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Weak XI

13 March 2017

No. 6,759 (cartoon)

You’re blind to the morass we’re in.

You’re crazy; I just don’t see that.

14 March 2017

A Man’s Right to Know

I steal, er, appropriate, ideas from other people all the time without attribution, so I can’t and won’t complain that Jessica Farrar has done the same to me.

The Texas legislator is the author of the Man’s Right to Know Act which purports put “masturbatory emissions” under government control, and fine men if their “emissions [are] outside of a woman’s vagina, or created outside of a health or medical facility.”

It’s apparent to me that she was motivated by what I wrote three months ago ...

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.

Farrar’s bill dictates that illegal ejaculation “will be considered an act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life.” Violators face a hundred-dollar fine.

The longhorn lawmaker apparently purloined the legislation from the Woman’s Right to Know Act, a patriarchal Texas law passed a while ago. She changed the word “Woman” to “Man” on the cover, replaced draconian assaults on women with the relative abuse of men, and she was done. I know I’m lazy, but even I make a bit more of an effort than just cutting and pasting.

I’ve never had any interactions with Farrar, but suspect she’s doing me a favor my leaving my disgraced reputation unsullied by any and all things Texan.

15 March 2017

My Tomato Plantation

Elaine brought salady things for brunch a month ago, or something like that. All I know with certainty is that she left a tomato on my shelf. I admired the crimson orb for weeks until I noticed it was developing a selenium patina that wasn’t a patina at all. Also, I couldn’t ignore that gravity was embracing the fruit’s structure and curvature, as it does with all of us of a certain age.

I know from past experience that old tomatoes ferment, so I decided to eat this one when it showed signs of decrapitude brought on by old age. Dang, was I in for a surprise when I cut it in half: it was gravid!

The fruit was full of sprouts. This should not have surprised me since tomatoes are full of seeds, but I was nevertheless taken aback. Although I eat sprouts on occasion, somehow it didn’t feel right to chew the tiny tomato plants.

I put the parturient tomato halves in the garden to see what would happen. I was imagining fresh tomatoes in olive oil in a few months when I went to check on my little farm in the morning and discovered creatures of the night had devoured everything but the kitchen sink, and that was only because the sink was safely locked inside.

Oh well, I never wanted to be a field laborer anyway.

16 March 2017

Boaty McBoatface Aborted

If you need to really bollix something up and can’t afford to have anything go right, send in the Brits.

The Natural Environment Research Council asked the public to suggest a name its new polar research ship; Boaty McBoatface was the winner by a huge margin. I predicted the stodgy bureaucrats wouldn’t be so wise as to recognize such a brilliant idea, and would instead probably call the vessel something stupid like RRS Olde Boringname. I regret to report that I was right. (Technically, they named it the RRS Sir David Attenborough, but that’s the same thing.)

Of course, it wasn’t enough to merely disenfranchise the voters. The apparatchiks went on to name an underwater robot Boaty McBoatface, even though it’s not a boat and has no face.

What a fiasco! There’ll always be an England, alas.

17 March 2017

The Zero-Minute Meeting

If there’s anything easier than being an artist, it’s being a management consultant. Just walk into a fat company, point out obvious solutions to obvious problems using lots of popular phrases like “creating synergies” and “new paradigms,” then bill ’em a couple hundred dollars an hour for your brilliant advice.

That’s lucrative, but it’s not nearly as profitable as coming up with the business craze du jour. And that’s why I wrote my new book: money.

The Zero-Minute Meeting*

Just say know.

*Make Everything Known

I didn’t exactly write it; no one does that anymore. I came up with the convoluted title, then made a crude mockup of the cover. I’ll use that to find an agent, then the agent finds a publisher, then the publisher hires a writer to pen hundreds of pages of codswallop, then I sit back and cash the royalty checks while I work on my next book, The Zero-Minute Manager.

18 March 2017

Roll Over Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson Berry is dead, so I decided to remember him by looking at films of his performances from around the time I was born. His concerts look identical to most of the shows in the same genre today but with two significant differences: they were first, and they were better.

Johnny B. Goode forever. Roll over Chuck Berry, and tell John Lennon the news.

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©2017 David Glenn Rinehart