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23 July 2020

No. 6,332 (cartoon)

These horrible sores terrify me.

Neither of us needs to worry about them except you.

24 July 2020

Coronarama Blues

Politicians are masters of diversion. The current message: pay no attention to a thousand Americans dying daily during the pandemic; we’re about to have a vaccine any day now! It’s clearly untrue. There’s never been a vaccine against any flavor of coronavirus. If there ever is one, past experience shows that it may not be here for a very long time.

On 28 March 1958 Eddie Cochran recorded his definitive findings on a common ailment that still plagues us today, even after sixty-two years of failure to find a remedy or even effective therapy. I’m not holding my breath for a coronavirus vaccine on this miserable July day when there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.

25 July 2020

Dead Horse Blues

I should have known better.

That would be a great title for the autobiography I’ll never write, but I’m talking about my first dinner with Wilma. I don’t know what possessed me to let her watch me cook; you’ll have to ask Bacchus.

I corrected her when she complimented me on my choice of red onions. I explained that they were actually yellow onions that became red after I sliced my thumb open cutting them.

That was a big mistake in more ways than one. She announced that she wouldn’t eat the fried taters in progress because they contained animal products, i.e., a bit of me. You’ve heard this story before, so you know it gets worse.

Wilma pointed out that a fruit fly appeared to have met a pleasant demise in the last bit of wine at the bottom of her glass. I gallantly told her I’d give it a decent burial, then swallowed the last gulp.

Or maybe the fruit fly gulped the last swallow. In any case, she was aghast that I’d put another living creature down my gullet, even if it was dead.

She refused another glass of wine, so I offered her a beer.

“You cannot be serious!” she shrieked. “It’s got isinglass in it!”

“You want it in a glass?” I asked.

“Isinglass is dried fish bladders!” she sputtered.

(Dried fish bladders in beer?!)

“I’m sorry if I forgot, Wilma,” I apologized, “but I don’t recall you mentioning your dietary concerns before.”

“Many people don’t know this,” she replied, “but it is possible to be a militant vegan without telling everyone about it.”

“I appreciate the lack of proselytization,” I responded, “but since you can’t eat anything I have here and will only drink free-range tapwater, you may want to consider gluing a manifesto to the forehead of the next person who invites you to visit.”

“Aren’t you aware that most glue is made from the collagen from dead horses?” she asked.

“It’s like Plato said,” I concluded. “When the horse is dead, get off it.”

As for the unhappy ending, that was more or less how the abbreviated visit concluded.

26 July 2020

Almost Forty Seconds Too Long

Vivian has a wretched job working for Shodde Solutions Limited. She has a convoluted title, Customer Experience Liaison, that has nothing to do with her actual assignment: to mollify and placate customers outraged by her company’s shoddy software.

She told me that she was in trouble at work after being criticized by her supervisor for spending thirty-seven seconds too long talking with a frustrated user. She added that it was impossible to appeal the reprimand because her overseer is a computer.

Once upon a time, some bureaucrat determined that a support phone call should take no longer than twenty-seven thousand seconds, or forty-five minutes. Thus two thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven seconds was simply unacceptable.

What kind of administraitor would delegate management decisions to electronic devices that cannot think or reason? That was a rhetorical question with an obvious answer: a bureaucrat who also cannot think or reason.

Vivian’s pathetic situation would be amusing if it was unique, but stupidity is ubiquitous and propagated by bosses everywhere.

27 July 2020

Sperm in the News

More than a third of a millennium ago Antonie van Leeuwenhoek designed and built dozens of high-powered microscopes. He then moved on to the next logical step: examining his ejaculate.

He saw sperm that, “moved forward owing to the motion of their tails like that of a snake or an eel swimming in water.” And that was that for the next three centuries.

Hermes Gadelha took a fresh look at what he called “very cheeky little creatures” and concluded we’ve been duped all this time by “sperm deception.” In fact, he and his colleagues concluded that the sperms’ tails only lash on one side.

I can hear the howls of disbelief already. A majority of my friends have spent much of their quarantine time under lockdown looking at semen under a microscope; Thia even sent me an unsolicited photograph. There’s a good reason none of them replicated Gadelha’s discovery, and it has nothing to do with drinking too much (even though that may have been a contributing factor in more than one instance).

To see how the wee buggers—cheeky little creatures indeed!—move, you need a camera that can take fifty-thousand frames a second. Gadelha had one, and saw the sperm gyrating, and “much like playful otters corkscrewing through water, their one-sided stroke would average itself out.”

I can think of several lascivious double entendres with which to conclude this dispatch from the frontiers of scientific research, but I’ll save ’em for the next party when I can watch people wince, groan, and perhaps even blush.

28 July 2020

Safe and Unsafe Music

Devorah has been holding her head erect and whistling a happy tune ever since we all landed in Coronarama, but she’s had enough. She announced she’s done pussyfooting around; she’s going on the aural offensive.

She has an abundance of discretionary time since being “let go” from her miserable job by her perfidious employer, so she’s decided to learn to play a musical instrument.

She showed me an advertisement from Musicville Super Store promoting a pandemic sale, “all social distancing instrument 40% off,” and asked me to suggest what musical direction she might want to consider.

I looked at the seven options—accordion, bagpipes, cowbell, kazoo, musical [sic] saw, tambourine, and ukulele—and told her that the choice was obvious.

“None of these are real musical instruments,” I explained. “I’m sure that the kazoo and saw are banned under the Geneva Convention, and I’m fairly certain you’ll need a permit for the others.”

“You mean there’s no easy way for me to make music and keep the infectious hordes at a safe distance?” she asked.

“There’s a simple solution,” I replied, “and it’s as old as annoyance itself.”

She took my advice and ordered several drums from an Internet Store, Russian Percussion. (I was astonished that Kremlin operatives are no longer even trying to hide their campaign to destroy what’s left of this miserable country.)

Devorah told me her shipment will arrive on Friday. That gives me enough time to come up with a good reason to never visit her again.

What did I just do?

29 July 2020

Semen in the News

pResident Drumph has proclaimed that Stella Gwandiku-Ambe Immanuel has “an important voice.” As someone tuned into the extreme lunatic frequency at the asylum, he should know.

Immanuel has declared that she has a cure for the coronavirus, but that’s just one of her unique medical insights. She had the courage to say that other doctors are using DNA from extraterrestrial beings as part of their therapeutic regimens. This hasn’t received much attention in the press, but she revealed that some of them are also working on a vaccine to prevent people from developing or maintaining religious beliefs. And then there are the demons in semen. Suffice it to say that if you’re suffering from astral plane sex with evil spirits then hydroxychloroquine may be what you need.

No one could call into question Drumph’s assertion that Immanuel is “spectacular in her statements” although whether “she’s had tremendous success” says more about his unbridled lunacy than the efficaciousness of her cosmic snake oil.

It’s medical insight like Drumph’s and Immanuel’s that’s allowed the United States to have the most coronavirus deaths in the world. Make America Annihilate Again; we’re number one!

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart