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Weak XXXVIII

18 September 2016

No. 8,133 (cartoon)

Why don’t you like dogs?

They don’t taste like chicken.

19 September 2016

Two Whopper Prints (Diptych, Made With Steamroller Platen)

It’s almost autumn, the steamrollers are rolling, and coal smoke is in the air. It’s time for my annual aesthetic foray into the analog world; time to use a coal-powered steamroller as a platen to make prints. In previous years I’ve flattened mobile phones, ketchup packets, and Rainier Ale cans.

Thia sponsored this year’s piece using hamburgers. Yesterday, she brought me a couple of Whoppers, the brand name of the sandwiches sold by the Burger King “restaurant” chain. I put them between two sheets of art board, then put the assemblage in a large plastic bag in the path of the steamroller.

Squish! Squish! And that was that.

I was appalled and almost nauseous at the mess I found when I opened the bag; the smashed hamburgers looked and smelled like vomitus. Thia wasn’t surprised; she said that they tasted like regurgitation even before they were. (I politely didn’t ask my patron why she ate them.)

I photographed the results, then took the greasy prints back to the Internet Archive to dry.

When I went to see how they were progressing this morning, they weren’t. They weren’t there, that is. Someone left an anonymous note complaining about, “the wretched stench.” S/he wrote that my most recent work had been donated to the composting bin.

Yikes, a Philistine among us!

As a result, the only evidence I have that the odoriferous piece every existed are the three documentary photographs in Two Whopper Prints (Diptych, Made With Steamroller Platen).

20 September 2016

A Decade-Long Divorce

I’m very sorry to read that Angelina Jolly is divorcing Brad Pitts. I’m distressed because that means I’ll have to read scandalous headlines about them such as the current one, “Brad’s on drugs!” for at least the next decade while standing in line for groceries.

Although I don’t advocate any flavor of drug use, Pitts and his soon to be former wife have half a dozen children. Who would want to be fully conscious living with half a dozen rascals? I fear it won’t be long before the tabloids are screaming that Jolly is psychotic. Again, with so many offspring, who could blame her?

I remain so very glad that I’m anonymous, and that most of my stupidity goes unnoticed, or at least unreported.

21 September 2016

Alcosynth

Humans have enjoyed alcohol for millennia. Why, were it not for alcohol, many of us would never have been born. Humans and a few other species have worked out a sustainable relationship with natural intoxicants.

But now, a professor at the Imperial College in England wants to bollix everything up.

David Nutt has developed a new formulation of synthetic alcohol that allows people to drink excessively without suffering the usual adverse reactions. You may still wake up with someone with whom you don’t remember going to bed, but at least you won’t wake up with a hangover.

I think anyone who’s read Frankenstein can see where this is going. When you bring the dead back to life, you’re tampering with the very nature of life. Similarly, when you give people a synthetic potion that allows drunks to break the fundamental laws of nature, then unimaginable calamities and disasters are sure to follow.

22 September 2016

Seven-Dollar Toast

Devorah has it with San Francisco. She’s had it had it had it; she’s had it up to here. She complains about everything from all the real people, i.e., people like her, leaving town. She whines about all the posers, i.e., young people with huge salaries, moving in. And of course, she whinges about the ridiculously high cost of living here, everything from spending eighty percent of her income on a grimy, dank apartment to seven-dollar toast.

She’s had it up to here and then some, so now she’s doing something about it. She announced that she’s joining the exodus and moving to Middletown.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“It’s about a hundred and fifty clicks north of here,” she replied, “between Left-town and Right-town.”

Cute, but not really.

She went on to extoll the wonders of living in a small town, including ample parking day or night. I didn’t ask her why she’d want to live in a place so dull and soporific that no one wants to go there. I fear she’ll soon be longing for seven-dollar toast, but I’m not the one to burst her bubble.

23 September 2016

Two or Three Parents

The gymnast Paul Hamm was widely ridiculed for saying, “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.”

I have a couple of problems with that. First, he never said it. And even if he did, he might have been accurate. John Zhang combined bits from two women’s eggs, added the father’s secret sauce, et voilà! A child with three parents!

The researcher from New Hope Fertility Center in New York explained that the process involved mitochondrial DNA or some damn thing. I didn’t understand a word of it; all I know is that some people aren’t as stupid as they appear to be.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart