Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XLVIII

26 November 2018

No. 7,464 (cartoon)

You’re living in a fool’s paradise.

Life doesn’t get better than this!

27 November 2018

Ululating and Caterwauling

Edward Allhusen is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, or so it would appear after seeing the reviews for his most recent book, Betrumped: The Surprising History of 3,000 Long-Lost, Exotic and Endangered Words. He laments the imminent disappearance of hundreds of words from Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). We lose words that we don’t use, and fine words like fizgig, hobbledehoy, juggins, and tarse could soon become extinct.

I’m a would-be curmudgeon, not a curmudgeon wannabe. That’s because “wannabe” is not a proper word, nor are hangry, mansplain, and other semantic shenanigans added to dictionaries this year. A pox on trendy editors everywhere.

Allhusen and I might make a great team. He could ululate about the disappearing words, and I could caterwaul about the ephemeral slang passing as real words.

And with that, I’m going to stop my caterwauling and condiddle out of here.

28 November 2018

Pucks are for Schmucks

I bet mass murderers everywhere have crossed Oakland University in the grim suburbs outside of Detroit off their list of potential soft targets. The American Association of University Professors has provided each of its members with a single hockey puck to ward off psychotic attackers with automatic weapons. University Police Chief Mark Gordon reportedly believes that the heavy rubber biscuits could distract someone slaughtering students, seventeen hundred of whom should soon also be armed with a self-defense puck of their own.

I suggest that the learned scholars go on a shopping trip to the Motor City. For less than the cost of all of those hockey pucks, the pedagogues could buy at least eight Bushmaster QRC assault rifles with thirty-round magazines. With a bump stock, that’s at least a bullet a second; even the most accomplished athlete can’t throw hockey pucks that fast.

And as for distracting an assailant, a single hollow point bullet through the forehead—pink mist everywhere!—is much better at diverting attention than a dozen hockey pucks bouncing off someone’s noggin.

29 November 2018

Salvador’s Dolly

Malcolm asked me to help him move out of his place, so I of course agreed. I never say no to a friend unless I’m declining a request. Also, “helping him move” simply involved making sure we didn’t run out of drinks and snacks while he directed the professional movers with a big truck he hired.

I was struck by one of the hand trucks the workers had. It was covered in multiple layers of tape, fibers, and cloth. Maybe Eva Hesse isn’t dead after all?

Salvador, one of the hands, was delighted when he saw me photographing it, and asked if I thought it was Art. He was relieved when I declared that it was indeed Art. He confided that he believed it was too but that he was afraid to tell anyone. What a triumph of our society, intelligent people afraid to think for themselves and voice their own opinions!

30 November 2018

What a Maroon!

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator (yes, that’s his actual redundantly repetitious title) Jim Bridenstein has been on the job for less than a year, but that hasn’t stopped the Okie politician from telling people many orders of magnitude more intelligent than he’ll ever be how to do their work. He recently warned Elon Musk that he had to stop drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana if he wanted to continue to build and launch rockets.

I’m sure I’ve heard of something funnier and stooopid this year, but nothing comes to mind at the moment. Bridenstein is an idiot who was appointed to his political position by a cretin, or maybe vice-versa. And yet the administraitor who couldn’t assemble a model rocket from a kit he found in a box of cereal had the hubris that comes from breathtaking stupidity to lecture the SpaceX CEO and CTO, who, in his spare time, is also Solar City’s Chairman and Tesla Motors’ CEO and Product Architect.

In those immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon!”

If you can’t get inebriated and stoned while building a rocket to Mars you have no business even thinking about leaving the troposphere. I doubt Bridenstein is even competent to pilot a desk chair even though that’s all he’s ever done.

1 December 2018

PETA Über Alles!

Almost a decade ago I wondered aloud—if I can do that by typing—whether the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was more offensive than muttonheaded or perhaps the other way around. Here’s what I wrote then ...

Members of the group wore Ku Klux Klan outfits during a protest at a dog show last month. I didn’t read more than the first few sentences; I didn’t need to. I now appreciate that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ raison d’être is to publicize the name of the organization. I also suspect the charlatans running the group are paid by the Association of Factory Raised Meat Producers to tarnish the reputation of animal welfare campaigners. That’s what empirical evidence strongly suggests.

The mountebanks running the scam have apparently worked tirelessly to become even more detestable. Instead of doing anything that benefits a single critter, they crank out press releases about micro-trivial and nonexistent “issues” such as urging people to call fish “sea kittens,” and banning popular phrases such as bringing home the bacon, letting the cat out of the bag, flogging a dead horse, et cetera. And when they have something especially specious to say, they rent a billboard as they just did to declare that feminists can’t eat eggs.

Are they trying to use lies and irrational arguments to land cushy jobs with the aspiring tyrant in Washington DC? The core belief seems to be the same: if you’re not ideologically pure then you’re an enemy of the people and you can’t be in our cult.

Here’s a safe prediction: if they haven’t already said this, I bet I’ll see this bumper sticker sooner than later: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Über Alles!

2 December 2018

Existential Foresight

I haven’t researched this, but I believe borderline dyslexics who meant “stink thank” coined the concept of “think tank.” I don’t know if the Foresight Institute is one or the other or neither or both, but I appreciated the surreal name of the outfit’s event today, “Accelerating Toward Futures of Existential Hope.”

On one hand, I like the acknowledgment that there are myriad futures. On the other hand, the organizers failed to acknowledge the prescient observation attributed to William Gibson, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” (Did he say it or didn’t he? He ain’t dead yet, why doesn’t someone just ask him?)

But why talk about the name of the event when I can talk about image promoting it? It’s rather pixelated and thus ambiguous, but it appears to show a city comprised of structures best described as “medieval Jetsons modern” floating in the clouds about an ocean sunset. I see a hodgepodge of architectural styles, flying saucers, and planets and/or moons impossibly close. A rocket-like object is flying from the Earth to the cheesy world above, but I can’t tell whether it’s really a rocket or someone propelled by smoke and flames blasting from the derrière of the future.

Yawn.

I know snake oil when I see it, and I’ve seen it all before. The people who are promising rockets flying to cites in the sky are no doubt descendants of the same hucksters who told me I’d have a personal jetpack and a flying car when I grew up. I have neither. (But, to be fair, I haven’t really grown up, either.)

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2018 David Glenn Rinehart