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Weak V

30 January 2023

No. 1,787 (cartoon)

That’s arguably the dumbest thing I’ve heard all month.

I don’t argue with idiots so it’s not.

31 January 2023

A Complicated Month

Feh, what a month. My computer monitor glitched, two of the three speakers in my studio went mute, the company store sent the wrong computer thingie, and the fancy electronic blower I use to keep dust off my cameras and lenses failed spectacularly, sending shards of plastic from the internal high-velocity fan flying before it died.

That’s one of the great things about being an olde person of noncolor; I get to kvetch about first-world problems that aren’t really predicaments, just annoyances.

[insert some sort of plausibly plausible segue here]

I like formal photographs; that’s why my camera has two bubble levels attached and my tripod has three separate controls for each axis. And so I was momentarily interested when I saw a press release for a tripod that automatically levels the camera: just press a button and the legs expand and contract to make the camera perfectly aligned with the conceptual horizon.

When I said “momentarily interested,” I meant forty-two nanoseconds. After my technology woes this month, I figure a contraption with motors, cables, batteries, electronics, and the software necessary to run it has a shorter lifespan than a case of cold beer on a hot day.

I’ll continue to meticulously align my tripod by hand; the slower I move the better the photograph.

1 February 2023

Margaret’s Santa Fe

I’ve known Margaret for thirty-some years, but today is the first time I’ve seen her handwriting. She sent me a letter in a paper envelope, and I was delighted by her handwriting. I’ve never seen a triangular capital “S” like she used in Santa Fe, and the “F” was downright European.

I wonder what my other friends’ handwriting looks like. It’s something one never sees these days. I was tempted to organize a calligraphy party where everyone would pass along examples of their penmanship, but I decided against it since my handwriting is somewhere between abysmal and embarrassing. The vestigial muscles I once used to write legibly have atrophied, as has my memory of phone numbers, birthdays, and all the other parts of my aging mind that I’ve replaced with my computers.

2 February 2023

Our Smooth Universe

I’m having another wonderful day, in part because the latest reports from the South Pole Telescope and the Dark Energy Survey are finally in! I won’t bore you with the scientificky details, but the spatial crux of the galactic biscuits is that the universe is “less clumpy” than we thought.

Hold everything. “We,” kemosabe?!

I’ve always known that the universe is incomprehensibly vast, and if that ain’t spacious I don’t know what is. Just look at our immediate neighborhood.

The Chinese lunar probe that landed on the Sea of Woes is reportedly blasting out disco versions of Chairman Mao’s greatest speeches. Whatever lunar nonsense Xi Pooh concocts down there is fine with me; that’s one of the many benefits of living in a roomy galaxy.

I just came in from stepping outside to take in the frozen air. I never gave a thought to a part of the purportedly clumpy universe bonking me upside the head; that sort of thing just doesn’t happen with any regularity.

The universe is self-regulating. Whenever there’s a clump a black hole swallows it. Why did the authors of yet another study that confirmed something all of us knew bother with all that tedious typing?

3 February 2023

Nuts with Bolts

If I’d ever owned a nuclear submarine you’d better believe that I’d have mentioned it, probably more than once. Even so, I know a thing or two about operating one, having watched many episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in my youth. In any case, I’m sure I’d be better at it than the Brits.

Incompetent workers overtightened bolts holding the HMS Vanguard’s reactor chamber together so much that the heads snapped off. The solution? They glued them back on.

I’m amazed at the bungling bunglers’ sheer stupidity. Even the greenest swabbie in the American navy knows you use gaffer tape, not glue, to patch up a nuclear reactor.

It’s unlikely that I’m being too harsh, but perhaps that’s how English nuclear submarines function. There’s a good chance their nuclear missiles don’t work, so perhaps the subs are only used for kamikaze attacks.

No, that’s being too generous. England is falling apart, so it follows that its navy is too.

4 February 2023

A Holey Omen

I spotted some exposed wiring in a pothole on Encantado Loop that left me baffled. (It doesn’t take much.) I couldn’t figure out what function it had since there aren’t any buildings nearby. And why would anyone put a cable just under the asphalt?

Gareth’s the kind of guy who knows about These Things, so I sent him a photograph. After when he explained that it was an omen for the holey people that was easy to interpret, I was baffleder than ever.

He went on to say I hadn’t discovered a severed cable; it was a plug with brightly colored wires implanted in the pothole to identify it as one of the orifices in the road that needed to be repaired. Apparently the holey people aren’t that smart; they need that sign to know which holes need to be filled and which should be left to grow to maturity.

I was disappointed that I hadn’t discovered some mystery wiring; Encantado Loop isn’t as enchanted as the name would suggest.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart