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Weak III

15 January 2016

No. 86 (cartoon)

You’re trying to humiliate, devastate, and destroy me.

That’s one way of looking at it.

16 January 2016

Suicide Vests

I’m feeling even more indolent than usual, so I’ll again whinge about sloppy journalism in general and today’s headline in particular: Knife-wielding man in fake suicide vest killed at Paris police station.

Gendarmes killed a young Arab man wearing what appeared to be a vest full of explosives when he tried to enter a Paris police station screaming “Allah Akbar!” and brandishing a huge butcher knife in one hand and an Islamic [sic] State flag in the other. I’m sure there must be quicker way of committing suicide by cop, but I can’t think of one at the moment.

Since the terrorist apparel alone was enough to guarantee that the gendarmes would shoot first and ask questions later, I think the reporters were obviously mistaken when they referred to a “fake” suicide vest. Although it contained no bomb, it certainly got the job done, which, after all, is the only reason we’re all not always nude.

17 January 2016

The First of April is Taken

Melanie told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury, England, has proposed that Easter should fall on the same day every year. Melanie’s agnostic, so I was surprised when she endorsed the idea.

“I propose we celebrate someone rising from the dead then floating into the sky like a hundred-dollar helium balloon on the first day of April,” she declared.

“I’m sorry, Melanie, but that’s already Saint Stupid’s Day,” I replied. “It belongs to The First Church of the Last Laugh, so the Anglicans will have to find a different day.”

She shrugged her shoulders indifferently (as if someone could shrug their shoulders differently).

And that’s how the first theological discussion I’ve had in decades concluded.

18 January 2016

The Group of Sixty-Two

Lara told me that the richest sixty-two individuals in the world have as much monetary wealth as the poorest three and a half billion people alive have. She was appalled, but I don’t have a problem with that. Just the opposite.

If everyone had that much money, there wouldn’t be room for all the mansions, yachts, aircraft, et cetera. And anyway, if that many people had that much money, there wouldn’t be enough servants to go around until advanced robots come along. (And when such sentient machines do evolve, they’ll exterminate us, but that’s another topic for another day.)

Those sixty-two people are doing the rest of us a favor, and I thank them. I should have them all over for a nice dinner, but it will probably never happen. Although even I can afford that much pasta and cheap wine, there’s just not enough parking for oversized limousines, and I don’t even have a helipad on my roof.

19 January 2016

The Internet’s Natural Enemy

“The natural enemy of the internet is the backhoe.” Ralf said that, so it must be true.

There’s a backhoe parked menacingly outside of the Internet Archive, but it’s really no threat at all: someone absconded with the cutting/digging thingie at the end of its business appendage. I’m not suggesting that Ralf and/or I did or didn’t snatch the nasty bit; I’m simply noting that it ain’t there this morning.

Our fiber optic cables buried underneath Clement Street are just fine; thanks for asking.

20 January 2016

Pink Flesh Forever!

Jeff Jampol takes care of business for a variety of musicians and musical ensembles including Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and the Ramones. All of his clients have one thing in common: they’re dead dead dead dead.

Jampol may have some new business after Lemmy and David Bowie recently crossed the great divide.

“Everyone I see trying to do this looks at an artist’s body of work like vultures over a dead animal, looking for pink flesh to pluck off and feed the machine,” Jampol said cynically.

The promoter imagines himself taking the high road, albeit a rather creepy high road.

“What we try to do is reanimate the body, lift it up,” he claimed, “and revenue streams will come with it.”

Revenue streams from the dead sounds like a great business model, one that’s worked for religions and hucksters for centuries. I wonder if Lemmy and/or Bowie will cut a post-mortem deal with him?

Pink flesh forever!

21 January 2016

Forty-Eight Sporting Areas and Their Variance from Phi

Two numbers are on display in the Internet Archive’s Really Really Great Room, pi and phi. They are, respectively, the sixteenth and twenty-first letters of the Greek alphabet, and both refer to mathematical formulae.

Scientists, artists, and mathematicians going all the way back to Pythagoras and Euclid have marveled at phi, better known as the golden ratio, where the height of a rectangle is approximately 1.62 times as long as the width, or, of course, vice versa.

I don’t understand sports, so I wondered if part of the fascination might be the dimensions of the area of play, so many years ago I made Forty-Eight Sporting Areas and Their Variance from Phi.

The sporting area closest to phi is hurling, a four-thousand-year old Irish game that’s somewhat similar to field hockey. I copied that from somewhere; I have no idea what field hockey involves. I do know that the sport has little to do with the contemporary Irish pastime of Guinness-fueled hurling.

I shall spend the rest of the morning contemplating phi, or until something better comes my way.

Hope springs eternal!

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart