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Weak IV

22 January 2014

No. 1,503 (cartoon)

I feel pretty depressed.

That’s funny; you don’t look pretty.

That’s pretty funny.

23 January 2014

Essential Feline Biology

Cats have thirty-two muscles in each ear. The pusses use most of those muscles to ignore anything a human says.

24 January 2014

Their Satanic Majesties’ Digital Request

The Catholic pope—as if popes came in any other flavor—declared that the Internet is, “a gift from God.” The pope is regarded as inflammable by the faithful, but in this case he’s obviously wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Internet is clearly Satan’s spawn. In fact, noted theologians have argued that the Internet is evidence that god does not exist, for what supreme being would allow such an abomination?

I bet the pope has a special pope-puter, with massive air filters so that he can’t smell the sulfur fumes wafting from Lucifer’s most notable creation in recent millennia.

25 January 2014

Photographic Hoarders

I don’t like William Eggleston’s photographs. I don’t dislike them, either. They seem like the imagery I expect to find bolted to the wall of a cheap motel room, with not enough aesthetic impact to either make me like or dislike them.

I do, however, appreciate Eggleston’s accomplishments as a hoarder: he has over three hundred Leica cameras. I know lots of doctors and lawyers have thousands of Leicas, but Eggleston is the only photographer of whom I’m aware who has so many such tools in storage.

Eggleston isn’t in the top tiers of film hoarders, though; he’s only made a million and a half exposures. That’s only thirty percent of Garry Winogrand’s output; he put over two hundred kilometers of film through his cameras without the benefit of a motor drive. I wonder what shape his thumb was in when he died? Or perhaps that’s why he popped his clogs at the relatively early age of fifty-six by succumbing to Fatigued Thumb Syndrome.

26 January 2014

Wicked Wok Raided!

City bureaucrats shut down Wicked Wok, my favorite Chinese restaurant. The reason? The “chicken” on the menu actually came from geese and pigeons plucked from the park.

The same sanctimonious people who go on and on about locally-sourced food are the same people who complained to the city health department about the provenance of the poultry on the menu.

I shouldn’t kvetch about the rabid do-gooders; if it weren’t for their strident sermonizing, San Francisco would be even more crowded than it is.

27 January 2014

A Foetus Named Nicole

Erick Munoz’s wife Marlise is brain-dead and pregnant. Munoz announced today that he’s named her (their?) feotus Nicole. The twenty-three week old embryo has no chance of survival.

What’s even sadder is that the hospital won’t honor his request to take Marlise Munoz—who also has no chance of life—off life support. The lawyers for both sides are battling it out in court. I don’t foresee an early settlement since the hospital stands to make a lot of money from providing unwanted “services” for a feotus named Nicole.

Ah, the sanctity of life in the United States!

28 January 2014

Cow-boom!

Cows are generous contributors to climate change; they pump out a lot of greenhouse gasses. This boring fact was recently reiterated with a bang in Rasdorf, Germany.

A farmer there kept ninety flatulent bovines in a shed; that proved to be a loud mistake. A static electricity discharge ignited the beasts’ methane, and cow-boom! The explosion blew off some of the roof, and singed part of one of the belching cows medium rare.

The moral of that story is obviously obvious; I wish I knew what it is. It’s probably something like, “Don’t count your cheeseburgers before they’re hatched,” but I’m not sure.

29 January 2014

Russian Literary Debating Strategies

What medium is superior, prose or poetry? A poet won a recent debate on that very question, but he had help from a knife.

A retired Sverdlovskian schoolteacher slashed his “friend” to death when, as Russian authorities described it, “the literary dispute soon grew into a banal conflict.”

Dang; them Russians take their literature seriously!

A few months ago in Rostov-on-Don, a heated discussion over Immanuel Kant’s theories ended in gunfire. The assailant used rubber bullets, so he and his philosophical adversary can resume their learned debate at a later date.

I think this tragedy just once again shows that writing and vodka go together like vodka and writing.

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©2014 David Glenn Rinehart