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Weak XXIII

5 June 2021

No. 852 (cartoon)

I’m going to show you every hue and shade in the pain rainbow.

With the blindfold on?

What did you think it was for?

6 June 2021

Haters Über Alles?

Today is the anniversary of perhaps the biggest battle between heavily armed white supremacists and anti-fascists, with over four thousand killed and twice that many shot or injured. I can’t begin to describe the carnage and incalculable losses numerically.

That was a long time ago, seventy-seven years to be precise. D-Day seems longer ago than that in some respects. Americans recently deposed a white supremacist would-be fascist dictator, but a disturbingly large percentage of the over seventy million people who voted for the obese psychopathic buffoon is still parading wearing swastikas and carrying Confederate flags pledging allegiance to their sociopathic fürher’s war on democracy.

Was it really less than eight decades ago that tens of millions of soldiers died defeating fascists and racial supremacists by any means necessary?

Here we go again ad infinitum ...

7 June 2021

Romaine Roulette

It’s hot in Petaluma this afternoon, so Toni and I are enjoying our literal salad days. Or rather we were until I protested that the Romaine lettuce in her refrigerator was too wilted and desiccated to eat. She countered that today was the perfect time to eat it, then proceeded to share her logic, such as it was.

Dozens of people have died from E. coli after eating tainted Romaine lettuce. After enough people have kicked the salad bucket, health officials identify the particular agribusiness where the killer plants originated. Toni reasoned that if she keeps her lettuce in the refrigerator for a couple weeks before eating it she could assume it’s safe if she hadn’t seen any reports of recent deaths.

The salad was a soupy mix of cream and oily cheese with strands of greenish-brown vegetation, presumably the geriatric lettuce. The salad didn’t kill us (although the cholesterol may), but there’s more to life than not dying. I’ll continue playing Romaine roulette with fresh lettuce. It tastes better, and if it kills me at least I won’t suffer the embarrassment of dying from unknown causes.

8 June 2021

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Coronarama

I think governments and societies around the world have reached the end of their collective attention spans now that “only” hundreds of people a day are dying from the pandemic. The charitable and mildly hallucinogenic explanation might be that enough people have bought into John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s pronouncement, “War is Over (If You Want It).”

Nah, just kidding.

I think the populace at large decided that letting a few hundred unvaccinated, weak, or simply unlucky people die every day from the virus is a reasonable price to pay for access to saloons, nail salons, and sporting events. The Onion captured the collective zeitgeist in a headline from a decade ago, Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels.

It’s time to watch Darwinism in action; I’m putting the Dead Kennedys’ Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death on the turntable to provide the soundtrack.

9 June 2021

Older Than She’s Ever Been

Anastasia complained that she was unable to get off the low couch without making sound effects.

“That’s a pretty trivial gripe as far as worries go,” I suggested.

“I’m older than I’ve ever been,” she explained. “That’s the real problem.”

“If you ever wake up one morning and you’re not older than you’ve ever been, then you should grab a cab to the crematorium,” I advised.

“I can see why everyone calls you the good humour man,” she grumbled.

Even though I am in fact almost relentlessly positive, I thought it advisable not to mention that the best part about fretting about her age was that it distracted her from her legitimate miseries.

10 June 2021

Swimming Like Otters Correction

This notebook serves as the journal of record for the world’s scientific elite, thus I am obliged to correct a report I published about otters. (Before I go on, I should note that otter feces really is called spraint.)

On 27 July 2020 I cited a study by Hermes Gadelha who noted that human sperm swim, “much like playful otters corkscrewing through water ...” I’ll gloss over the details, but suffice it to say that it ain’t true.

The editorial oversight committee—that’s me!—regrets disseminating news that clearly should have been true wasn’t.

So well then, how do sperm move? I’m working on that very research right now. I can’t submit the paper until it’s been reviewed by my learned peers, but I can report that Woody Allen demonstrated the concept in his 1972 film, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask.

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart