Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXXVI

3 September 2020

No. 5,769 (cartoon)

Lick a hippopotamus’s ass ’til it bleeds.

How can you say that?!

Clear enunciation, and a decent indecent vocabulary.

4 September 2020

Music from the Exoworld

I’ve spent a lot of my life in my studio breathing my own fumes; I was quite happily self-isolating decades before it was mandated. As a result, I’m not at all familiar with popular culture. And that concludes today’s setup.

I just listened to One Foot in the Grave, the 1994 recording by Bek David Campbell dba Beck. This is the first time I heard it, thus it’s a new recording for me.

The singing and guitars are quite out of tune, obviously intentionally. How refreshing, even a quarter of a century later. I wonder why more musicians don’t do that? Or maybe they do; not much from the exoworld makes it into my bubble.

5 September 2020

Drinh Me

I was completely flummoxed when I discovered “Drinh me” printed on a recently liberated wine cork. I’ve never heard of any connection between wine and Viet Nam, so I asked my Vietnamese friends what it meant. It was easy to do; Dr. Huong comprises all of ’em.

As I anticipated, she had no trouble interpreting “Drinh me.”

“It means you’re an idiot,” she explained.

“Is there another meaning?” I asked. “Why would anyone put an insult in Vietnamese on a wine cork?”

“No, you’re an idiot since you couldn’t read ‘Drink me,’” she concluded.

That’s such an obvious conclusion that I wonder why I never thought of it. Perhaps because I’m an idiot?

6 September 2020

If You’re Bored ...

Imogen called and asked how I was surviving. I thought that was an interesting question, one that almost no one asked before Coronarama.

A year ago Imogen—or anyone else—would have probably asked, “How are you?” Despite the punctuation, that’s not a sincere question at all; no one wants to get an update on someone’s bursitis or carbuncles. In contrast, my friends do seem genuinely interested in how others are coping with isolation and quarantines.

I assured her that I was doing well; I was generally happy being alone in my studio and photographing toilet paper rolls and making stuff up and writing it down.

“I’m doing well as well,” she replied. “Only boring people get bored.”

What a great line; I shall have to plagiarize it! That was my first response. It only took me a few seconds to realize I could never say that to anyone I liked. Instead, I’ll stick to quoting John Perry Barlow’s mother, “Anyone who’s bored isn’t paying close enough attention.”

7 September 2020

The One-legged Junky and the Maggot Honey

Gertrude complained about her first task of the day as a hospital nurse: she had to cut the pants off a junky so the doctors could amputate his leg. The assignment was especially repugnant since the cloth was glued to his leg with “maggot honey.”

I don’t mind it when people I love call me to grumble and grouse about their petty travails; that’s what friends are for. That wasn’t why she contacted me, though; I knew she wanted to gleefully share nauseating medical details. I’m a good friend, so I played along.

“What’s maggot honey?” I asked.

“It’s the sea of pus that comes from a gangrenous wound that’s turned into a maggot colony,” she explained.

“I know the only reason you phoned me is to hear me say this so I’ll humor you,” I replied. “That’s somewhat disgusting.”

“I was trying to be polite,” she argued unconvincingly. “I know you’re not antisemantic, so wouldn’t you agree that maggot honey is less objectionable that pus?”

“I’m not going to criticize whatever you prefer to put in your tea,” I concluded. “That’s a personal choice.”

“Ewww, that’s gross!” she protested.

And that’s the happy ending to today’s tale of the one-legged junky and the maggot honey.

8 September 2020

The Best Camera

Is that little camera of yours letting you down? If so, it’s likely that your problem is that you don’t know how to use it. But, if you have a problem with the size thing, get yourself down to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. The brainy boffins there have assembled a camera that captures over three billion pixels every exposure.

What does one do with a camera that large? The same as with any other camera: anything you want. The folks at Stanford decided to photograph a head of broccoli before they chopped it up and tossed it in the wok for lunch. I could make an image with the same amount of detail by combining one hundred and thirty-three photographs from my Nikon (that only captures twenty-four million pixels every time I release the shutter), but who needs that much visual information, even about one of the brightest stars in the vegetable cosmos?

I’d argue that no one does. I reproduced their image using only one hundred and seventy-six thousand of the billions of pixels in the original photograph, and I think it looks just fine. It’s true that I couldn’t count the eyelashes on the Pieres rapae in the upper left-hand corner, but I consider that redundant data from an aesthetic perspective.

People worry too much about photographic equipment. I have Hasselblads and Leicas and Nikons and more, so people sometimes ask which one is best. The answer is obvious: the one I happen to have with me.

9 September 2020

Farmer Owned Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product

I love visiting friends, seeing how they live, and discretely giving their place the once-over twice. I’m nicely brought up and generally well behaved, so I’m careful to obey everything in The Book of Unwritten Rules.

For example, when I visited Cordelia this afternoon I avoided her medicine cabinet; I don’t want to know if she has gout, a sexually transmitted disease, or any other malady. Her refrigerator, however, was definitely fair game.

She told me I looked fetching, then asked me to fetch the habañero sauce she’d buried in the reefer. I eventually found it along with Borden Grilled Cheese Melts, a “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” abomination. Each nineteen-gram dayglo-orange portion was individually sealed in plastic and labeled “Farmer Owned” along with all the production information for that particular batch excreted from some fetid factory in Kansas City. That Frankenfood has about the same relationship with a healthy farm as embalming fluid has with the Mayo Clinic.

I can imagine Farmer Pat’s idyllic barn, filled with huge vats of artificial color, enzymes, gelatin, propionic acid, sodium phosphate, sorbic acid, and all the other industrial ingredients that, added the basic ingredients of what might have been healthy cheese, festers into a cheezy, greasy toxic treat.

Nah, I can’t imagine that at all.

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