Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XL

1 October 2019

No. 3,571 (cartoon)

You only live once.

Your wishful thinking annoys me.

2 October 2019

Hank’s Hog Heaven

Hank, the owner of Hank’s Hog Heaven, has a most unusual marketing strategy: honesty. But first, a word about what Hank doesn’t sell: bacon, barbecue, or any other foodstuffs. He sells Harley-Davidson motorcycles, affectionately called “hogs” by the knuckle draggers who ride them.

Even though today is the second day of October, Hank’s still promoting the September Savings Spectacular, “Free crutches with every new hog!”

I think that’s simply brilliant!

Hank knows his customers very well. Most of them want a big bike to help them with their post-midlife crisis, erectile dysfunction, or even worse.

“Most of these guys are gonna eat some asphalt sooner or later, so why pretend otherwise?” he asked rhetorically. “The accident wasn’t that bad if you end up in the hospital instead of the morgue, and that’s why you’re probably gonna need crutches sooner than later.”

Again, I think it’s a clever promotion. Crutches make owning a classic motorcycle unhampered by fifty years of progress a practical proposition. And from Hank’s perspective, crutches are a much cheaper premium than wheelchairs or caskets.

3 October 2019

Anita’s Birthday Outfit

Brandon told me that Anita asked him to get her something he’d like to see her wear for her birthday.

“Sounds like a poisoned chalice to me,” I opined. “There are so many possibilities to bollix things up.”

“Not really,” he explained. “All I have to do to satisfy Anita is do what she says and she’s happy.”

“So what are you going to give her?” I asked.

“Exactly what she asked for, of course, nothing,” he replied.

I had to agree that giving her a birthday suit was the perfect gift. It’s one of those rare cases where one size really does fit all, and most women would be flattered if their partner asked her to wear one.

4 October 2019

National Poetry Day

It’s National Poetry Day, the perfect time to whinge about the word “gossamer,” an execrable workhorse in every crappy poet’s abominable vocabulary. I just discovered that I mentioned “gossamer” as a foolproof indicator of an odious poem in this notebook twice before, once on 13 September 2003 and again on 17 March earlier this year. I’m not going to beat myself up over involuntarily repeating myself every five thousand six hundred and sixty-four days; I’ve done much worse as recently as, well, just this morning.

But that’s more than enough about poetry and the most unfortunate misunderstanding with the mayonnaise.

And that brings at least one of us to the Buffalo International Airport, where greedy administraitors charge travelers exhorbitant, mandatory fees, then provide them with the worst toilet tissue I’ve ever encountered, although the infamous state-issued waxy toilet paper in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik certainly wasn’t any better.

The Buffalo roll was translucent. I hate to use this word, but I could accurately describe the pellucid “paper” as gossamer. It took me a while to appreciate this engineering marvel. A team of designers managed to somehow create paper much thinner than vellum that had just enough structural integrity to be wound by industrial machines onto a cardboard core, yet disintegrated when handled by a human.

Spectacular!

When I used a few sheets to cover a sneeze, it disintegrated into thousands of cellulose snowflakes. The silent poetry of the tiny shower is perhaps the first correlation between the word “gossamer” and good poetry, and quite probably the last.

5 October 2019

Toxic Babies

In September, a New Jersey jury awarded over thirty-seven million dollars to four people suffering from mesothelioma attributed to asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. I wasn’t surprised by the decision, nor was anyone who knows a thing or three about baby powder.

It all starts with mother’s milk; that’s how a human parasite continues to feed off its host after it’s expelled from the womb. Milk from a mother’s breast used to be a paragon of purity, but that was a very long time ago. These days, it’s a fatty cocktail of hormones, the human immunodeficiency virus and other diseases added while fertilizing an egg or two, the smorgasbord of drugs every sensible parent uses to make it through yet through a busy day, pesticides, and other contaminants including asbestos.

All this nastiness accumulates and concentrates in a baby, so when one is harvested to be dried, pulverized into talcum, then canned, it’s entirely predictable if not guaranteed that the baby powder is a toxic menace.

I understand that some people might prefer to have babies in talcum form rather than the meat version that drools and defecates everywhere, but they’re just not worth the risk anyway you slice it.

6 October 2019

Yours Truly’s Great Breakfast

My breakfast with Doctor Crane and Doctor Roberts this morning was delayed because of an understandable misunderstanding. When Mark asked Susan who was cooking, she replied, “Yours truly will.”

Almost an hour later, I asked why all of us were drinking coffee and no one was cooking.

“Mark’s slow on Sunday morning,” Susan explained, “He’ll get around to it.”

“I thought you said you were going to cook,” Mark replied.

Susan pointed out that she said “yours truly” would, and since Mark is her true love, it was about time for him to get to work. Mark smiled, hopped up, and concocted such a fabby brunch that I didn’t even miss the champagne. (Much.)

7 October 2019

Air and Door

I like words, even if I’m not very good with them. I always like seeing the word “AIR” on a metal box, even though it’s repetitiously redundant: air is everywhere, and anyone driving a car would recognize an air compressor at a filling station.

And again speaking of repetitiously redundant again, I noticed that someone spray-painted “DOOR” on what obviously could hardly be anything else. The label may have been intended to keep the portal unobstructed, but it clearly didn’t work: someone blocked the doorway with a truck.

The world can be a confusing place, so I appreciated the straightforward clarity of Air and Door.

8 October 2019

Fence

People who call themselves artists rarely produce the best work. (I am of course talking about other artists, not myself.) I was reminded of that when I saw Fence, a brilliant, unattributed piece along a busy road in an industrial neighborhood just outside of Boston.

The artist used polyvinyl chloride tubing to spell the word FENCE, a rare example of innovation in typography. The tubing was attached to what looked like a fence, but wasn’t; it was a swinging gate. The gate adjoined a wall that wasn’t a fence either. Nice!

My highest praise for another artist’s work is to plagiarize it; now I just need to figure out how. All I know is that it will probably involve pushing pixels, and not bending plastic tubing;. That’s actual work, and my life is too short for that.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2019 David Glenn Rinehart