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9 October 2020

No. 2,354 (cartoon)

I don’t believe in alcoholism.

Alcoholism believes in you.

We agree to disagree.

10 October 2020

Habañero: There’s No Such Thing

Abraham called me within minutes after I posted my Thursday notebook entry.

“You just made a horrible typo!” he announced.

“I could not be more shocked!” I replied. “Next you’ll be telling me that the sun rose east this morning.”

I apologized for my snarkasm after he pointed out that there’s no such thing as a habañero pepper. I checked and discovered that I misspelled habanero sixteen times in the last twenty years.

Damn! How could I be so stupid?

I ask myself that very question several times a day, but, in this case, I had an answer: I love diacritics. I never met a caron, circumflex, diaeresis, macron, or umlaut that I didn’t like. And so, I’ve been proud of my pretentious self by getting all fancy with the fictitious tilde over the “n” in “habanero.” Too clever by half, alas.

Oh well, one of the many things I like about publishing on the Internet is that it’s easy to correct past mistakes retroactively, as opposed to slipping errata notes into hundreds of books. Now no one will ever know I only learned how to spell habanero later in life.

Unless they read this, of course, so forget I ever mentioned it. This notebook entry never happened.

11 October 2020

Safety First!

Nathaniel put four wine glasses on the counter in his studio after I gently suggested to my oblivious host that the weather was rather thirsty this afternoon. So far, so good. But then ...

After he filled the four glasses, I grabbed a couple and handed him one.

“Thanks,” he replied, “but safety first!”

?!

He ’splained that two glasses were for me and two for him. With a glass in each hand, we couldn’t touch our faces thus avoiding any hand-to-nose viral infection.

Such a clever lad!

I always thought that the two-fisted drinker was a cliché, a metaphor, an urban myth, but no! I am one!

Safety first!

12 October 2020

The King of Chicken Gizzards

Wilbur Beauregard Jefferson is the self-proclaimed King of Chicken Gizzards. His company, Lickety-Chicky, enjoys a near-monopoly in the southern states. And as Jefferson hisself said, “When it comes to the gizzard business, t’ain’t no place else that matters.”

Despite his immense wealth, he still lives in the backwater town where he was born: Swamp Bottom, Mississippi. He’s not exactly modest, though; he cruises around the dirt streets in his 1956 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith. (That’s the one with a bonnet big enough to house a family of five.)

In one of life’s predictable ironies, the King of Chicken Gizzards lives on a diet of cheeseburgers. If you think the pandemic’s been hard on everyone including those who subsist on fast “food,” then think again. It’s true that he can no longer eat his greasy fare at a plastic table under fluorescent lights; he now has to buy his fat bombs from the comfort of his Roller.

You might think that would be a problem since his Silver Wraith was built for the English market, i.e., the steering wheel is on the wrong side, but there you go thinkin’ wrong again. He drives his pretentious car in reverse through the line of cars picking up their order, and that allows him to smile his I’ve-got-more-money-than-you smirk as he makes eye contact with the people in the car behind him.

Chicken gizzards, cheeseburgers, and ostentatious wealth: Swamp Bottom, Mississippi, really does have it all!

13 October 2020

Forked

“As Yogi Berra famously said ...” I began.

“Stop right there,” Philip interrupted. “You’ve only heard about his quotes that have been repeatedly repeated, so the word ‘famously’ is redundant.”

“That’s where you’d be wrong, my learned friend,” I replied.

I pointed out that Berra once admitted, “I really didn’t say everything I said.” I explained that since there are things Berra famously said and things Berra famously didn’t say, it’s important to make that distinction.

Philip just shrugged resignedly. He knew he lost that rigorous intellectual debate, but he wasn’t at all upset. We enjoy such ridiculous debates several times an hour, nobody who cares who wins (on those rare occasions we can agree on even that), no one keeps score, and that’s that.

Oh dear; I’ve concluded without a conclusion, so here it is: anyone who starts an intellectual debate about Yogi Berra is chewing on the wrong end of the drumstick. And when you come to a fork in the road, you really should take it.

14 October 2020

Badinage

I’m not shy about flouting my high school diploma. After all, some people don’t even have a liter of sheep dip to their name, let alone a prestigious sheepskin like mine. Having said that, I am nevertheless humble. After all, I have a lot about which to be very humble indeed. And that’s quite enough foreplay for early Wednesday morning ...

I rarely I run across a word I haven’t heard, but this morning seeing the word “badinage” sent me to my dictionary. That’s where I discovered that it means, “humorous or witty conversation.”

That got me to thinkin’ about the antonym, so I looked up “goodinage” and there ain’t no such critter. The universe abhors a Hoover, so I just minted the word:

goodinage | goodn’äZH|
noun
humorless or inane conversation

Adrian has more words under his belt and/or between his ears than anyone else I know, so I shall have to call him later and engage in some badinage about goodinage.

Later: upon subsequent investigations, I discovered that “raillery” is a synonym for “badinage.” That’s another new word for me, but I’m not going to add it to my vocabulary until tomorrow at the earliest. Two new words a day is all I can handle.

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart