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Weak XXXVII

10 September 2022

No. 6,849 (cartoon)

I hate my teenage twins even more than they hate me.

Get a fiftieth-trimester abortion.

Just one?

11 September 2022

Pesto Pizza and Beer

Sid balked when I suggested that he take a break from being a vegan teetotaler and enjoy pesto pizza and beer for dinner.

“That doesn’t sound wise or prudent,” he demurred.

“You just might be right,” I admitted. “Once you start spontaneously doing pleasant things you enjoy, you might end up being like one of those sanguine people enjoying a rich, rewarding life. You know, the ones who annoy you so much.”

“I guess one slice of pizza’s not going to kill me,” he admitted, “but I’m doing it to be polite and not because I might like it.”

12 September 2022

Bedward and Beyond

It’s been a long day, and I’m bedward thinking about the studio session overmorrow. I’m also wondering what other useful olde English words like “bedward” and “overmorrow” we should bring back from the dead.

13 September 2022

Snot Funny

After decades in San Francisco I thought I’d at least heard about if not seen every form of physical intimacy between two living humans. (Even here bestiality and necrophilia don’t appear to be that popular for anyone who doesn’t work on a farm or in a morgue.)

Gerrit and Alicia insisted that it was normal for parents to use a straw with attachments to suck the mucous out of their kids’ nostrils, and showed me “proof,” the illustration on the FridaBaby Nosefrida the Snotsucker box.

I liked the surreal illustration of a parent sucking a long tube stuck up an infant’s nose. People don’t really inflict that on their offspring, do they? They’re probably just sharing the same hookah. Or maybe post-embryo infants really are as disgusting as I’ve heard.

Snot funny, so time to move on.

14 September 2022

The Fourteen-Day Kitten Rule for Boyfriends

Helena never tells her mother Mabel the name of her latest kitten or boyfriend until the relationship is two weeks long.

Her strategy worked well with Julian: the poor bloke never made it past day ten. No one ever heard about him by name, so she disappeared him tracelessly with the ease that comes from years of practice.

The Fourteen-Day Kitten Rule makes perfect sense: don’t name something that might be about to die.

15 September 2022

Ig Nobel Prizes

I set aside today to highlight my favorite picks from the list of 2022 Ig Nobel Prize Winners, so here I go:

The 2022 Ig Nobel Biology Prize went to Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado, for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions.

And that’s it; that’s the list of awards on which I’m spending my digital ink.

Yawn.

Where did all the wackadoodle scientists go?

16 September 2022

Farrokh and Lizzy Dead at Wembley?

Today’s big news: Queen Still Dead, Touring England.

Today’s big unanswered question: How long can the British Broadcasting Corporation maintain its mournathon ratings?

Sure, the royal cadaver can still draw enough of a crowd to line a narrow street, but if King Chuck wants to fill a stadium he’s going to have to call on the royal gravediggers to exhume Farrokh Bulsara aka Freddie Mercury.

If we rely on Chuck, we’re not going to see Farrokh and Lizzy dead at Wembley Arena. King Chuck the Inept recently had a right royal meltdown when his pen started leaking after writing the wrong date in a guest book.

“Oh God, I hate this,” Chuck wailed. “I can’t bear this bloody thing.”

He should have heeded what Shakespeare predicted in Henry IV, “Heavy is the head that the wears the crown.” Today, the Bard would probably have written something like, “Dense is the idjit what can’t use a pen.”

17 September 2022

Photography is Dead

“From today, painting is dead!”
—Paul Delaroche, 1840

“From today, photography is dead!”
—Me, 2022

A hundred and eighty years ago the art world got its collective knickers in a twisty twist when photographers called their prints art. Something created by a machine can’t be art!

Quel outrage!

And now it’s déjà vu all over again. The photographic world, such as it is, also has its underwear in a state of painful contortions now that visual artists with computers using artificial intelligence are generating photographs without using a camera or a lens!

What an outrage!

I’m delighting in every moment of this stupiditude. It took a century and a half, but eventually zealots on both sides of the fence just got plain tuckered out and stopped arguing about whether a photograph can be art. I’ll be long dead by the year 2200, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some guy using a two hundred-and-fifty-year-old camera (was the Leica M3 the Stradivarius of cameras?) is ranting that a photograph made without film isn’t art.

From today, photography is dead: long live photography!

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart