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Weak XXXIV

20 August 2023

No. 455 (cartoon)

The future is the past.

That can’t be true.

It’s the past that hasn’t happened yet.

21 August 2023

John Warnock

I’d say that eighty-two years is a good run, but I was still saddened to hear that Adobe cofounder John Warnock died. Without his support, my Of What is Adobe Made? project would have been impossible. I don’t write obituaries, but I do retell stories; here’s one he told me.

His high school misguidance counselor advised him not to bother even trying to get into college. Instead, he suggested he pursue a career in automotive repair. John was smart enough to ignore bad advice and enrolled at a university. He wasn’t doing too well academically until he found a solution to a math problem that had been unsolved for centuries.

“That’s when I went overnight from being one of the dumbest people on campus to one of the smartest,” Dr. John concluded with a wry smile.

Postscript: Warnock invented Postscript. He also created the program Illustrator as a gift for his wife; other people eventually used it as well.

22 August 2023

Ceased its Existence

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency that’s unrelated to my late grandfather Roscoe, announced that the Luna-25 spacecraft “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface.” I love the phrase “ceased its existence.” As I noted yesterday, I don’t write obituaries, but, if I did, I’d probably use that line in every one.

And that got me to thinking about words with an extra syllable in front that mean the same thing, e.g., flammable and inflammable, ceased and deceased, et cetera.

One second thought (or is it the first thought?), ceased and deceased have very different definitions. It’s time to admit that, despite my aspirations, it’s been a while since I’ve been much of a cunning linguist, alass.

23 August 2023

Spud Earth

Our planet isn’t round. Before anyone gets her/its/his fuzzles all frizzied, the article I saw a few weeks ago in the Washington Post didn’t claim that it was flat, either. It’s a geoid. (I had to refer to a dictionary to discover the definition: “the hypothetical shape of the earth, coinciding with mean sea level and its imagined extension under (or over) land areas.”)

I decided to address this visually by photographing a potato impaled on a chopstick. It’s not a very good representation of the shape of the earth, and it’s not a very good photograph of the spud, either, so it all works out.

Not really, but close enough for art!

24 August 2023

What’s Physics Got to Do With It?

Everyone knows the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. That’s why the recent science headline was so exciting: Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature. Apparently investigators are keeping a quizzical eye on the movements of some wobbly muons that suggest a fifth fundamental force of nature.

That’s when I stopped reading. I’ve known what the fifth force is for decades, but it’s not the fifth, it’s the first and most powerful.

Love.

I’m not going to spend years walking around the Fermilab particle accelerator facility in a white lab coat toting a clipboard trying to get a bunch of self-proclaimed experts with their heads up their Tevatrons to understand something beyond the empirical.

25 August 2023

Three-Dollar Bill

Before the United States admitted Texas into the union, the arid wasteland was the self-proclaimed Republic of Texas. Bamboozlers and thieves printed their own money there, including a three-dollar bill, a classically queer denomination indeed.

The note features a woman sitting on large sacks with farm tools. She’s leaning against a huge shield with her left breast exposed. (I suspect that the engraver, who’d apparently never seen a woman’s breast before, botched a theft from Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting, Liberty Leading the People.)

Alicia is the only person I know who knows anything about that dismal state, and she escaped decades ago. I asked her to explain the symbolism, but she couldn’t.

“It’s a Texas thing so you wouldn’t understand,” she replied, then added, “and be glad you don’t.”

26 August 2023

Deglycyrrhizinated

Helena’s mother Mabel gave her a bottle of some holistic hokum, deglycyrrhizinated licorice root extract “to help with her wonky guts.” I assume it works on the same principle as cod liver oil: anything that tastes so repulsive must be very healthy.

As for “deglycyrrhizinated,” that sounds like a word that was developed for a spelling bee championship that leaked out of the lab and onto the street where some new-age hucksters appropriated it.

Helena reported that she poured the disgusting licorice chews in the alley by the trash; she’ll check in the morning to see what critter(s) died. That sounds like something Charles Darwin might have done, since he certainly wouldn’t have swallowed that black tar snake oil.

27 August 2023

The Wonderful Mysteries of Life

Julian and Sandra aren’t getting any younger, of course they’re not. In fact, they’re old enough to discuss what happens when one of them dies. Neither of them wants to die after the other, and that’s a problem.

Sandra told me that they came up with an elegant solution: they both pledged to outlive each other. I wonder how that’s going to work out?

Maybe I’ll live longer than both of them and find out. Maybe I’ll die first. Ah, the wonderful mysteries of life; that’s how it works.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart