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Weak XLIII

22 October 2023

No. 2,614 (cartoon)

I’m a theoretical physicist.

I’m an actual bus driver.

23 October 2023

Marketing Viviane Sassen

I never heard of Viviane Sassen until now, although the review I just read about her retrospective tome, Phosphor, suggests that she’s a very accomplished artist. (When it comes to art, I mostly live in my own little bubble breathing my own fumes, so my ignorance was predictable.)

I still have no idea about her work. The only image accompanying the article in an otherwise fairly respectable rag was a self-portrait the artist made.

She photographed herself in a bathroom mirror.

Thirty-some years ago, when she was a teenager.

Naked.

The editors of the Guardian may not know much about art, but they know images of beautiful nude young women generate money.

24 October 2023

Please Don’t Urine Revisited

I usually don’t revisit a topic I’ve mentioned, but I noticed that something I spotted over a year ago hasn’t changed, so here’s an unedited rerun from 13 October 2022 that’s as accurate today as it was then:

There’s a pitiable sign taped to the entrance of the Spring Valley Science School on Washington Street in San Francisco with a plaintive plea: Please don’t urine or poop around the school area.

I’m surprised it’s still there. I’ve been walking by it for weeks but waited to photograph it until I could bring my real camera instead of using the phoney camera that lives in my pocket. (Just in case I might want to make a meter-wide print someday?)

What kind of illiterate person would post such a notice? The first answer is obvious: someone who thinks urine is a verb. The second answer is probable by not certain: an uneducated school worker who’s paid to learn San Francisco schoolchildren how to use English real good.

I think the kids are getting a fine education. They’re going to spend their lives surrounded by idiots, so may as well get ’em used to it early.

25 October 2023

Poodle Piss Retraction

I usually admit it when I’m wrong. That may sound like I’m vaguely honorable, but that ain’t the case: it happens so often that I never go anywhere without a few mea culpas in my pocket.

A worker at the Tsingtao beer factory was photographed urinating into a tank of the watery suds. With documentary evidence like that, I retract what I said about the anemic Chinese “beer.”

Tsingtao does not taste like poodle piss.

26 October 2023

There Are No Words (Except Six)

The apparatchiks who control China have rather thin skins, and don’t take kindly to criticism. More accurately, they have negative zero tolerance for dissent. As a result, demonstrators have resorted to holding blank signs if they dare protest.

Meanwhile, I saw a photograph of a Jewish or Palestinian activist holding a sign that read, “There Are No Words.” I can proofread anyone’s writing except mine; the message should have been, “There Are No Words (Except Six).” In addition to a competent editor, the protester also needed a better Chinese translator.

27 October 2023

Trimming the Endangered Species List

The environment we once knew is transmogrifying into hellish decrapitude, so I was taken aback when I the headline, “Twenty-one Species Removed from Endangered Species List.”

Is it possible that I was too pessimistic? That’s not only possible, it’s probable. But not in this case: the US Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the critters because they are extinct.

This is wonderful news. Who’d have thought I’d live long enough to see wild beasties permanently lose their endangered species status? Not me, that’s who!

This is more than wonderful; this is a beacon of hope. If human civilization continues to make the same kind of progress we’re witnessing, someday there will be no more endangered species.

28 October 2023

Deaf, Blind, and Dumb

Another day, another mass murder. Some guy with automatic weapons—isn’t it always a man?—attacked a bowling alley as well as a billiards parlor in Maine and killed nineteen people. That kind of atrocity is so common I’m not sure why an editor would consider it newsworthy except for one unusual detail: four of the victims were deaf.

Over a million deaf or blind people live in the states, but this is the first time in many years I’ve seen one of them mentioned in the press. I’m guessing the intrepid journalists are too busy reporting on people with modified genitalia.

I should have stopped there, but I’m going to conclude with a mea culpa. I created the Internet site on which you’re reading this. And I’m all but certain that you’re not reading this if you’re blind; the HTML coding I used makes this page a jumble of gibberish to a blind person. A programmer friend told me this at least six years ago, but her suggestions fell on deaf ears.

I now find myself at the bottom of a very deep hole, so I suppose this is the right time to stop digging.

29 October 2023

Redundantly Scary

I joined Stewart and Veronica for an exam at a cancer clinic. I spend way too much in Cancerland, so our visit seemed as routine as a walk along the Embarcadero.

It’s almost Halloween, so some employee glued twenty bat silhouettes at the entrance to the breast screening clinic. I quite liked the idea; the thought of making cancer scarier by adding some Halloween iconography was so ludicrous that I almost smiled.

Another day in Cancerland, but the first one with a hint of a smile.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart