Well, it was toward the center of the desert if not exactly the middle, but it couldn’t possibly be a marine mammal because it was a monumentally mediocre sculpture that looked like the repulsive spawn of a blue whale and a monstrously colossal banana slug, and covered in a gaudy mosaic.

There may be more to this monstrosity than meets the eye. I hope there is, for what meets the eye is quite visually annoying. (Hmmm; maybe I can plagiarize that approach; sounds promising!)

And then there’s the solar panel. Why oh why? (Uh-oh; I fear that I may be starting to like this abomination.)

The ultimate question remains unanswered: why is this massive piece of sculptural excrement here? Luka speculated that it might be a test by the Department of Energy: if no one objects to the slugwhale, this could be the ideal location for a nuclear waste dump, er, repository.

11 November 2019

Hiccups (Yawn)

This is the headline du jour: “Scientists may have just worked out why we hiccup.” Hoo boy, here we go again ...

I’ve been reading about hiccup “discoveries” my entire life, but I don’t think there have been any, just hypotheses, theses, postulations, et cetera. Note the weasel words in the headline, “may have.” For example, I may have discovered the formula to convert glass to platinum. May have ...

And that brings me to, yawn, yawns. Same thing. Scientists are constantly coming up with theories about why people yawn. In one of life’s ironies, I know for a fact that speculative reports cause yawning, but no one’s studied that. It’s one of those catch sixty-nine situations that are the bane of the research community.

In conclusion, no one knows why we hiccup and yawn. The only proven and accepted medical knowledge is that anyone who hiccups, yawns, burps, and sneezes at exactly the same time will die instantly. Sadly, that paper will never be published; it was rejected because the lethal research was judged to be barbarically cruel.

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart