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Weak XXXV

28 August 2018

No. 9.089 (cartoon)

How did I get to be this old?

Murder is against the law.

29 August 2018

Rambunctious Animal Trying to Fulfill a Need

Once upon a time in another millennium, a Greenpeace apparatchik in Hawai’i distributed an information packet on dolphins clearly labeled, “for internal use only.” Or perhaps the warning wasn’t foolproof given the right fool. The author later got a call from an irate schoolteacher asking how he could send information to young students that included the sentence, “Dolphins will have sex with anything that moves.” (To make things worse, he of course used a popular four-letter word instead of “have sex with.”)

That was undeniably a faux pas, but at least it was accurate.

Roger Lars, the mayor of Landevennec, France, has banned swimming and diving near the coast of his village. The reason, in a word: Zafar.

Zafar, a “lovelorn” male bottlenose dolphin, has developed a keen interest in humans that the French newspaper Ouest-France describes as, “of an intimate nature.”

“Dolphins and different whale species will rub themselves against objects with what appears to be some type of sexual satisfaction coming ... strange behaviors can come about,” Elizabeth Hawkins, an Australia researcher, confirmed.

Is Zafar really that dangerous? Probably not; no human has ever died from an amorous encounter with a dolphin. On the other hand, Hawkins notes that Zafar, “may not mean to inflict harm upon swimmers, but it’s several hundred kilos of a fairly rambunctious animal trying to fulfill a need.”

Several hundred kilos of rambunctious animal trying to fulfill a need: now that’s amoré!

30 August 2018

The Fastest Homing Pigeon in the World

I’m not sure if one of my favorite Chris Burden pieces has a proper title. I’m thinking about the time he flew a paper airplane down the aisle of a supersonic Concorde jet flying over the Atlantic, thus creating The Fastest Paper Airplane in the World.

A couple of homing pigeon fanciers in China tried the same thing with disastrous results. They decided to cheat by smuggling their racing pigeons aboard a bullet train. Pigeons can fly over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour over short distances; the modern express trains go twice that fast over long distances. They concluded that their pigeons would win if given a train ride for most of the six hundred and fifty-kilometer race.

Their scheme worked; their pigeons did indeed beat all of their competitors home. Unfortunately, they apparently weren’t very good at math, and their birds made it back well before even the fastest of birds could have possibly arrived.

About the only thing they did was right was not to claim the six-figure prize money. As a result, the miscreants ended up with suspended sentences and not in the hoosegow.

Too bad Chris Burden didn’t live long enough to hear about the farce; I’m sure that he would have appreciated The Fastest Homing Pigeon in the World.

31 August 2018

Cancer Exchange

I’ve tried to remain as ignorant as possible about cancer as possible. That way, if I hear that someone has, say, toenail cancer, I won’t know if it’s a very painful annoyance or a death sentence. My willful unawareness ended yesterday when I learned that two dear friends have very serious cases of cancer.

There’s no point saying that’s unfair; I figured out life is unfair when I was a little boy. I have never once seen any reason to change that assessment, especially while Dick Cheney outlives good people.

If a friend needed a kidney I’d donate one of mine for transplant. I wish there was a way to transplant cancer.

I’m happy to enjoy my improbably charmed life until I suffer from mental and/or physical decrapitude; I have no desire to explore far outside the wonderful physical and conceptual places where I thrive.

My friends are different; they each have long lists of new things to try. I wish I could take their cancers so they could continue their explorations. I know that’s a hollow statement since that’s medically impossible at last report. I suppose it’s just another way of saying that life is painfully unfair, and that’s so obvious there’s no point saying it again.

1 September 2018

The Most Impressive Artwork at Burning Man

I’ve never really understood why anyone bothers with art criticism. For example, why bother writing, “Kanye West is a pretentious buffoon?” Anyone who agrees or disagrees with that statement won’t waste her or his time reading more, so why bother?

(I may have made a mistake to include “art” and “Kanye West” in the same paragraph, but I’m too lazy to rewrite it now.)

The Burning Man festival is famous for Burning Man art that looks like Burning Man art; yawn. I didn’t think there was more to say until I spotted a brilliant critique in the form of a thirteen-word headline: “This 100-foot-tall disco ball could be the most impressive artwork at Burning Man.”

That’s all one really needs to know about the Burning Man exhibition this year, innit?

2 September 2018

Corks Galore

I have a lot of wine corks. I’m not sure how many, but I’d guess at least five thousand of ’em. One might conclude from my inventory that I drink a lot of wine. I may or may not, depending on your definition of, “a lot.” In any case, one can’t conclude anything with certainty from the number of wine cork on hand and under foot.

First, I don’t know when I started collecting them. Twenty years ago? Thirty years ago? I have no idea. Also, I didn’t drink wine from every uncorked bottle; I brought many of them home from parties. Conversely, a lot of my wine these days comes in economical five-liter bags that have spouts, not corks. And that’s quite enough about the volume of wine in question.

The volume of corks is not in question; I have too many of them. Veronica pointed that out gently when she said she was moving and that I needed to move my corks out of her basement.

I agreed it was time to divest myself of most of my corks since I’ve never been able to come up with an aesthetic use for them. The only idea I had was to dump them in one of the artificial lakes in Golden Gate Park, but that smelled more like littering then art since someone would have to clean up my mess.

I decided to recycle most of them after boxing at least a thousand of them for future use, possibly in a body of water near you.

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart