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5 March 2024

No. 4,291 (cartoon)

Your smile is contagious.

Thank you!

Antibiotics will cure that.

6 March 2024

My Hypothetical Ten-thousand Hillbilly Babies

The Kentucky hillbillies running the state government, who earlier this year proposed legalizing sex between cousins, have joined forces with the Kentucky Taliban to provide child support to unborn children. Meanwhile, the Alabama Taliban has declared that frozen embryos are legally protected children.

I smell gold!

Embryos are going really cheap in Alabama after recent developments. A friend knows a dealer in Mobile who’s selling a thousand embryos for only sixty dollars. All I have to do is go to Alabama and buy, er, adopt ten thousand children, put my cherished babies on dry ice, drive ’em to Nashville, file the government paperwork, and go on the megadole for all my youngin’s.

Easy money!

And that’s the problem: there’s no such thing as easy money. No amount of money could get me to move to Tennessee.

I have more than enough dosh, so I’m not leaving civilization as I know it to grow rich off embryos. That doesn’t mean you can’t, though; please send me some snapshots of your wee bairns frozen in their icy microscopic cribs if you do.

7 March 2024

Just Asking for a Friend

I love my doctor, figuratively speaking. I need almost no medical attention, so we spend the twenty minutes allowed for my annual exam talking about her life in the “American health care system.” Our starting point is a tacit agreement with Walter Cronkite, who astutely observed way back in 1990, “America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

She said one of the funniest aspects of her work is the “for a friend” requests she gets from shy and/or repressed patients. Here’s a real example from January.

“Would your genitals get numb from sex with an embalmed body?

That was followed a few milliseconds later with, “I’m just asking for a friend.”

She said it took all of her professional decorum not to laugh. She gave an obfuscated medical school explanation to avoid the one-word answer: no.

Her patient’s mistake was to ask a doctor; almost any mortician could have answered that question.

Or so I’ve heard from a friend.

8 March 2024

Amelia Mary Earhart and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014 never to be seen again. A decade later, there’s only one thing we know with certainty: we’ve found the twenty-first-century reincarnation of Amelia Mary Earhart, although neither she nor the Boeing 777 have ever been found.

Not even close.

The aviatrix disappeared over the Pacific on 2 July 1937, but I keep reading about new sightings almost ninety years later. One deep-sea explorer captured a blurry image of what he believed to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10e Electra on the ocean floor thousands of fathoms below his ship near Howland Island. An investigative reporter claimed that she discovered Earhart’s plane on a remote auxiliary runway at New York’s LaGuardia airport.

And so forth.

And so on.

And that’s pretty much where we’re at with Flight 370. With conjecture ranging from a suicidal pilot to alien abduction, there’s a theory for everyone. A decade after the Malaysia Airlines plane’s unexplained disappearance; I’m guessing it won’t be found.

Having said that, I have a pretty good idea where the missing jet is: wingtip to wingtip with Earhart’s plane on the ocean floor. Find one aircraft and you’ve found the other: you read it here first!

9 March 2024

Because Everything Is

Bayo Akomolafe is one of those really smart people who’s so smart that I’ve never heard of him, so smart that he can write a run-on sentence ninety words long. (For reference, that’s three times as long as the previous sentence.)

I discovered when I spotted the title of an essay he wrote with Marta Benavides, The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down. Nice!

I found the copy almost impenetrable given my short attention span. I was about to move on to the next shiny thing when I discovered this little gem ...

“Nothing is original, because everything is.”

Six words; now that’s more like it!

Even better, it’s easy to plagiarize; all I have to do is replace “original” with another word or phrase. I don’t have a problem with that, since nothing is plagiarism because everything is.

10 March 2024

Lake Cleawox False Horizon

I’ve been staying at the cabin on the lake by the ocean here in Oregon for fifty years in every iteration of my allegedly adult life. That’s how long it took for me to finally make a keepable photograph of the ridiculously photogenic environs, Lake Cleawox False Horizon.

11 March 2024

Pseudotsuga Menziesii Detritus on Canvas

The roof of the large tent provided a blank canvas for the Douglas Fir towering above it. The tree and gravity did all the work; all I had to do was remove my lens cap and push the shutter release button to make Pseudotsuga Menziesii Detritus on Canvas.

12 March 2024

Bucatini no. 15 and Garage Door (Monodiptych)

My love affair with charismatic pasta continues with Bucatini no. 15 and Garage Door (Monodiptych). This is most improbable, but I may be the first person to use the unhyphenated word “monodiptych.”

(I don’t care who’s on first; that’s a great Abbott and Costello routine brilliantly recycled by The Credibility Gap.)

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart