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Weak XLIII

22 October 2016

No. 5,933 (cartoon)

I love you.

You could have fooled me.

I did.

23 October 2016

Deleted Unread

A robot replied to the email note I sent to Nico.

I am traveling without electronics from 15-30 October. All email received during this period, including yours, was deleted unread. It’s nothing personal; I just want to return home to an empty inbox.

Happy Halloween,

—Nico

What a great idea! I bet she’s really receiving and reading her mail while she’s allegedly away, but it’s a perfect excuse for not replying.

24 October 2016

Dead After Alive

Peter Jozzeppi "Pete" Burns died yesterday. I never heard of him, but he seems to have been known for his musical ensemble, Dead Or Alive. I suppose the band will need to be renamed Dead After Alive. Or something like that.

25 October 2016

Toasting Gender Equality

Drinking alcohol can be quite pleasant; ask any inebriate. Drinking to problematic levels, though, is, well, problematic. Public health officials have maintained that alcoholism would be much less prevalent if men drank as much as women. That’s why I’m filing this notebook entry in my Be Careful What You Wish For folder.

A recent report in BMJ Open analyzed millions of drinkers from around the world during the twentieth century and concluded men and women generally now drink about the same amount. That’s a big change from a hundred years ago when men drank twice as much as women. The research had a definitive answer to the question, “Why are men drinking less after all these years and millennia?”

They aren’t; women are drinking more.

At last, gender equality! Now both women and men can enjoy cirrhosis of the liver, chronic pancreatitis, and all the other great benefits of alcoholism.

I look forward to telling Josephine the news when she comes over to my studio this afternoon; this calls for a toast, perhaps several.

26 October 2016

Sex Clean

Jana was just plain tuckered out when I saw her at Jasmin’s party tonight. She looked exhausted and was most odoriferous, but not in a good way. (Come to think of it, I suppose there is no way of “smelling good” except to be scentless.)

She admitted that she’d been programming for almost three days and nights and hadn’t had time to shower.

“You didn’t have time to shower?” I asked. “Even if you include a gerbil or two, that’s less than an hour.”

“The only reason to get that clean is if you’re going to sleep with someone, and Florian and I are done done done done,” she explained. “I’m not ready to meet the next loser tonight, so why bother?”

I found her logic compelling, and I felt a bit silly for having bathed within the last week.

27 October 2016

World Standards Day(s)

The members of the IEC, ISO, and ITU celebrate World Standards Day on 14 October. The United States waited until today to observe World Standards Day 2016.

Beautiful!

Standards are great, that’s why we have so many from which to choose.

28 October 2016

Salem Witch Trials

The 1692 Salem Witch Trials were over and done with over three centuries ago, but since Halloween’s only a few days, that provides as good an excuse as any to talk about American witch mythology.

The first myth to be debunked is gender. Four of the nineteen witches hanged in Salem were male. And that brings us to the other myth: no one burned any witches; they hanged all but one. (The pious authorities crushed Giles Corey under a mountain of rocks, thus earning him the distinction of being the only American to be pressed to death.)

But hold it, didn’t Jeanne d’Arc burn to death? She did, but for cross-dressing, and that’s another story. The French burned their evildoers, and the Brits hanged theirs.

So what did the good people do who lived on the island of Guernsey between England and France? They played it safe and first hanged then burned their witches. Win-win as the Californians say.

Oh dear, I seem to have wandered far from the Salem Witch Trials and even farther from an interesting story.

Done.

29 October 2016

My Internet Site, Cemented in Time

I love publishing my work on the Internet. It’s not like printing a book, where I printed a couple thousand copies thirty years ago and will spend the rest of my life with most of them. I love the freedom of putting a new body of writing and images on the Internet tonight then editing and proofing everything in the morning, even though we all know mañana never comes.

I finally decided to permanently commit. My Internet Site, Cemented in Time, is just that. I embedded a hard drive with the every bit and byte from my Internet site in the wet cement next to the polyvinyl chloride tubular portal for my piece, Internet Archive Audio Underground.

Done! And one last thing to (never) edit and proof.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart