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Weak XLI

9 October 2019

No. 8,672 (cartoon)

I just had a terribly sobering experience.

That sounds horrific.

It was, but I’ll be over it in a few more drinks.

10 October 2019

A (Wrong) Way With Words

Julia’s very cagy when it comes to her chronological age, as Henri just found out the hard way.

“When’s your birthday?” he asked.

“December fifteenth.”

“What year?”

“Every year,” she replied tersely. “I hope that concludes your tedious interrogation.”

Henri saw he was in a hole, so he kept digging and told her that she looked surprisingly great for her age. Ah, the French certainly do have a way with words! It’s too bad for Henri that his way with ’em is about the worst. C’est la vie ...

11 October 2019

Dedham Invitation

Angie invited me to visit her in Dedham, Massachusetts, of all places. I’d never heard of such a place, so she explained it was “outside of Boston.” That wasn’t very helpful, since everything in the entire Bay State except Boston proper is somewhere outside of Boston. She said it was a fifteen-minute walk to catch the train that went downtown.

“What’s nearby that might interest me?” I asked.

“Well, there’s the wine cellar in the basement and the liquor cabinet in the living room,” she replied. “Oh, and there’s the Blood Garden, too.”

She showed me a postcard of the local cemetery. It depicted a New England cliché of puffy white clouds drifting above fall foliage. Everything looked like it should have; that’s why it was a postcard. Angie explained that the leaves were bright red because trees were planted on the site of a bloody Revolutionary War battle.

I told her that has to be one of the dumbest, most inane stories I’ve ever heard. And in the next breath, I gratefully accepted her invitation. Angie and I are good friends, I knew we’d have a great visit without even leaving the house let alone looking at Kodachrome trees.

12 October 2019

Stupidity Springs Longer

Eric insisted that we play another game of chess, but I had to decline. I don’t play chess in order to win; I enjoy the game because of its entertainment value, and I was completely bored after effortlessly winning at least a dozen games in a row with him.

Eric was the worst chess player I’ve encountered since eighth grade. I had to explain the rules for an en passant capture after he accused me of cheating. Beating him was like shooting fish in a barrel, if I was using a double-barreled shotgun, the fish was a fifty-kilo Chinook salmon, and it was a very small barrel with a liter of water.

It took us several drinks, but I finally figured out that Eric wasn’t playing chess to enjoy the game; he was trying to lose weight. He read an article claiming that the best chess players can burn six thousand calories a day by thinking so hard, so Eric foolishly concluded that he could drink ale and inhale potato chips and watch kilos of fat melt away as he sloppily pushed chess pieces around the board almost at random. He’s no grandmaster; he put so little mental exertion into our games that he probably burned fewer than a dozen ergs, and certainly not even an entire calorie.

Losing weight through playing chess, like shedding kilos by having great sex, is just another example of the eternal desire to get something for nothing. Hope springs eternal, and stupidity springs even longer.

13 October 2019

The Burj Khalifa

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the world’s tallest building. The eight hundred and twenty-eight-meter tall skyscraper can house some thirty-five thousand people; it’s an engineering marvel. I love it because it’s also a spectacular monument to stupidity.

So what do tens of thousands of people do every day? The answer is obvious: they defecate. Or maybe it’s not that obvious; the architects and engineers who created the massive structure forgot that that many people generate over six thousand kilos of excrement a day. A large fleet of sewage trucks operating constantly keeps the building habitable.

I think the folly of the Burj Khalifa is the perfect metaphor for so many things that I’m going to go for a nice, long walk instead of making a predictable list. Being listless is underrated.

14 October 2019

Monopolizing My Time

I had an exceptional day last week. On Tuesday, I won twenty-two games of Monopoly in a row against my three computer-generated opponents, Bezza, Puter, and Quazza.

I know them well; we’ve almost certainly played tens of thousands of games in the last quarter of a century. That’s not as pathetic as it sounds; a game usually only lasts ten or fifteen minutes since the machine is rolling the virtual dice and doing all the math. In all that time, my longest winning streak was seventeen games.

Monopoly requires little skill; I enjoy it because of the randomness of rolling the dice and the way the designers of the game integrated chance and probability. Sometimes winning is easy, and other times it’s literally impossible; that’s why it took me decades to win that many consecutive games.

I was marveling at my most improbable winning streak this evening when I again won twenty-two games in a row for the second time in a week.

Amazing!

What are the odds of that happening? I have no idea; I don’t know enough about advanced mathematics to even guess. There’s only one clear conclusion: I’m spending too much of my short life playing Monopoly.

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart