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Weak XXV

18 June 2019

No. 903 (cartoon)

Your future is ahead of you.

That was very long ago.

19 June 2019

Love by the Numbers

Cecelia has insisted for at least the last decade or two that she’s “done with men.” I think that she was telling the truth at the time, but that was before she met Cedric not long after her seventy-third birthday.

Like me, Cecelia eschews relationship labels. She refers to Cedric as, “my gentleman companion,” but I smell courtship. She later confirmed the obvious when she noted, “Getting romantic at my age is simpler; ‘forever’ isn’t as long.”

I’ve never considered eternity to be a variable, but I suppose it’s all relative.

20 June 2019

A Shaky Foothold

I don’t know if Aylin Woodward is an inept reporter, or if her alleged news outlet’s headline writer is an idjit. Here’s the slug in question: “A dangerous flesh-eating bacteria is gaining a larger foothold in the US as the oceans warm.”

I don’t know much about those repulsive, loathsome microscopic critters except that Vibrio vulnificus or any other unicellular microorganism can’t have feet. And no feet mean no foothold at all let alone a larger one, no?

On second thought, perhaps this is one of those cases where I’m the idjit; that’s never improbable. The article mentioned that one victim, “had his hands and feet amputated.” I suppose that the wee killers had to get hold of his feet before eating them. I also suppose that such a death grip might technically be considered a foothold.

It’s time to move on from this stupid topic to the next stupid topic; life is good!

21 June 2019

Y Chromosome Conversation Inhibitor

Antoinette is annoyed with Conrad and me as is tradition. She rightly accuses us of passionately discussing and occasionally arguing about things about which we know not a damn thing. I hear that a lot from people who don’t have a Y chromosome.

Antoinette is a smart woman, but she can’t understand let alone appreciate the obvious explanation. Men have almost nothing to talk about except things about which we know nothing.

22 June 2019

The Afflatus of Flatus

The Internet Archive is hosting some sort of comedy event tonight, but I’m not going to walk five meters from my studio to attend. There are so many bad comics that the show would probably be a disappointment. No, when I need a good laugh, I reach for the James Joyce Quarterly.

I just got around to the Spring-Summer 2016 issue. I’m way behind, but that’s not really a problem. There’s not much new to say about the famously opaque writer who died over three-quarters of a century ago. And so, my hat is off to Dr. Crispian Neill from the University of Leeds for his article, “The Afflatus of Flatus: James Joyce and the Writing of Odor.”

Get this: “The unstable linkage between an odor and its presumed source or odor object recalls the linguistic unit’s arbitrary pairing of sign and object, an interconnection signaled in representations of odor throughout Joyce’s writing, as smells—flatulent or floral—become aromatic signs that float free from their original referents.”

But wait, there’s more! “Joyce’s taxonomy of flatus does not provide a differentiation based upon odorous characteristics. Rather, the characteristic intangibility of the fart as a gaseous emanation is offset by the narrative’s ascription of spatial and auditory properties, which enables the encoding of flatulence within the text.”

Cor, Blimey Guv’nor! With prose like “the characteristic intangibility of the fart,” Neill is certainly headed to the pinnacles of academic greatness if he’s not there already!

23 June 2019

Primitive Music

Angelina is going on and on and then on some more about some guitar player she recently discovered. Imagine that! Here we are closing in on 2020 and she’s excited about some guy plonking strings on a stick glued to a wooden box.

It’s as if she’s never heard of electricity.

24 June 2019

The Antidote to Vertigo

Freddie is a stagehand; he clambers around on the scaffolding high above the stage like the agile primate he is. It can be dangerous work; from time to time his less capable colleagues fall to their crunchy deaths. Freddie’s fearless, so I asked him why.

He explained that vertigo and gravity are a deadly combination, but he’s had so much experience drinking a lot that he was immune to vertigo.

“How do you think you’d fare up there after a couple of drinks?” I asked.

“I wonder what it would be like up there without a couple of drinks,” he replied. “I guess I’ll never know.”

25 June 2019

Thirty Years Ago

Paul told me that he ran across some old photos of us at a dinner party some thirty years ago.

“We looked so much younger then!” he exclaimed.

I thought that was a curious remark, as if he just discovered that ice is cold and flames are hot.

He showed me the old snaps and I was gobsmacked: we looked so much younger then!

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart