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17 December 2024

No. 1,081 (cartoon)

Is it possible to be alone and truly happy?

I’m schizophrenic so I’m never alone.

I’ll take that as a definite maybe.

18 December 2024

Childbirth

Herbert proudly reported that Wilma’s knocked up and that their baby should pop out next summer. He seemed quite pleased with himself, even though impregnating someone requires much less time and skill than making even a passable cheese and spinach omelet. I’ve never understood why anyone would create a personal parasite that will batten on them for decades, but I do have a macabre interest in the practice.

“When will it start to move?” I asked.

“Right after high school graduation,” he predicted.

“How do you plan on determining its gender?” I continued.

“It’s simple,” he explained. “Childbirth.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied.

Vivian, who’s worked in a maternity ward at the hospital for decades, told me that they can’t definitively identify the gender of maybe one in ten thousand newborns. Herbert seemed unnerved when he heard that, but I like the greyification of subjects thought to be black or white.

19 December 2024

Enshittification

Oxford University Press editors have declared that “brain rot” is the word of the year.

Say what?!

That’s stooopid, even for a Brit: that’s two words. I repeat: that’s two words, not one; count ’em and see for yourself. (On a positive note, at least they didn’t select “hawk tuah.”)

No, I agree with the Macquarie Dictionary editors that “enshittification” is the word of the year.

As Cory Doctorow, who coined the word a couple of years ago, explained, “We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.”

And there you have it: a one-word summary of the year in review.

20 December 2024

Her Own Worst Impuissant Enemy

Thia told me that she’d done something too stupid for me to repeat here, and chastised herself for being her own worst enemy.

I assured her that she could be doing a lot worse, a remark that confused her. I explained that, as enemies go, she wasn’t very threatening or formidable. She wasn’t fueled by rage and hatred; she wasn’t very clever or cunning when it came to being mean; she was a weak if not impotent adversary, so she wasn’t too bad off.

She thanked me for my observations and added that she was also lazy, which was also to her advantage since it takes a lot more work to be nasty than nice.

21 December 2024

Remembering My Father on the Winter Solstice

My father died thirty-three years ago today. My friends and I still toast him every winter solstice even though, in one of life’s cosmic anomalies, the solstice was on the twenty-second in 1991. He wouldn’t have been bothered by such a trifle, so neither am I.

The winter solstice seems like a good day to die; the summer solstice might be pretty good too. I’m not sure what to make of the equinoxes; I may find out for myself one of these days.

22 December 2024

That’s Dementia for Ya

Devorah’s concerned about Luka, we all are. Now that he’s in his eighties, his short-term memory seems to be deteriorating rapidly.

“At least his lapses are more darkly comedic than troubling or alarming,” I said doing an unconvincing imitation of the good humor man.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me with a laugh. “He’s only going to get worse; that’s dementia for ya!”

I think I had better leave it at that.

23 December 2024

The Future of Journalism

A year or several ago I read an article about Chinese city planners installing segregated sidewalks: one for people walking from here to there, and a parallel one for people stumbling along staring at their phones. I remembered that when I saw this piece in Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird.

An unnamed woman in Chongqing, China, landed the grand prize of $1,380 after she managed to avoid using her mobile phone for ... one hour. Out of ten contestants, she was the only one who prevailed. The winning participant showed up in her jammies and had to lie perfectly still, without benefit of distractions like books or movies.

I was intrigued, especially after I discovered Chongqing was also the city with separate mobile phone lanes. I looked for more information and found another account in the Jerusalem Post.

A Chinese woman named Dong won a unique challenge in Chongqing, where she abstained from using her mobile phone for eight hours and earned a prize of 10,000 yuan (about 1,400 US dollars). Participants mainly passed the time by reading books.

The twenty-dollar difference in exchange rates is trivial, but the difference between one and eight hours is huge, as is books versus no books, and Dong’s description as unnamed.

I was pondering how two news sites could publish contradictory accounts of the same event when I arrived at the byline at the end of the piece.

This article [credited in the byline to Jerusalem Post staff] was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq.

According to the company’s Internet site, “Alchemiq is building a powerful toolset for journalists and content writers tapping news.” Tapping news? I have seen the fututre of journalism, and it ain’t true.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart