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11 December 2016

No. 791 (cartoon)

I’m floating down the river of time.

It’s an open sewer.

12 December 2016

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Beatrice fancies herself to be a comedian, an opinion shared by almost no one who’s seen her perform. As a brief survey of the popular culture hellscape will confirm, there’s no correlation between talent and commercial success; that worked to Beatrice’s advantage.

She got lucky; no other explanation will do.

Beatrice was eager for an audience, but no audience was eager for her, or even mildly interested. That’s how she got her lucky break when, out of desperation, she volunteered to perform at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, California. She correctly concluded that her almost complete lack of comedic talent would be minimized if she delivered her lines through a sign language interpreter. That was true, but it didn’t negate her main failing as a comedian: she wasn’t funny.

She was dying onstage, as they say in her trade, until she stumbled upon her fortuitous accident.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before ...” she began.

That turned out to be a literal showstopper. Her interpreter was laughing too hard to do his job. Beatrice was mortified when she realized what she’d just said. But when her stock line was finally conveyed to the audience, everyone in the hall started laughing uproariously.

And that’s how she discovered that deaf people like deaf jokes. That should not have come as a surprise since x people like x jokes, but, again, she wasn’t well versed in the comedic arts. It didn’t matter; Beatrice discovered comic gold: her own catch phrase.

Beatrice is doing well on the deaf circuit telling bad jokes, e.g., can a judge really give a deaf person a fair hearing? What she lacks in ability she makes up for in money, and that’s not funny.

13 December 2016

Internet Archive Driverless Truck

Slews of small companies are designing and building driverless trucks. They’re already on the road in Nevada, but has anyone thought about the implications and the collateral damage? Once truckers are extinct, can country music be far behind? (I never thought about it until now, but that does seem like a pretty good idea.)

I decided to conduct my own research, and it didn’t take me long to transform the Internet Archive’s freight vehicle into the Internet Archive Driverless Truck. I anticipated the skeptics, and conclusively documented that the truck was driverless from 13:32 on 9 December 2016 until 15:47 this afternoon. That’s over four days of safe, consistent performance!

This is a slow week for pickups and deliveries, so I suppose it’s probably still driverless.

I’m done with this project; even I have better things to do than photograph a truck. Now if I could only think of one of them.

14 December 2016

My Penis Bone

I have a penis bone. Hold it; that’s not right. I shall start over.

Decades ago I photographed natives of the Pribilof Islands helping fur seals off with their heavy coats. It didn’t hurt a bit; all of the seals were dead. At least the Pribilofians claimed they were dead at the time. Having recently bashed the seals’ heads in, I suppose they should know.

I returned to Sans Frisco with lots of money; wildlife snuff photos practically sell themselves. I also returned with a seal’s penis bone I found on the beach.

So why do seals and other mammals have penis bones and humans don’t? In a word, sexual monogamy. (Oops; that was two words.)

Before I continue, I’ll note that I learned two new words today in the course of my research, i.e., reading one article on the Internet. Baculum is the scientific name for penis bone, and intromission is the insertion of said penis in another person.

A University College London study hypothesized that a baculum is redundant if intromission lasts less than three minutes. Chimpanzees and an unknown percentage of humans are extraordinarily efficient and only need seven seconds or so to do what needs to be done.

When humans became sexually monogamous (or did we?) there was no biological need for intromission to last very long, so the human baculum vanished down the evolution hole. As a result, I am one of a very few people on the planet to have a penis bone.

15 December 2016

Every Sperm Is Sacred

Those wacky Texans are at it again. This time it’s a law mandating that all aborted fetuses be cremated and/or buried. It’s hard to out-crazy a Texan, but I’m feeling good tonight. I initially thought about having a proper funeral for my fingernails and toenails, but then I had a better idea.

I’m going to found the American Patriotic Alliance for Preborn Rights, a preprenetal advocacy organization that will make the lunatic fringe look positively Socratic. The organization will be dedicated to providing a dignified burial for every human sperm.

Did you know that a healthy man can ejaculate more sperm in a few seconds than there are people in the United States? A typical man will produce an average of five hundred and fifty billion sperm in his lifetime; that’s five times more than every human that’s ever lived.

Do we respect this sacred life? We do not. Instead, these unrealized human lives, this staggering potential, is literally thrown in the garbage like a used condom, and often inside a used condom.

As the founder of the Patriotic Alliance for Preborn Rights, I’ll draft model legislation, The Sperm With Dignity Act, outlining our demands for mandatory sperm funerals. I’ll then send press releases to Texas newspapers and periodicals lambasting Texans for ignoring a slaughter on an almost unimaginable scale even though it’s right under their noses, and sometimes on their sheets and couchs as well.

I’ll then open a beer, sit back, and watch the anti-choice factions try to out-crazy each other. That should provide Texas-sized entertainment!

16 December 2016

Six Foot One

Everything I write here is true: it either happened or it will. This one of those rare stories from the latter group.

Davide talking about the superiority of the metric system. I didn’t pay much attention to his argument; everything said with a thick Italian accent sounds the same.

“How tall are you?” Mouse asked.

“Six foot one,” he said proudly.

Mouse smiled her discreet, serene smile after winning the debate before it even started.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart