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11 December 2018

No. 1,245 (cartoon)

You’re a hopeless romantic.

I’m a hopeful romantic.

That’s far worse.

12 December 2018

Half a Millennium Behind Bars?

James Alex Fields Junior drove his car into a crowd of protesters last year; his attack killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens of other people. Apparently, the twenty-one-year-old Neo-Nazi idiot was incapable of a more nuanced rebuttal to the anti-racist demonstrators. He’ll be sentenced to life in prison plus an additional four hundred and nineteen years.

Ross is complaining with such passion that life is unfair it’s as if he just figured that out for the very first time.

“Why should a murderer get to live four hundred and nineteen years longer than the rest of us?” he fumed. “I hope he gets a Whitey Bulger makeover or at least shanked on his first day of prison.”

I tried to explain that the lengthy sentence was necessary to avoid future legal maneuvers that would allow him to walk free after only a century or two behind bars.

After that, I started thinking about advances in science and medicine. I have no desire to live to a triple-digit age, but a lot of people do. (The same people who want to live for centuries are the same people who get bored on a Saturday afternoon.) What if Fields had to spend half a millennium in the pen? That would be the kind of punishment Nazis deserve.

13 December 2018

The Alluring Smell of Feces

Anyone who’s ever embraced someone wearing lots of perfume would immediately recognize the fragrance wafting up from a steamy neck: feces. The smell doesn’t come from feces proper, at least probably not; the scent comes from the indole it contains. Esther Inglis-Arkell described the compound thusly.

Indole is molecule that looks like two mostly-carbon rings glued together, little spikes of hydrogen one each joint of the ring, and one nitrogen added in for spice. Although it can be solid, it usually released into the atmosphere in individual pieces, and get picked up by your nose.

That’s how a real writer would describe it without the help of a copy editor, but I’m taking a different approach. Here’s all you need to know about indole: it’s what you gotta have if you want to catch a man-eating tiger.

That was Dr. Prayag’s idea; he proposed using Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume to lure the tiger that killed over a dozen people in the last couple of years in India. The cheap fragrance is rich in indole, and kitties love it! The wildlife veterinarian already proved it would work by using it to capture a leopard and a tiger.

Yavatmal authorities didn’t like Dr. Prayag’s proposal, so they came up with a clever scheme of their own: they brought in an elephant to thwart the man-eating tiger. Or perhaps not so clever after all, the elephant killed a villager and proved useless against the preying puss.

No one will ever know if the vulgar perfume would have conned the cat; rangers shot the wily feline to death last month.

The moral of this cautionary tale is clear: don’t wear perfume. Actually, that doesn’t follow at all, but pay no nevermind: that’s still damn fine advice.

14 December 2018

Pulling the Plug on Keith Richards

“I pulled the plug on it. I got fed up with it.”

That’s a recent announcement from Keith Richards and/or his publicist that the guitarist has stopped drinking alcohol (except when he regularly has a drink containing alcohol). That’s the official press release; the subtext is that he’s purportedly no longer drinking a bottle or two of Jack Daniels whiskey a day.

(My friend Nerissa is a smart investor. As soon as she heard the news, she sold all of her stock in that distillery before shares dropped by thirty-seven percent.)

Some people stop drinking when they finally realize they’re never going to defeat alcohol. I wonder if Richards stopped drinking when alcohol finally figured out that it was never going to conquer Keith Richards?

15 December 2018

Square Eclipse Revisited

Miranda complimented me on my piece Square Eclipse; she noted that I’m one of the few people who renders the color of the sun correctly. I found that remark most curious since I’m a chromophobe and made the photograph in shades of grey.

(I pity the fool who asks me if, as a chromophobe, I like mommy porn like Fifty Shades of Grey. I replied to the last person who asked me that by pouring an entire shaker of salt in her beer. Her cup didst indeed runneth over!)

Let’s see, where was I?

Ah yes, the color of the sun. I tried to talk about something else, but Miranda insisted on giving me a lecture on interplanetary optics. (Once a teacher, always a teacher.) Sunlight is actually white. She explained that the blue light from the high-energy end of the spectrum gets scattered by the atmosphere but the relatively low energy red light makes it through, hence the “yellow” sun. She added for emphasis that I should go into space and look at the sun for proof if I was skeptical.

I didn’t ask her why she wanted me to fry my retinas, so I thanked her for her praise and science lesson and finally changed the subject.

16 December 2018

Street Ambrosia

A disheveled man in a greasy coat approached me on the subway and offered to sell me ten grams of ambrosia. “This will knock your mittens off!” he enthused with a brown-toothed grin. This sort of thing happens all the time; it’s all part of living in Sans Frisco.

“Thanks, but I’m trying to quit,” I lied. (That reply almost always works.)

In fact, I had a pleasant flashback to a lesson my late grandmother taught me as a young boy. She warned me to never buy ambrosia on the street because it’s usually cut with industrial nectar.

I wish I’d paid more attention to her other great pieces of advice, sigh ...

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart