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Weak XLVI

12 November 2023

No. 5,863 (cartoon)

I used to think I could take anything life threw at me.

What happened?

Too many bricks and knives.

13 November 2023

My Coin Collection

I collected coins when I was a boy; I had an impressive collection. The last time I saw it was when I left my parental home for a nice little boarding school, Interlochen, when I was thirteen. My mother moved several times over the following decades and somewhere along the way my hoard was lost, or probably stolen.

And then ...

And then my mother opened up an old box full of her mother’s books that had been in storage since time began and there it was!

Jackpot!

When I finally saw my treasure again I was shocked to discover it was nothing like I remembered. I had a dozen silver dollars, not the sixty-some I thought I had. And all of the old coins had been in circulation so long that they were much the worse for wear and of almost no numismatic value.

Now what?

I’m too lazy to research how to sell them; they’ll probably stay in a closet for the rest of my life. I’ll let my executor figure out what to do; she knew the job was dangerous when she took it.

14 November 2023

Out of the Mouth of Scumbags

“As long as your schmeckle works, you feel immortal.”

I liked that idiocy, and was glad to add another word to my modest Yiddish vocabulary. So far so good, but there’s always a problem, and today’s complication is the author.

He’s a thoroughly reprehensible jerk, or, technically speaking, a jerkus maximus. And so, I’m passing along his clever line but not his name.

Having addressed today’s moral conundrum, I’d say that it’s time for a beer, wouldn’t you?

15 November 2023

UC Obscenity

What’s the world coming to?! Don’t worry; that was a rhetorical question and I’m gonna tell you right now.

The UC—urination chamber, or toilet, bathroom, whatever—is one of the few refuges in this dog-eat-refugee world, a tranquil, meditative place where one can go and relax listening to one’s own personal waterfall. Or, to finally get to the point, it used to be before some marketing idjit desecrated it.

Even in the bleakest, shabbiest UC I could always count on finding perfect white squares of toilet paper. Who could bollix up such an ideal concept? That was another rhetorical question, and I’ll tell you for the second time: some marketing idjit.

I dropped by Gomez’s studio and discovered an abomination in his UC: toilet paper perforated with wavy lines; there wasn’t a single square on the entire roll!

I could go on but I won’t. That’s one of the few good things about an abominable obscenity: it speaks for itself.

16 November 2023

Rotting Fresh Meat

I love Max Cannon’s comic strip, Red Meat. He’s been publishing it since the eighties, so I’m all but certain that I must have plagiarized, er, appropriated more than one of his dark, humorous ideas over the decades. (Sorry for the weasel words, but the trick for having a clearish conscience as a thief is to forget the specifics of past thefts.)

Lately there’s been a mysterious haze around Red Meat. He hasn’t shown a new strip since July, but why oh why oh why might that be? Did Cannon retire? On sabbatical? Or maybe he failed to pay his bills and can’t upload anything? Or perhaps he’s just plain old dead?

That brings up the question of how to gracefully conclude something one’s published daily—or, in my case, weakly—for decades. I’m not going to worry about that until my doctor tells me not to waste money on green bananas. Since I’m lazy, I’m counting on getting creamed by a drunk driver while cycling and then cremated.

With any luck at all, my beneficiaries can figger out how to terminate An Artist’s Notebook of Sorts.

Delegate and dominate!

17 November 2023

BART Police Is Hiring

There’s a sign on the Bay Area Rapid Transport subway platform that’s irked and vexed me ever since I saw it: “BART Police is hiring.”

That has to be wrong; the police are hiring. No, the police force is hiring. No, “police is hiring” clearly wrong. Unless it’s clearly right. At least that much is clear.

I asked my learned friends, and they agreed that both possibilities are right, and that both possibilities are wrong. I have many learned friends, but only one expert friend when it comes to this flavor of sticky grammatical conundrum, so I asked Dr. Cristello.

She’s something of a semantic dominatrix. Corporate executives who rampage through offices barking orders at underlings cower before her, begging to be whipped into strict semantic discipline, and paying her lots of money for the rewards of submitting to her strict, unforgiving hand.

Dr. Cristello is a friend of mine, so I dropped her a line and told her how uncomfortable I was sitting on the horns of my dilemma. She dispensed with the formalities and conceptual whip and simply replied, “Ah. Yes, the org is singular, so it’s correct.”

Spread the word: BART Police is hiring.

18 November 2023

Good News from the Land of Ramen

Some people—people who don’t know me well, people who really should know better, the miscreant class—opine that I’m always complaining about this, whinging at that, pooh-poohing the other thing.

And they’re right.

Sometimes.

I’m also frequently mistaken for the good humour man, and with good reason: with my extremely low entertainment threshold I can often delight in the flower growing out of the dead dog’s carcass by the side of the highway. Or something like that.

And so, here’s today’s wonderful news that gives me hope for the future in general and humanity in particular: the World Instant Noodles Association reports that last year discerning epicureans in some fifty countries slurped down over a hundred and twenty-one billion—that’s million with a “b”—bowls of ramen. (I originally wrote “fifty countries around the world” but then edited it: where else would countries be?)

Where there’s ramen, there’s hope. And now it’s time for a delicious little culinary aside. You know that block of dried ramen noodles, the one that’s got you salivating right now? Here’s my relevant notebook entry from 6 February 2007.

As it turns out, each brick of noodles contains eighty to a hundred noodles, with a cumulative length of over thirty meters. At current prices, that works out to about half a cent a meter. That’s cheap, even for an artist!

Bone appetite*!

Bonus rerun: here’s the recipe for the tasty dish I used to illustrate this entry ...

Rockridge Recipe No. II (Ramen)

Ingredient: one block of ramen noodles

Preparation: add boiling water

(from Three Rockridge Recipes)

*Inflation notwithstanding.

19 November 2023

Justice Stinks

Okay, citizen crimefighters, here’s your scenario right here right now!

You’re playing golf in Wisconsin, where nothing ever happens, and then, inexplicably, something big happens. There you are, golfing on the nteenth green, when you spot the flashing lights of a cop car in lukewarm pursuit. One of the perps—obviously guilty—flees the fuzz and hides in a nearby portable toilet. What do you do?

Adam Westermayer, one of the golfers puttering about, knew precisely what to do. He could have beat the suspect’s brains to a crimson purée with his golf club, but he was more creative than that. He pushed the plastic outhouse over, trapping the villain inside.

“It was really smelly,” reported one of Westermayer’s golfing companions. “He could hear the sloshing, so I can just imagine the stench.”

The car thief surrendered without protest after he was greeted by a sea of police pistols pointed at him when he was done being fecally marinated.

But now the purportedly true story gets a tad dodgy. Why didn’t the law officers just shoot him “in self-defense” instead of putting someone covered in blue shit in the back of their patrol car?

The End.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart