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Weak V

30 January 2010

No. 4,612 (cartoon)

Making art looks easy.

It might be if I was sober.

We’ll never know.

31 January 2010

Saliva Noodles

A few years ago, I wrote about saliva chicken, a Chinese delicacy that gets its name from a poor translation of, “mouthwateringly tasty chicken.” And so, when I read about xian shui mian, or saliva noodles, I assumed the reference was to some delectable Chinese carbohydrates.

Wrong.

Saliva noodles, “a meal of family community and harmony,” were allegedly concocted three millennia ago by King Wen of Zhou. The dish remains popular in Meixian, Qianxian, and Wugong counties. And the saliva in the soup comes from, well, saliva. The communal soup is recycled and recirculated many times, and is a smorgasbord of everyone’s bacteria.

Yum!

I wonder if the Chinese might be more inscrutable than the Japanese? Since I’m so ignorant, I suppose every culture is equally unfathomable.

1 February 2010

-dous!

Buzz asked me to tell him what I thought about Annie, so I did.

“Depending on the day and the hour and the mood,” I explained, “she may be tremendous and/or horrendous and/or stupendous and/or hazardous.”

“Is that true?” Buzz asked. “Or were you just gratuitously using the only four words ending in ‘dous’ that the English language has to offer?”

When it comes to useless knowledge, Buzz’s advanced degrees in English have provided him with more useless information than I can ever hope to accumulate.

2 February 2010

The Final Screw

Screw is one of those slang words with myriad associations, most of them negative. That may or may have not inspired Donald Scruggs to invent a corpse repository (casket?) that’s simply screwed into the earth, thus using a minimum of real estate and avoiding the expense of digging a grave. I like Scruggs’ device, especially since it might also work as a nose cone on a small rocket.

Should I ever find myself inside one of Scruggs’ contraptions, I’ll know that I’m terminally screwed.

3 February 2010

Bad Dogs!

Everyone loves a dog story. Today’s doggie tale comes from Ljubljana, where a Slovenian man rescued three dogs who were to be killed for attacking humans.

The story follows the ever-popular theme, no good deed goes unpunished. The fifty-two-year old man who rescued the bullmastiffs died after saving them; the canines mauled him to death. That proved to be a really bad move by the beasts. With their protector gone, authorities finally killed the three ungrateful canines.

All the characters in the short story are dead, what a tidy ending!

4 February 2010

Thursday at the Dentist

When I went to the dentist’s office today, I was greeted by a freshly-minted dentist on his first day of practice. I was curious why he was poking an orange with a hypodermic needle, so I asked.

“An orange has a similar consistency to the gums, so I’m practicing on an orange before I jab you,” he explained.

I wasn’t worried.

When the dentist asked for the drill, has assistant asked if he was sure he that he didn’t want to first ozmossify the mertinian region, or something like that.

“Oh yeah,” he said sheepishly, “I forgot that part.”

I wasn’t worried, even when he studied the drill with a blank look.

“What does this orange button do?” he asked his assistant.

I still wasn’t worried about his apparent incompetence, even when he sliced my cheek with his drill. That’s because my new dentist was the fist person to ever provide me with nitrous oxide. Thanks to that pleasant gas, the bloody farce seemed quite amusing.

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©2010 David Glenn Rinehart