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Weak XXXVII

10 September 2021

No. 5,310 (cartoon)

Suicide is just plain wrong.

Don’t knock it if you haven’t done it.

I tried my best.

11 September 2021

Humane Aerial Transport for Rhinoceroses

“Shitty shit shit!”

That’s what everyone who can’t swear very well says when they come home to discover a rhinoceros in their backyard. They get out the tranquilizer gun, sedate the horned galoot, and call a pest removal service to haul the sedated behemoth away hanging in a sling from a freight helicopter.

It happens all the time, but now things are a bit better thanks to the joint winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Transportation Prize, Robin W. Radcliffe, Mark Jago, Peter vdB Morkel, Estelle Morkel, Pierre du Preez, Piet Beytell, Birgit Kotting, Bakker Manuel, Jan Hendrik du Preez, Michele A. Miller, Julia Felippe, Stephen A. Parry, and Robin D. Gleed. Their research shows that it’s better to suspend the rhinos upside down during aerial transport than on their sides. Good to know!

Although I applaud the scholarly research, I fear what might happen if the report falls in the wrong hands. It’s not too hard to imagine airlines using industrial conveyor belts to load passengers hanging from their ankles onto crowded jets.

12 September 2021

The Muse of Disco Revisited

I needn’t recount the scandalous end of The Muse of Disco. Everyone knows about the terminal debauchery and depravity except the people who were there at the time. (It goes without saying that they don’t remember anything, so I won’t say it.)

The Muse of Disco is no more, but its memory lives on in signage at the Sloan Museum of Discovery building under construction. Vivian sent me a photo of the building’s façade and highlighted that the designer had incorporated the old Muse of Disco sign into the corporate logo. I like the continuity; it’s a name that will live on in infamy, along with the stainless steel toilets.

13 September 2021

Trailer Park Rules

The lunatic fringe isn’t on the fringe at all here in Flint, Michigan; its members are marching in support of their right to die writhing in pain from Coronarama like a medieval peasant. They’re demanding an end to government mandates to be vaccinated against the virus (while simultaneously demanding the government control women’s bodies vis-a-vis reproduction). I knew it was just a matter of time before one of the idjits insisted I remove my protective masks in the name of free speech, and today it happened. The cretin told me that if I didn’t remove my mask he’d remove it for me.

I was prepared.

I knew I may as well be talking in Swahili if I tried logic, science, and reason. Instead, I used simple words and concepts that even a nincompoop chump could comprehend.

“You mess with me and you mess with the whole trailer park,” I warned.

The knuckledragger scowled, grunted, and lumbered away like a horse that’s overdosed on deworming pills.

14 September 2021

The Whittier Classical Academy

The Whittier Classical Academy has been abandoned to squatters and looters. Vandals plundered the boarded-up building choking in vegetation, just as they did with the Romans.

That’s classically classic indeed!

15 September 2021

Unrecognizable

Thia is about to start a new chapter of her life in Cambodia of all places. She asked me if I’d ever gone through such a large change. What a generous setup!

I told her about my warehouse space in San Francisco in the eighties, complete with a huge darkroom. I was running a consulting business as well as publishing books, and had an employee, a car, and all the rest of the afflictions that go along with making the unfortunate choice to encumber myself with a large overhead.

“You wouldn’t have recognized the person I was thirty-five years ago,” I said.

“Of course I wouldn’t, David,” she agreed. “I was in gestation then.”

How cheeky! Impudent kids these days!

16 September 2021

Sippin’ Whisky at Ten Kilometers

I think “sippin’ whisky” is a phrase invented by some emasculated hombre on Madison Avenue back in the dark ages when such a mythological place may have actually existed.

The illuminati who light up my cosmos enjoy chuggin’ whisky, gluggin’ whisky, and so on, but sippin’?!

Balderdash!

And yet and but yet, here I am on a jet aeroplane sippin’ whisky. Surreptitiously. Through a straw underneath my anticooties mask. From little toiletry bottles that pass through the airport insecurity checkpoints without remark. Coulda been liquid nitroglycerin, but no one cares as long as it’s in little bottles.

At ten thousand meters above the planet, the lighter fluid the nefarious Canadians label “whisky” is actually not as repugnant as I remembered it, even when sipped through a straw. It tasted even better after a flight attendant announced that it was verboten for passengers to drink any alcohol they didn’t buy on the plane.

In any case, only someone who doesn’t understand how a straw works could deny that the vile yet efficacious liquid was, in fact, sippin’ whisky.

17 September 2021

Lizard Brain

Dr. Hayes, the enigmatic spawn of Ace and the Midnight Lace, commissioned me to provide the libretto for his latest masterwürke (his word and no one else’s), Lizard Brain.

He gave me the most concise of creative briefs: “Gimme something that will make a deaf person’s ears water in anticipation of my next work of genius.”

That’s precisely what I did with these staggeringly stupendous lyrics that will go down in the history of words on the Internet:

A lizard ain’t a lizard,
If it ain’t got no gizzard,
I can see that is quite plain ...

If his tail’s been scissored,
And he’s lost in a blizzard,
For a lizard, that ain’t no strain ...

I know this for a fact,
How the reptile does act,
For I gots the same lizard brain.

Lizard brain, lizard brain,
That’s what my skull does contain,
Lizard brain, lizard brain,
I’m never one to complain ...

Lizard brain, lizard brain,
Gets me from Brunswick to Maine,
Lizard brain, lizard brain,
Keeps me from goin’ insane ...

Lizard brain, lizard brain,
I nurse it with rum and champagne,
Lizard brain, lizard brain,
I just know I ain’t feeling no pain!

My brilliance speaks—no, it sings aloud!—for itself, so I’m done for the moment.

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart