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Weak XXVIII

9 July 2020

No. 1,531 (cartoon)

I want to be an artist when I grow up.

Choose one.

10 July 2020

I Stink, Therefore I Am

Some things never change: the Dingbats of Darkness are again laying siege to the Palace of Scientific Knowledge. The current battleground is Paris Descartes University’s Center for Body Donations. The doofi and goofi are lobbing Epoisses de Bourgogne bombs at the learned researchers’ gates.

And speaking of smelly French things that never change, the current tempest in a corpse warehouse is just that. The unwashed masses are indignant after learning that the bodies of their loved ones “donated for scientific research” are stockpiled in rotting heaps of decomposing flesh and providing a tempting buffet for previously hungry rats.

Prosecutors with little or no understanding of science are investigating “violations of the integrity of a corpse.” It’s quite a tableau, with thousands of ’em in trash bags, mounds of cadavers, with the odd severed head or other body waiting to be filed away.

The stakes are high. If the studies in progress are aborted, how will we ever know with knowledge-based certainty that Gallic flesh smells different in death as well as in life? I find the entire scandal profoundly and darkly amusing since it’s unfolding at a prestigious academic institution named after René “I stink, therefore I am” Descartes.

11 July 2020

Up Against the Cosmic Wall

I know this is a tautology, but I’ll say it anyway: cosmography headache science gives me a headache. It could be one of an egernfyllion different things, but today it’s the news about the South Pole Wall. It’s nearly one and a half light-years across and contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies. That sure is rather ginormous, innit?

Think about that for a moment.

Now stop thinking about it; it’s pointless.

I know that the Internet is chock full o’ data, but how many people have a cosmic understanding of how long a single light-year is, let alone a billion of ’em? How big is a galaxy and what’s in one?

Here’s a simple formula that I use when trying to understand such things: Incomprehensible multiplied by x equals incomprehensible.

Try this helpful exercise: compare the Great South Wall to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It’s ten billion light-years across, or more than ten percent the size of the visible universe.

You see? Of course you don’t.

Closer to home you’ll find the Laniakea supercluster. Actually, that is home to our relatively humble Milky Way and thus us. It’s only half a billion light-years wide and has a mass that’s roughly equivalent to a hundred quadrillion of our suns ... as if more than a few people know what a quadrillion is or have the faintest grasp of our sun’s mass.

No, cosmography is nothing but headaches. Instead of trying to grasp the incomprehensible, I instead suggest drinking a liter of cheap rotgut then hitting yourself on the forehead three times with an iron bar. It’s much quicker than trying to wade through all of that cosmic degree, and it hurts less.

12 July 2020

Discovering Holes

Multitasking is a myth: when you’re doing something, you’re not paying much attention to the other tasks you think you’re doing. It’s the same with seeing: when you’re looking at something, you’re not looking at something else.

People have been gawking at Stonehenge for thousands of years. It wasn’t until recently, however, that archaeologists discovered a Neolithic ring of huge pits nearby that predate the stones in Stonehenge by a couple of millennia or so.

I’m fascinated by the discovery. Everyone’s always speculating about when humans first managed fire, grew crops, et cetera, but here’s the big question I want answered: when did we invent holes?

Conversely, the wheel is of no historical interest to me. As Sid Caesar explained, “The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.”

13 July 2020

Son of a Bitch!

I just learned that my old friend Huey Johnson died yesterday. Like his allies Sylvia McLaughlin (in the photo with Huey at Lake Tahoe) and David Brower, Huey was one of the elders of the environmental movement back in the olde days when bold people got results without focus groups, stink thanks, smartly-dressed consultants and inbred impotent lobbyists.

He founded The Trust for Public Land, the Grand Canyon Trust, and ... well, he accomplished a lot in his eighty-seven years. And now he’s gone; son of a bitch!

That’s a phrase I’ve never used before, but I need to do so now—and almost certainly never again—to add a few personal anecdotes to his myriad proper obituaries.

He frequently yet inconsistently began or ended statements with, “son of a bitch.” We got the grant; son of a bitch! Son of a bitch, we didn’t get the grant!

He again reminded me earlier this year that I could marry more money in a day than I could earn in a lifetime. I noted that he’d been married to Sue for going on sixty years and cheerfully ignored his intentionally bad advice.

Once upon a time I was revising an article he wrote and pointed out a statistic that had to be wrong. He proved he was right by pulling out a magazine article from the filing cabinet and pointing out that the same figure appeared there. I still insisted he was wrong; the lazy editors cited Huey as the source.

Huey once wrote a regular column for the San Francisco Examiner in the century when it was a real newspaper. I suggested that he compile those ephemeral pieces as well as his other articles and essays and publish them on the Internet to provide a definitive legacy.

He politely declined.

“No one will remember who anyone was in a hundred years,” he predicted.

He’s probably right, but then he was a most exceptional hombre. Perhaps someone could update this entry in 2120? Thanks in advance!

14 July 2020

Frankenfurter Science

And this ten-day-old news just in from my sports desk: Joseph Christian “Joey” Chestnut wolfed down a record seventy-five hot dogs in ten minutes at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest for his thirteenth championship.

Thanks to rigorous scientific investigations at the International Center for Hot Dog Research, I can report that’s not true. Chestnut did in fact eat the tubular slaughterhouse byproducts faster than a coyote or grizzly bear would have, but he certainly didn’t “wolf” them down, since that wild carnivorous mammal or a Burmese python would have consumed the chemically delicacies much more quickly.

James Smoliga knows this to be true. The sports medicine specialist from High Point University in North Carolina has declared that Chestnut’s unequaled achievement was nevertheless eight frankenfurters fewer than the theoretical maximum a human could possibly consume in ten minutes.

I’m sure there must be something more boring and tedious than competitive hot dog consumption theory, so I’m off to find it.

15 July 2020

Gary Larson’s New Work

Gary Larson put down his cartooning pen in 1995 when he saw the technical pen writing on the wall. “If I continue for many more years,” he predicted, “my work will begin to suffer or at the very least ease into the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons.”

When he resumed drawing again after a quarter-century, he didn’t reach for his Rapidograph X500, “my once-loyal but now reliably traitorous pen.” All Things Digital are now in every orifice of modern life, so he used an electric drawing tablet.

“I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered,” he enthused, “all the creative potential it contained.”

Sure enough, his new cartoons look very different, like slick illustrations complete with computerized special effects. I was very disappointed, and thought about writing a snarky review. After a couple of days, I decided that I should write a nasty critique.

Of myself.

Larson’s a guy who’s done lots of wonderful work I admire. And then, after taking a very long break, he chose another style to illustrate his dark and great humor and I get miffed that things aren’t the same as they were in the previous millennium. Shame on me for being such an idiot, an exemplar the kind of audience that wants safe, predictable entertainment without the potential disappointment of experiencing something new.

Woody Allen was right when he cynically yet accurately noted, “The audience always wants what you gave them last time.”

Sorry, Gary; keep up the new work. And if you ever want someone to document you smashing your X500 with a sledgehammer, I know a bit about that sort of thing and would be happy to volunteer.

16 July 2020

DWAT!

I told Herbert that seemingly suicidal little bunnies are a cycling hazard here; I’ve had to make some extreme maneuvers to avoid cleaning rabbit hair out of my drive train. Herbert, who’s never been threatened by the bucktoothed kamikaze killers, asked me to send him a video.

I aims to please, and I’ll do (almost) anything for my friends, so I did. In an unusual move, I avoided being slothful and added a title, a soundtrack, and credits to make DWAT!

Despite that, I still can’t take anything I didn’t shoot from a tripod seriously, so I avoided going through all the postproduction headaches of adding it to my collection of capitalized Films. I instead used a commercial company’s server instead of mine to host it. I liked the technology, but I’m too cheap to pay them a hundred dollars a year in perpetuity to take their logo and other visual detritus off the screen.

I’m sorry about that. Oh well, times are hard all over ...

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart