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Weak XXXII

7 August 2024

No. 1,764 (cartoon)

I expected you to hurt me so I’m not surprised.

I didn’t want to disappoint you.

8 August 2024

Subway Ambush

Coronarama never went away, so for the last four years I’ve been wearing my mask in crowded public places and it’s served me well. I’ve never caught Coronarama, and today the mask protected me when I was ambushed getting off the subway.

As soon as I awkwardly pushed my bike through the new, narrow, two-meter-tall fare gates, a television news crew pounced on me to ask about what it was like to pass through the new portals with my large bicycle. Instead of pulling up my shirt to cover my face as I might have done five years ago, I let the mask provide adequate anonymity.

“International problems demand international solutions,” I replied.

The so-called reporters were satisfied with the punch line from an old New Yorker cartoon, and let me pass unhindered and incognito into the cool embrace of the San Francisco fog.

9 August 2024

Bland, Boring, and Dull Day

Today is Bland, Boring, and Dull Day, an international celebration of all things uninteresting between the sister cities of Bland, Australia, Boring, Oregon, and Dull, Scotland.

I embraced the aesthetic and photographed a large sheet of plywood, oh yes I did. To add to the boredom, I’ll mention that the shutter was open for a sixtieth of a second at f8; stopping down more would have resulted in diffraction. I could add more details, but I fear they’d be too exciting bordering on the tantalizing.

10 August 2024

Vietnamese Eels in the News

I’ve traveled in Thailand and Cambodia, but, thanks in part to Daniel Ellsberg, I’ve never set hand or foot in Vietnam. In practice, that means I’ve never been to a real Vietnamese restaurant. (Vietnamesey dives in other parts of the world don’t count.) And in temporary conclusion, I have no empirical evidence of whether live eels are on the menu there.

What I do know, based on reliable news accounts, is that live eels are showing up in men’s intestines there. I presume it was easy for doctors at the Hai Ha District Medical Center to diagnose a patient’s excruciating gastric cramps: an eel had chewed through his abdomen to escape his innards.

More recently, surgeons at Viet Duc Hospital removed a live eel that had gnawed an escape path through a young man’s intestines. I suppose it wasn’t a difficult decision for the eel since the rectum exit was blocked with a lemon. (That detail initially puzzled me until I remembered that many people enjoy lemon with seafood.)

Is there a lesson one can learn here? Of course there is. I occasionally like to write about revolting, nauseating behavior; it keeps the digestive system healthy without live eels.

11 August 2024

The Good Photograph Trap

I recently bought a small, high-resolution camera with a great lens that lives in my backpack, and I find myself almost involuntarily scanning for good photographic opportunities whilst cycling. This is an incredibly bad idea for a couple of reasons.

I can probably make a good photograph of anything that looks like a good photograph at a glance. But here’s the paradoxical rub: if it looks like a good photograph, then it’s almost certainly not.

Those arty musings are relatively trivial given the other concern: when I’m riding my bike, I should be looking for reckless drivers and hidden obstacles that might spindle, bend, mutilate, or kill me.

Andy Grove, a holocaust survivor, was most prescient when he observed, “Only the paranoid survive.”

12 August 2024

PLY-WOOD (Plywood Deconstructed, Deciphered, and Decoded)

Now that Bland, Boring, and Dull Day is history for this year, I tarted up my photograph of a sheet of plywood to make PLY-WOOD (Plywood Deconstructed, Deciphered, and Decoded).

(I see that the text in the above photograph is illegible at the small reproduction size, so I hope you can see the larger image referenced in the previous sentence. The problem is that the person who built and manages my Internet is unskilled bordering on incompetent. I can say that with certainty since he is me.)

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart