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Weak XLV

5 November 2024

No. 4,180 (cartoon)

I aspire to be truth-adjacent.

In other words, you’re a liar.

How would I know?

6 November 2024

Strengthening My Happiness Muscle

In one of life’s tasty ironies, the Americans have just voted to elect a despot. As I told Clarissa, I always wondered what life under a dictator would be like, and now I have a firsthand opportunity to find out!

In response, she sent me a little piece by Jenny Taitz, How to Strengthen Your Happiness Muscle. The essay suggested, “One proven strategy is to strengthen what psychologists call your reward sensitivity.”

I think that’s the same as my concept of benefitting from a low entertainment threshold, but I got confused because she kept talking about the happiness muscle.

Taitz never explained the relationship between the happiness muscle, the joy muscle, the pleasure muscle, the delight muscle, the euphoria muscle, the delight muscle, the glee muscle, and all the other muscles that make life worth living.

The assistant clinical professor of psychiatry didn’t make the lowest bar of my low entertainment threshold, so now I’m exploring if and why toilets flush differently in Aberdeen and Adelaide.

Never a dull moment, if you use the right muscles!

7 November 2024

Don’t Mention It

This almost never happens, but tonight I did something so embarrassingly embarrassing that even I don’t want to mention it. The only positive aspect of my colossal stupidity is that now I have a good reason not to say anything more, so I can quit typing.

Mañana ...

8 November 2024

The Immiseration Years

Hillary Clinton wrote an autopsy report on the 2016 election, What Happened. And even though the corpse of the body politic as I knew it is still barely above room temperature, I couldn’t resist reading Ben Davis’s premature post mortem, None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny. Here’s the only memorable sentence from the essay ...

Indeed, he is currently running on the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history and Republicans’ Project 2025 would decimate the social safety net and immiserate millions.

I wasn’t interested in the rehash of conventional wisdom; the semantics caught my attention.

First, I was predictably annoyed by the misuse of “decimate,” as I am by anyone who uses the word to mean anything but, “reduce by ninety percent.” Davis made up for stepping on my pedant’s toes six words later when he introduced me to the word, “immiserate.”

Thanks, Ben; that’s going to come in very handy in the coming years.

Alas.

9 November 2024

Ain’t Never Killed Nobody Yet

It seems that the cyclists most people notice and remember are the rude, arrogant, and dangerous ones. That’s why I like to flummox pedestrians by being nice. I stop when I see someone about to cross the street in front of me, and I grin and brake for people in crosswalks.

When they wave and thank me, I assure them, “I ain’t never killed nobody yet!”

I love looking at the various expressions as they try to parse the triple negative. Cycling can be extra fun if you know how to do it rightly!

10 November 2024

Glocks versus SIG Sauers

“My mother asked me if I might consider moving back to Tulsa now that the election is over,” Charlie reported.

“I know that one,” I replied, “What did you say?”

“I told her I’d blow my brains out with a Glock before I moved back to Oklahoma.”

“I know you didn’t say that.”

“Of course I didn’t; my mother hates Glocks. I told her I’d blow my brains out with a SIG Sauer before I moved back to Oklahoma.”

There are times when a comforting little untruth is the best option, and I suppose that was one of them.

11 November 2024

Brain Dust

I made an amazing discovery tonight. Just as I was going to sleep, I realized that I was seeing things made out of brain dust. After all these decades, why did I just discover this phenomenon now?

I was spectacularly fortunate to realize the answer just before I lost consciousness. I forced myself to open my eyes and grab a pen before I lost my revelation, and here’s what I wrote, edited for clarity.

Brain dust is ephemeral and will be washed away with the next brain tide.

Perhaps that wasn’t a truly amazing discovery, but “amazing” is relative, and that was more than enough for tonight.

And with that, I’m going to shut my eyes and look for more brain dust.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart