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Weak XI

13 March 2018

No. 1,624 (cartoon)

You’re a dream come true.

I’m delighted.

It was a nightmare.

14 March 2018

Airhead

It’s 1939, you’re a veterinarian, and your client’s prized poodle has been kidnapped. (Dognapped?) I know it’s not 1939 and, statistically speaking, you’re probably not a veterinarian missing an abducted mutt, but please bear with me.

In the Three Stooges’ masterpiece, Calling All Curs, Curly is admonished to think, but without success.

“I keep tryin’ to think but nothing happens,” he laments.

And speaking of airheads, doctors in occupied Ireland came across a rare, literal case of the phenomenon. A variety of physicians couldn’t figure out what was ailing an eighty-four-year-old man until they examined scans of his brain and found some of it wasn’t there. Instead, they discovered a large air pocket in his right frontal lobe where his brain used to be.

I thought that was a very valuable lesson. The next time someone—probably me—acts like an airhead, I’ll seek an opinion from medical practitioners to see if that just might be the case.

15 March 2018

Welcome Nightmares

Kurt complained mightily about what a wretched night he had. He told me he dreamt that he met a spectacularly beautiful woman, an introduction that was quickly leading to an intimate—nudge nudge wink wink—encounter.

“That’s never happened to me,” I admitted, “so I can only begin to imagine how traumatic that must have been.”

“Go to hell,” he grumbled.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“I woke up,” he complained.

Ah, that I could understand even if I’ve never had that experience. I’m fortunate; for reasons I do not understand, I always have nightmares. This morning’s bad dream was typical.

I didn’t know where I was, in part because I’d lost everything including my navigational electronics. I was running away from bad hombres with guns who raided an Icelandic falafel buffet when I instead found myself chased my an improbably speedy alligator. It wasn’t that bad, though; what I thought was a deadly predator turned out to be behemoth raccoon that wasn’t even rabid. Nevertheless, I was quite relieved to wake up and quaff a liter of coffee.

I’m glad I’ll never have Kurt’s nocturnal problem. And as for my nightmares? I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, psychologist, witch doctor, or any other mental health professional, so all I can do is speculate that bad things happen to me when I dream because I enjoy a ridiculously charmed and lovely life free from anxieties when I’m awake.

16 March 2018

Fifty Years After My Lai

Fifty years ago today American soldiers had another bloody day in Viet Nam. Specifically, soldiers from Company C, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry Regiment, Eleventh Brigade, and Twenty-Third Infantry Division slaughtered from some five hundred unarmed civilians in My Lai, mostly women—many of whom were first gang-raped and mutilated—and their children. It was about as civilized as massacres get; the Americans took time off for lunch.

As a result of this atrocity, just a single soldier spent three and a half years under house arrest. All of the other details are documented and readily available for anyone who wants to be as sickened as I am half a century after the unprovoked atrocity.

I’m sorry to be so somber, but I don’t have even an attempt at a clever punch line or an amusing angle on this remembrance. I’m also sorry about the over fifty-eight thousand Americans who died in the war—especially the three hundred and eighty-two who killed themselves—but we earned our defeat in Viet Nam at My Lai.

17 March 2018

Gooseburgers

Brian Ellison, a Senate candidate in Michigan, is proposing that homeless people be given shotguns for self-defense. (Why not pistols? Too much paperwork.) That’s a great idea with the wrong rationale.

Take the geese and ducks—please!—that have overrun Golden Gate Park and covered the grounds with their feces. (I will admit, however, that watching football players slip and slide on the birds’ excrement is amusing; it’s even slipperier that a Vaudeville banana peel.)

Meanwhile, take the homeless people—again, please!—who live in or near the park. In spite of the fact that Sans Frisco’s budget is over ten billion dollars a year, with seventy or eighty thousand dollars purportedly allocated to each person living on the streets or in the bushes without a roof over his or her head, that money seems to provide a luxurious life for the administraitors who “serve” them with relatively little trickling down to the neediest.

Put one and one together, and the answer is a double-barreled shotgun.

Even at close range, it’s hard to kill a big fat bird with a pistol or a rifle if the person pulling the trigger has delirium tremens. A shaky aim isn’t much of a handicap with a sawed-off shotgun, though. We’re talking barbecued birds; there are hundreds of free charcoal grills in Golden Gate Park that are rarely used. Give a homeless person a gun and s/he can rob a liquor store. But give that person a shotgun, and s/he’ll never be hungry again.

If one of them sets up a gooseburger stand, s/he won’t be homeless for long as long as no one skimps on the obligatory rooster sauce.

18 March 2018

My Posthumous Life

Constantin Reliu is a much more honorable person than I’ll ever be. Romanian judicial officials told the very much alive man in court that he was no longer among the living because it was too late to revoke his 2003 death certificate.

He shrugged, bemused. Reliu is an hombre who is well acquainted with bureaucracy. I would not have been that patient or dignified.

If I’m ever declared legally dead while I’m in fine fettle, the first thing I’m going to do is go on a crime spree. I’d start by taking a four and a half million dollar Lamborghini Veneno—Spanish for poison!—for a “test drive” with no intention of ever returning it. I’d then head to the most pretentious and overpriced restaurant I can find, order a banquet worthy of Monsieur Creosote, then wash it down with a two and a half thousand dollar bottle of Champagne Krug Clos d’Ambonnay 1995. Or maybe two or three. And then I’d leave without paying, safe in the knowledge that the authorities can’t jail or punish a dead man.

Although I have all the cameras and computers I need, it might be fun to have a few dozen more. And this is where my plan gets a bit nebulous. I may need to rethink this whole caper; a Veneno has almost no cargo capacity.

I wonder if a civilian can steal a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with an M240C machine gun and BGM-71 TOW missiles? That would make my posthumous life so much easier.

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart