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Weak IX

26 February 2012

No. 4,479 (cartoon)

Then we’re in complete agreement.

We certainly are.

I’ve never been so bored.

27 February 2012

Missed Opportunities

Megan’s father Jerry throws great parties, including the one tonight. As I left, I asked Megan what she thought of the evening.

“It was great,” she said, “but I think you missed at least three great opportunities to keep your mouth shut.”

My mouth was open for the salmon, asparagus, and wine; I wonder if she was referring to one or more of those occasions? I didn’t care, so I didn’t ask.

28 February 2012

Gratuitous Photo of the Weak: Wine Crash

Charles Shaw has sold over six-hundred million bottles of two-dollar wine since the the brand was introduced. The wine magnates have kept the price the same by reducing expenses, such as using lighter bottles to minimize shipping costs. I was reminded of this when a bottle dropped half a meter and smashed into a sea of wine and glass shards.

29 February 2012

Leap Day

Thirty-two people jumped to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge last year. Since this a leap day, officials tripled the amount of undercover security forces on the bridge who’ve been trained to spot and detain jumpers. There’s not much more to say about a leap day, except perhaps this.

I always wondered why most, but not all, people who dove off the Golden Gate Bridge died. And now I know why. A leaper’s body is traveling a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour when it hits the water. With rare exceptions, the body stops moving within a few decimeters of the surface. The internal organs, however, are another story. When the body stops moving, the guts are still ripping along at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, “ripping” being the operative word.

Happy leap day!

1 March 2012

Whitewashing Climate Change

Some of the snow-covered peaks in the Peruvian Andes aren’t. Covered in snow, that is. But at least three of them will be white again, once Eduardo Gold and his team get done painting them. The theory is that once some one hundred and seventy acres of mountaintops are covered in a mixture of lime, egg whites, and water, they’ll reflect sunlight, cool the temperature enough to allow the return of glaciers.

The Andes glaciers are vanishing quickly; they’re over twenty-percent smaller then they were thirty-five years ago; some scientists predict they’ll be entirely gone in twenty years. Oh well, at least this environmental disaster is yielding some aesthetic rewards. I’d be tempted to paint a bald mountain, but it sounds like much too much work.

2 March 2012

Brilliant Project Management Strategies

Suzanne Ciani has a brilliant approach to project management: “There is nothing to do, and everything will get done.” That’s perhaps the best strategy I’ve heard since Marcel Duchamp’s observation, “There is no solution because there is no problem.”

3 March 2012

No Handcuff Stories

Ralf pointed at the locking mechanism on my bike and opined, “Those look like handcuffs.”

“They are,” I confirmed.

He gave me a quizzical look and awkwardly changed the subject. I was disappointed that he robbed me of the opportunity to tell him at least a dozen handcuff stories, most of them false.

4 March 2012

Smoking Kills

It’s the same old story. You’re visiting a friend, you’re thirsty, and that jar of amber liquid in the kitchen looks promising. Might be whisky, might not be, and there’s only one way to tell: have a drink!

Oops, it was gasoline. You’re not stupid, so you spit it out, drenching yourself in the process. Since there’s no better way to get the taste of petrol out of your mouth than smoking a cigarette, you light up. That’s what Gary Allen Banning did a few days ago, but instead of just lighting up the cigarette he lit up Gary Allen Banning.

Banning died from his misadventure. He really should have paid more attention to the overwhelming evidence that smoking kills.

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©2012 David Glenn Rinehart