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Weak XII

19 March 2022

No. 8,073 (cartoon)

Everyone who ever loved you was wrong.

Are you trying to insult me?

Only geldings try.

20 March 2022

Tam Tams Instructions

I showed up at Andrea’s studio with some wine; that’s just good manners. Half past the first bottle she asked me to bring us a snack, so I grabbed some cheese and crackers from the kitchen.

“I’m not sure you can eat these crackers,” she said when I returned.

“I can’t imagine a cracker I can’t eat unless it’s made with that olestra crap that came with warnings about ‘anal leakage’ and ‘fecal urgency,’” I replied.

“Those are kosher Passover crackers,” she explained. “Look at the instructions and see if they’re okay for you.”

Cracker instructions?!

In a word, yes. In the twenty-six words printed on the Tam Tams box: “According to Ashkenazic practice, all egg matzo may be eaten only by the young, infirm or aged. If you are of Sephardic ancestry, consult your rabbi.”

I decided that that I was aged (as opposed to youthed) and that being peckish rendered me moderately infirm, to I tucked in like the circumspect goy I am.

21 March 2022

It Was a Very Good Year

Don’s an unusual musician, the kind who made money from his work. (Note the use of the past tense; that’s what litterature people call foreshadowing.) He explained that he was in the right place at the right time, specifically, San Francisco in 1978. He got paid a hundred and fifty dollars a night to perform in a club; that was fifty dollars more than the rent on his studio apartment.

Adjusted for inflation, he got paid six hundred and fifty 2022 dollars back then. No bar owner is going to pay a guy with a guitar that much for an evening’s work these days, and even if that happened that’s maybe a third of the going rental rate.

Don said that it’s always a good time to pursue any creative project, but when it comes to making money as a musician it’s all been downhill since the seventies.

I’ll take his word for it since I’ve never tried to monetize art. Making art is art, and making money is business, and I’ve never conflated the two; that’s poison.

22 March 2022

Nogoodnik Rascal

Elaine cut me off in the middle of a sentence to interject, “Pardon me for interrupting, but what’s the next thing you were about to say?”

I could never get away with a stupid joke like that, but Elaine is a nogoodnik rascal; that’s her annoying charm.

23 March 2022

Wilhite’s Gif(t)

I just heard that Stephen Wilhite, inventor of the animated gif, died last week. In case you’re not much of a geek, an animated gif is one of those irritating illustrations in an infinite loop that tiresome people use in their electronic messages in order to be even more annoying.

I suppose I should mention that I’m not a big fan of the gif. On the other hand, I am most grateful to Wilhite for definitively declaring that his creation is pronounced “jif” with a soft g. That ended that ridiculous debate, leaving only seventeen billion other inane arguments unresolved.

24 March 2022

No Women of Huayna Picchu

Hoo boy, I got me a humdinger of a problem, a doozy of a dilemma if you will. (And I hope you won’t, for it’s not much of a dilemma at all; I just couldn’t resist the alliteration.)

A couple of months ago I published Five Women of Machu Picchu. And now I read that we northerners have been using the wrong name; the Incans called it Huayna Picchu.

I did three minutes of research and decided it was all too confusing. As a result, I decided not to rename Five Women of Machu Picchu which I wouldn’t have done anyway since it’s too much work.

I’ll conclude where I began: not much of a dilemma at all.

25 March 2022

The Drummer Always Goes First

“The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins.”

Let’s unpack that Foo Fighters press release and dissect the payload, as the wankers say.

The Foo Fighters is the name of a musical ensemble. I’ve never listened to the band’s recordings because I never knew whether they were musicians fighting foo or foo performers fighting for their cause. I found the ambiguity unacceptable. (I’m not a Marxist, but I do have my principles (including embracing plagiarism and parentheses.) And if you don’t like them, I have others.)

Hawkins is, er, was the drummer for the group. All the stories I scanned reported his death at age fifty as, “unknown.”

Unknown!? C’mon people, the drummer always dies first, as Ginger Baker, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Tommy Ramone, Charlie Watts, et al, could attest were they not deceased.

It’s clear why he died at a relatively young age, but I’m looking forward to the obits to find out which side of the foo fence he ended up on, pro-foo or foe-foo.

Postscript: I intentionally made today’s notebook entry factually incorrect to give bored people with nothing better to do than to send me lengthy notes correcting my mistakes something to do; I feel sorry for the sad buggers.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart