Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXXIV

20 August 2020

No. 5,753 (cartoon)

I’m comfortable in my own skin.

I’m comfortable in it too.

21 August 2020

10,001,100,101,000 and Counting

This is my nine-thousandth consecutive daily notebook entry. I mention the irrelevant statistic because I can’t think of anything very interesting to mention at the moment.

Nine thousand is indeed a big round denary number, but it’s an irrelevant milestone when expressed as a binary number: 10,001,100,101,000.

For a really impressive big round binary, check back on 8 November 2040 when I crank out number 100,000,000,000,000.

Never mind, just kidding! If I’m still alive in a couple of decades, I hope by then that I will have found something more rewarding to do than meet my self-imposed quota of publishing something daily.

22 August 2020

Cheat to Win, Mate!

Jasmin dropped by this afternoon for a drink, and even though I’m most certainly not a masochist I offered her a game of chess to go with it. She’s not a sadist, so she politely declined and not so politely gave me a lecture.

“You don’t know the first thing about chess,” she began.

“And almost nothing about other things too!” I cheerfully agreed.

“You keep coming up with muttonheaded ideas on how to play better like keeping an expensive chess set by the toilet,” she continued, “but you ignore the only thing that works.”

“I know,” I admitted, “but all that book learnin’, practice, and hard work is hard work.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she corrected. “Cheat to win!”

“The simplest chess program on your pocket computer plays a much better game than anyone who’ll waste their time on a match with you,” she continued. “A few surreptitious glances now and then is all you need to stop being such a pathetic loser.”

I felt like more of an idiot than usual when I realized she was obviously right, and even worse that it never occurred to me to cheat at chess even though that’s how I usually win at every other board game.

23 August 2020

Close to Surpassing Van Gogh

All of my friends are generous, as am I, but Florian is exceptionally magnanimous, especially when it comes to giving unsolicited advice. Today he’s urging me to market my creative work commercially. Or, in his words, “Get out there and sell, sell, sell!”

I’ve heard that dozens and dozens of times, all too often from people who really should know better. After getting the would-be mentor to assure me that there’s lots of easy money to be made, I offer a lucrative commission: fifty percent of everything s/he sells. No one has taken me up and that munificent offer, and that’s fine with me.

Being a legend in my own mind has served me very well in all of my purportedly creative endeavors. I feel sorry for people like Florian who are so insecure that they need others—or, even worse, the marketplace—to validate their work.

And anyway, I’ve done just fine commercially without trying. Vincent Van Gogh only sold a couple of paintings during his lifetime; that’s only two more than I have! And I’m not nearly as dead as he is!

24 August 2020

Rarer than a Javan Rhinoceros

I joined Rosalind while she ran some errands this morning, including getting a new oil filter for her car at the local Ferrari dealer. We had to walk through the showroom en route to the parts department, and that’s when I overheard a most remarkable statement.

“I hate customers,” said one salesperson to another.

I couldn’t believe what I heard, an honest car salesperson! That’s even rarer than a Javan rhinoceros!

Rosalind’s new oil filter cost over a hundred dollars, another timely and costly reminder of why I’m so glad that I haven’t owned a car in over thirty years. I doubt that I’ll ever change my mind, especially since it will probably take another thirty years to find another truthful dealer.

25 August 2020

The Lickspittle’s Comeuppance

Oliver knows that I loves me a good tale, so he told me about his last day on the job on Friday.

He began by explaining that he walked into his manager’s office that morning fully prepared to be reprimanded for refusing to provide a DNA sample for his company’s database, but that’s not what happened. Instead, his overseer gave him a condescending lecture on microaggressions.

“You may think you’re being clever,” he began, “but I’ve been keeping a file on your microaggressions and they have to stop right now, mister.”

The little weasel then recounted a half dozen examples of unacceptable behavior including smirking, rolling his eyes, staring, sighing, avoiding eye contact, hostile body language, and even “intentional gaseous emissions.” He concluded by demanding that Oliver change his attitude, starting by submitting his DNA.

Oliver responded contritely and accepted that what he’d done was wrong. He apologized for calling the paper shuffler a lickspittle and a toady. He promised to follow his directives. He said he regretted all of his microaggressions and promised that he was going to change. He announced that, starting immediately, he would only engage in giantaggressions.

And that’s when things got interesting.

He poured the urine in his coffee cup over the administraitor’s computer and explained, “There’s your DNA sample right there.”

“You’re fired!” shrieked the wretched little man with the dead laptop.

Oliver snatched his personnel file from his now-former boss’s hand and finished ripping every page into little pieces before the security guard arrived to escort him from the building.

“What a glorious ending to a wretched job!” I enthused. “Any regrets?”

“Not really,” he replied, “although in retrospect I wish I would have had asparagus for dinner on Thursday.”

What a great yarn! I can now see why some people get jobs; it’s so great when you quit!

26 August 2020

Qubit Incoherence

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more tedious, the new edition of Nature arrived. A lot of people subscribe to the prestigious journal just to ogle the centerfolds, but not me. I do read the articles, just not the bad ones. For example, I skipped, “Impact of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubit coherence.”

First, a bit of background. I’m writing this on an eight-year-old computer. Contemporary computers require programs with sixty-four bits to function. I’m not sure if I’m using two-bit software, but in any case it works just fine on my old hardware so I’m not going to replace working tools with experimental ones. Since I have no plans to even migrate to sixty-four-bit hardware there’s no point in learning the first thing about qubit machines.

Even if I made it past the title, the list of authors was a red flag: Antti P. Vepsäläinen, Amir H. Karamlou, John L. Orrell, Akshunna S. Dogra, Ben Loer, Francisca Vasconcelos, David K. Kim, Alexander J. Melville, Bethany M. Niedzielski, Jonilyn L. Yoder, Simon Gustavsson, Joseph A. Formaggio, Brent A. VanDevender, and William D. Oliver.

No, make that fourteen red flags. Any paper that credits over a dozen people doesn’t have an author; a committee wrote it.

27 August 2020

Typos-B-Gone!

For decades I’ve been pumping out these notebook entries chock full o’ typos. I try my best to catch all of them, but empirical evidence suggests my best ain’t all that good.

Adriana is never shy about pointing out my myriad oversights, so I decided to tell her about my recent software acquisition, Typos-B-Gone! According to all of the reviews I read, the program is astoundingly effective at flagging spelling, grammatical, and punctuation mistakes and much more, such as identifying repetition, analyzing sentence structure, spotting repetition, et cetera.

I expected her to be pleased—perhaps even smugly pleased—but she was aghast. She didn’t suggest that I avoid using my new tool, she demanded that I erase Typos-B-Gone! immediately, “for your own good.”

She explained that the typos and other errors are the only things that make my writing worth an occasional glance. Without the possibility of such happy accidents, my words would be devoid of even the possibility of a modicum of interest.

I’m not a serious writer so I wasn’t hurt by her aspersions. (I’m not really any kind of writer; I find such labels unhelpful at best.) And anyway, she was right: chance is always my friend when it comes to any flavor of creative pursuit.

And finally, here’s the happy ending: the teeming multitudes of miscellaneous mistakes are here to stay. Typos-B-Gone! be gone!

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2020 David Glenn Rinehart