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Weak XXII

28 May 2021

No. 3,065 (cartoon)

You’re hard to remember.

You’re hard to forget.

Try harder.

29 May 2021

A Brutal Critique, The Beginning

I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut’s take on how comically impotent critics are.

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

Had Vonnegut not died in 2007 when Kim Jong Un was only twenty-four years old, I think he’d retract, or at least amend, that pronouncement.

The North Korean potentate, known to his cowering serfs, er, fellow citizens, as Dear Overstuffed Pork Dumpling, recently gave a decisively bad review to a choir director according to Joo Seong-ha, writing in a daily rag, the Dong-A Ilbo. (You know with a name like that it has to be first-class.)

Two days after a performance, Kim ordered “all artists in Pyongyang” to assemble. The twenty people who gathered saw Hyun-woo Cho—or maybe Hyun-ho Ryu, or possibly someone else entirely—tied up, then executed by three soldiers who each emptied a thirty-round clip from an AK-47 into him. According to the report, “It is said that the body, which was hit by ninety shots, became so full that it could not be lifted.”

Now let’s stop right there and put on our critical thinking fedoras. Only twenty artists in the entire North Korean capital? I suppose that’s possible; I haven’t been there in a while. A bullet of that caliber only weighs under eight grams, thus even in the improbable event that everything they fired lodged in the choirmaster’s body, that’s less than a kilo. That’s also less than the weight of the blood that used to be in his body.

Members of the choir were forced to file past the bloody corpse. At least that part sounds plausible; Kim loves parades.

The moral of this story, even though it’s not really a story and has no moral, is to steer clear of North Korean critics, especially the bloated, pudgy ones.

30 May 2021

A Brutal Critique, The End

This isn’t the most graceful of segues from yesterday’s observations about North Korea’s most famous critic, but it will have to do.

I think the Grateful Dead should have their very last tour that concludes with a performance in Pyongyang.

“Hold it!” I hear you say even though I’m listening to loud music with headphones on. “The old hippies had their final tour years ago!”

That’s true; they’ve had lots of “final” tours. After each one, they regroup to milk millions of dollars in ticket sales from their sycophantic fans under a slightly different name, e.g., Deader Than Fred, Dead All Over, The (Dead) Doornails, et cetera. They’re like the influenza plague that keeps coming back every year with the slightest variation with a different handle. The Grateful Dead is the herpes of musical acts from the sixties, only more annoying and less entertaining.

After the Dead du Jour’s last song in the North Korean capital, Kim Jong Un, having executed the former director, will lead the National Contribution Choir in a stirring rendition of I’m So Grateful They’re Dead, accompanied by the staccato rat-a-tatty-tat of automatic weapon fire as each of the “musicians” is summarily executed.

Finally, the real grand finale! Now that’s what I call a final show!

31 May 2021

Ungrounded

Now that’s I am again using an aeroplane to get from there to here, I always wonder what fresh hell the journey will bring. It’s always something, and yesterday it was more of a heck brought on by demon trainees than a proper hell.

The ever-vigilant airport security screeners noticed a suspicious object when scanning my bag. I expected that since I travel with lots of cameras and electronics. I was even prepared for the Spanish Inquisition, but the kitchen appliance police took me by surprise. (As any dead soldier will tell you, it’s the one you didn’t see coming that gets you.)

To make a long story merely tedious, the inspector triumphantly pulled out a coffee grinder and announced we weren’t going to be traveling together. She gave me the options of leaving the “secured” area to spend fifty dollars to send the twenty-dollar appliance as baggage or leaving it behind. I told her I hoped she and her colleagues appreciated my contribution to their lunchroom.

The problem with the coffee grinder was the sharp, spinning blades. I guess once I found a hundred-and-twenty volt outlet on the plane, I could turn it on and ... and do what?

I suppose I could use the old “stick your finger in here” trick, but even I can’t imagine anyone stupid enough to fall for that ten times in a row. (And even if someone did, my late friend Lisa Bufano managed pretty well without any fingers, but then she was exceptional.) As for doing more damage than ten fingers and perhaps a very large nose, I’d have to chop someone up into two-centimeter-square pieces in order to fit them in the grinder.

And so, the flight ended up being all bumping and no grinding, as is tradition.

The good news is that I’ll be able to tell every friend that the plane police confiscated the new two-hundred-dollar coffee grinder I was bringing as a gift for them. Spending twenty dollars to tell that many tall tales is a bargain, especially at today’s inflated prices.

1 June 2021

The Vulva Part(s)

“You won’t believe how incredibly ignorant my boyfriend is,” Angelina wrote.

“Try me,” I replied. “What did Freddie do now?”

“I forwarded an article about how most Brits can’t name all the parts of the vulva, and you know what he said?” she asked.

“No, but I bet you’re going to tell me,” I predicted.

“He said he thought the vulva was a part!”

I didn’t ask how much his ignorance surprised her; there are some things I don’t want to know.

2 June 2021

Do Cats Eat Human Corpses?

Evelyn is one of my friends who’s ridiculously busy, but she managed to find time for a quick lunch with me yesterday. She confided that she’s been noticing an evil glint in her cat’s eye.

“Do you think my cat would eat me?” she asked.

“Not if you keep feeding him salmon and cream,” I assured her.

“No,” she replied, “I mean if I’m dead.”

“That is different,” I agreed. “I’ll look into it.”

So I did.

I called her this afternoon and told her I had a definitive answer to her question of whether cats eat human remains. Before I could go on, she warned me that it had better not be one of my “stupid one-word answers” like I helpfully provided after researching whether snakes had ears. (No.)

I hadn’t prepared an exhaustive report, so I scrambled to improvise a more thorough reply.

“Here’s what I discovered after rigorous inquiries,” I announced. “They most certainly do.”

3 June 2021

Coronarama Nostalgia

Alexia suggested that we get together at a noisy, crowded restaurant and eat tiny slivers of mediocre, overpriced food. That’s certainly not what she said, but that’s what I heard.

I haven’t received an unwelcome invitation like that in over a year. I miss the Coronarama lockdown already.

4 June 2021

A Gift to Which We Can All Look Forward

Hubert told me that his mother’s home healthcare nurse told her, “Bladder incontinence is a gift to which we can all look forward.”

Well I’ll be! I can’t think of any other gift that keeps on giving except a kitten; good times ahead!

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart