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Weak XXXII

7 August 2022

No. 4,490 (cartoon)

I beg to differ.

It’s not begging unless you’re on your knees sobbing.

Here we go again ...

8 August 2022

Two Milliseconds Late and a Dollar Short

I lot of people are frettin’ that Wednesday, 29 June, was the shortest day ever in the history of history by a tad under two milliseconds. I’m not joining in their jeremiad; I learned long ago to leave the wailin’ to Bob Marley and his musical descendants.

I have almost nothing to do, and by the end of that noteworthy day I accomplished almost nothing, so it all worked out rather well for me.

I usually have at least a dozen free milliseconds built into my schedule, so I should be able to deal with these time disruptions until my time runs out, and by then I won’t have to worry about time or anything else.

9 August 2022

Dull, Boring, Bland, and Nagasaki Day

A year ago today I wrote about Dull, Boring, and Bland Day, a “sister city” arrangement between Dull, Scotland, Boring, Oregon, and Bland, Australia.

I planned on writing about DBB Day annually, but came up empty for what would have been the 2022 installment today. There’s only so much I can say about an international tourism campaign about three grim little towns one should avoid and I already said it, so in three hundred and sixty-five days perhaps I’ll revisit the gratuitous nuclear carnage at Nagasaki in 1945.

10 August 2022

Hogswallop

Hubert sent me an article he grabbed off the Internet, “An eye implant engineered from proteins in pigskin restored sight in fourteen blind people” along with a cryptic note, “See? I told you so!!!”

That called for a phone call, so I dropped a dime.

He explained that I was wrong to have chastised him for his staple diet of bacon cheeseburgers as well as bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. He insisted that since I’m a visual artist I should “stop fretting about all that chemically gobbledygook,” (nitrites, nitrates, heterocyclic amines, glycation end products, and other tasty carcinogens) and eat lots of bacon to improve my eyesight.

I admire Hubert; being able to rationalize even the most idiotic hogswallop is a gift.

11 August 2022

Toni’s Garden

Toni apologized for not replying to my message earlier; she said she’d been busy gardening.

“What kind of garden?” I asked.

“I suppose I’m not a gardener in the traditional sense,” she explained. “My idea of gardening is to put plants in holes and see how long it takes them to die.”

“It sounds both practical and realistic to me,” I replied.

Yet another example that expectation management is efficacious!

12 August 2022

Twenty-Four Signs of No Alcohol, Alameda, California

Susanna and I like to meet for drinks in a park on San Francisco Bay in Alameda. The authorities have declared es ist verboten to consume alcohol there, which of course makes even the most humble of beers taste so much better.

I suggested that we meet at the illuminated “NO ALCOHOL” warning sign on the beach, and made a snapshot of our rendezvous point. Or, more accurately, I tried to make a photograph, but couldn’t. My camera told me the words were composed of a bunch of baby strobe lights that went off so rapidly that the characters appeared to be continuously illuminated but weren’t. I took advantage of the phenomenon to make, Twenty-Four Signs of No Alcohol, Alameda, California.

Epilogue: Susanna and I appreciated the warning that no alcohol was available on the shoreline. We brought our own selection of adult beverages and enjoyed a very nice visit.

Addendum: ’twould appear that I included two pairs of duplicates, but I concluded from the original files that all twenty-four photographs are unique, albeit almost identical in a couple of cases.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart