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Weak XXXV

28 August 2016

No. 9,135 (cartoon)

I’m desperate.

Sex is not an emergency.

29 August 2016

LD₅₀ Coffee

Steve Benington, the owner of Viscous Coffee, is selling coffee so strong that it might be described both as a pick me up and/or a put you under. The café in Adelaide, Australia, offers Asskicker coffee that contains five grams of caffeine in a single cup. That’s roughly equivalent to eighty cups of espresso.

Benington advises customers, especially those with high blood pressure and heart problems, to sip it slowly over a four-hour period. That’s darn good advice, since five grams of caffeine is about LD₅₀, i.e., fatal to half of the people who drink that much.

That sounds like an interesting gamble, so I’m glad Adelaide is thirteen thousand kilometers away.

30 August 2016

Deaths, Nothing That Serious

Brandon is rather fanatical about climbing. That’s fine, I suppose, but he’s proselytizing and trying to get me to join him.

“Let’s see if I understand the proposition correctly,” I began. “I pay some business a lot of money to have the opportunity to climb up a fake rock wall inside a four-story room, where I may fall and break one or more of my bones. Correct?”

“Why are you always so cynical?” he asked. “Sure, some people get hurt and maybe one or two died, but nothing really very serious.”

Well, then, that’s different.

31 August 2016

Belphegor’s Prime

Anita gets excited about numbers, although she doesn’t know anything more about math than I do, i.e., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. What else is generally useful? She’s obviously more interested in numerology and superstition than any of the conventional sciences.

She’s currently enthralled with Belphegor’s Prime, 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. Or, one nonillion, sixty-six quadrillion, six hundred trillion, and one, if you prefer.

She loves triskaidekaphobia (does that make her a triskaidekaphobiaphiliac or perhaps a triskaidekaphiliac?), so she’s delighted that the number contains two strings of thirteen zeroes. She’s also chuffed that it contains 666, the alleged number of the beast. And finally, she thinks it’s quite wonderful that it’s named after Belphegor, one of the seven princes of hell.

I find her ignorance amusing. If she knew anything about anything, she would appreciate that 665 and 667, the neighbors of the beast, are much more monstrous demons.

1 September 2016

Evil’s Not So Bad

Google is a colossally colossal and fantastically profitable corporation. Google’s directors abandoned their de facto motto, “Don’t be evil,” some time ago. Ask any business school graduate: that’s not a coincidence.

Julia, who Google employs as an engineer, picked me up in her ostentatious new sports car tonight. I wasn’t so gauche as to ask, but I’m pretty sure she paid more for it than I made in the last decade.

“I guess accepting evil is working out pretty well for you and your colleagues,” I suggested.

“I can’t complain,” she replied. “Evil really isn’t all that bad.”

She paid for drinks and dinner, so who am I to argue?

2 September 2016

Why Do Sheep Attend Concerts?

I’ve never understood why people go to unexceptional concerts. Most of the events involve musicians performing songs by rote that they’ve previously recorded. So-called classical musicians are in a class by themselves; they perform music composed by someone who died decades or centuries ago. I understand why Frank Zappa referred to them as mechanics.

It’s the rare concert that provides an aesthetic experience that couldn’t be appreciated by listening to recordings. I remember seeing the Dead Kennedys performing outside the Democratic party’s national convention wearing Ku Klux Klan hats. After a few politically charged songs, the singer removed his hood to reveal the bloody Ronald Reagan mask he was wearing underneath. Ah, memories ...

I’m grateful to Steven Caldwell Brown from the University of Edinburgh and Don Knox of Glasgow Caledonian University for their recent paper, “Why go to pop concerts? The motivations behind live music attendance.” Now, thanks to the Scottish scholars’ research published in Musicæ Scientiæ, I finally understand this previously unfathomable behavior.

“The results highlight that participants want to ‘be there.’”

Brilliant! I hope they provide a definitive explanation of why the chicken crossed the road in a subsequent publication.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart