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Weak XVII

24 April 2019

No. 6,846 (cartoon)

I miss the times when life was good.

Your life was a mistake.

It was good before I was born.

25 April 2019

Bone Appétit!

OK Jack, let’s say you work in an industrial food factory in Pennsylvania and you can’t find Jill. And then you hear the behemoth meat grinder making disturbingly strange sounds.

Uh-oh ...

Yep.

Fraid so.

According to Charles Kiessling, the Lycoming County Coroner, Jill Greninger, “tragically either fell or was drawn into the machine resulting in her death.”

No mention of Jill tumbling after, but Kiessling had yet to complete the investigation. It took authorities over two hours to extract Greninger’s remains from the massive meat grinder. Apparently, it works rather well.

I’m reporting this horrific, gruesome, grisly, gory story for the obvious reason: it’s a horrific, gruesome, grisly, gory story. But wait! It’s also a cautionary tale.

One of the reasons I don’t eat ground meat is that I can’t be certain whether my hamburger isn’t a Jillburger. If you’re willing to gamble, I suggest you first visit the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Internet site to see how long it’s been since the Economy Locker Storage Company, Greninger’s employer, has been cited.

And with that, bone appétit!

26 April 2019

Parenting on Drugs

I just saw an astounding headline: almost fifteen percent of people driving in the state of Washington with children in the car were under the influence of marijuana. That’s almost one out of seven motorists with miserable little urchins in their automobile.

Incredible!

I simply don’t believe the statistic. Every parent I know has told me you can’t raise your parasitic offspring without being on drugs to mask the suffering and misery. The percentage of drugged parents driving must be in the nineties.

I’m not a parent, so I can’t be too critical. Preventing drug users from breeding would probably doom the human race to extinction. Come to think about it, that’s a darn fine idea.

Sterilize people who use drugs and alcohol (the source of most pregnancies), and humans wouldn’t be a problem in a century since there wouldn’t be any.

Later ...

In researching my proposal, I found that the field of eugenics is disturbingly problematic, so please forget about what you just read. I have!

27 April 2019

Always Remember Dead People

One of the best things about the Internet and one of the worst things about the Internet are the same thing: anonymity. Anonymity allows any moron to be as stooopid as s/he wants and remain nameless, thus I do not know who posed the question in a public forum, “How did people in the Middle Ages know what skeletons look like without X-ray machines?”

Either the Internet site where the person posted the question didn’t allow users to delete them or s/he wasn’t smart enough to do so, so the query was amended with, “Edit: I forgot about dead people.”

The lesson to be learned from this little farce is obvious: never forget about dead people, because we’ll be joining them sooner or later.

28 April 2019

This Is Photography

My most recent piece, This Is Photography, bears a strong resemblance to my friend Victor Landweber’s series of three images, Make Your Photographs Sing. For the record, I saw Victor’s work recently before making my photograph.

This begs the obvious question: is it plagiarism?

I have the obvious answer: who cares?

If I was a sophist I might claim that my work was an homage to Victor, that it was informed by his work, or other artspeak claptrap. I don’t know if the photograph was so obvious that I had to take it, or if the idea would not have occurred to me had I not seen, Make Your Photographs Sing.

All I can say with certainty is I didn’t photograph the book, published in 1955, before I put it into storage almost thirty years ago. Maybe I did steal the idea. On the other hand; I did photograph the volume on a paint-splattered canvas instead of a black background and included my hand.

I have only one thing to add: who cares?

29 April 2019

Loophole Louie

If you’re an American, you almost certainly paid more in federal taxes last year than Amazon, Chevron, Delta Air Lines, Duke Energy, General Motors, Halliburton, IBM, Molson Coors, Netflix, Occidental Petroleum, Prudential Financial, and Salesforce combined. Not only did they not pay a dime, most also received massive government subsidies. This is a great country for generous welfare benefits, but only if you’re rich.

Please don’t lecture me on using Loophole Louie to prepare my tax returns; I feel no shame or guilt whatsoever for deducting every cent I spend on my cat as a business deduction for rodent control, “forget” to report some cash transactions and otherwise try to do my best to pay the same taxes as a company that made ten billion dollars last year.

I’m doing pretty well at avoiding taxes, now if I could only tap into some of the zillions of dollars the government doles out to billionaires ...

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart