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Weak II

9 January 2010

No. 3,043 (cartoon)

I’m twitching and convulsing.

Attracting or repulsing?

Your choice.

10 January 2010

Vodka Pills

A scientist recently announced that he came up with a way to distribute vodka in pill form. This pretty much goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: the researcher is based in Russia.

“We have developed a technology that allowed us to turn any liquid solution into powder,” Professor Evgeny Moskalev of the Saint Petersburg Technological University announced.

Perfect! Precisely what Russia needs: more vodka!

Moskalev obviously has his finger on the pulse of his fellow Russians, each of whom drinks an average of a liter of vodka a week. (This calculation may or may not include the thirty-five thousand pulseless Russians who die annually from alcohol poisoning.) For former(?) communists, the Russians demonstrate a lot of entrepreneurial exuberance; half of that vodka is concocted in private stills.

If I know the Russians—and I certainly don’t—I imagine it won’t be long before bathroom chemists throughout Russia will be cranking out an avalanche of vodka pills. And washing them down with large glasses of ice-cold vodka.

To conclude with a traditional Russian toast, “to your health!”

11 January 2010

The Mystery of Marriage

Marriage is a curious practice. On one hand, it makes practical and logistical sense to have a partner. On the other hand, as one of my learned friends opined, the idea of choosing one person with whom to spend the rest of one’s life, no matter what happens or changes, is completely insane.

I don’t have any strong beliefs on marriage, but Honoré de Balzac certainly did.

“No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”

I’m ignoring Balzac’s advice, especially since I’ll need no marital guidance in the foreseeable future.

12 January 2010

A Really Good Headline

I enjoy a really good headline, one that’s so clear that reading the article is redundant. Here’s a recent example: Study Concludes That Neanderthals Wore Jewelry and Makeup. Having been to Flint, Michigan last year, I know this to be true based on empirical evidence.

13 January 2010

Here’s to Iranian Tavern Wenches!

I waste a lot of time looking for things that don’t exist, although they occasionally do. Like every poorly-written sentence, that remark needs some explanation.

I clearly remember that the pretentious Orlan tried to silence a critical audience by commanding them to stop “censoring” her. Even though I knew this to be true, I couldn’t find any evidence among the million plus files in my computer. Worse, I wasted at least an hour looking for the quote on the Internet. After a friend suggested that I might have been thinking about Karen Finley, I wasted at least another hour on that dead end.

And then there’s Ayatollah Khomeini, the rascally figurehead of the most recent successful Iranian revolution. Again, I knew he was yet another poet who wrote paeans to tantalizing barmaids. And again, hours of scouring my computer and the Internet produced not one scintilla of evidence.

I must hallucinate more than I hallucinate that I do.

But then! This is what I found buried in an unsearched database, a line from a Khomeini poem.

You want to know what brought me to my senses,
The tavern wench whose fair hand wine dispenses.

What’s even more amazing, I had a source for it: a small, free San Francisco street newspaper published over twenty years ago. And that’s good enough for me; artists have so many more freedoms than academics.

14 January 2010

Channeling Rip Van Winkle

It seems that everyone’s getting reacquainted with old friends these days. I have of course done no research, but I assume this phenomenon may be attributed to the ease of conducting an Internet search.

For whatever reason(s), I recently received mail from Michelle and Noel, two unrelated friends from whom I hadn’t heard in some twenty years. They were the equivalent of human time capsules.

I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I talked with them. They each asked about aspects of my life a millennium ago, things about which I have little or no recollection. Conversely, I appreciated their ignorance about how I spent the last decades. I told them all the positive things I did, without mentioning the scandal with the empress, the unfortunate incident with the hand grenade, my acquittal on trumped up bribery charges, and so on.

It was a delight to become reacquainted with such lovely friends, and not just because it helped me remember how much fun—real and imagined—I’ve enjoyed.

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©2010 David Glenn Rinehart