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Weak XXXVI

3 September 2024

No. 2,546 (cartoon)

I have visions of you writhing in horrific pain.

Why is that?

Wishful thinking.

4 September 2024

More MLE and IFOCE News

I have a morbid curiosity about many of the usual suspects, plus an unusually disturbing one: hot dogs. There’s nothing intrinsically horrendous about hot dogs; in many ways, they’re not the worst thing you can put in your stomach. It’s only when Joey Chestnut jams eighty-three of them down his gullet in ten minutes that my macabre fascination kicks in.

That’s just what Chestnut did recently during a competition on a live television broadcast. (Is there even such a thing as television today?) I talked about Chestnut, Major League Eating, and the International Federation of Competitive Eating a couple of months ago, so I only have one thing to add: who would watch such a grotesque spectacle?

I hadn’t finished typing the preceding sentence before I answered my rhetorical question: people with morbid curiosities. People like me.

5 September 2024

Bernoulli, Euler, e and pi

Another day, another freak show, er, world record. Deepu V memorized the first fourteen thousand digits of Euler’s number, and later recited them in under an hour without making a single error. My first reaction was the predictable “Wow!” followed a few milliseconds later by, “What’s Euler’s number?”

I don’t want to get too mathy, so I’ll just mention that Jacob Bernoulli discovered Euler’s number—the mathematical constant e—in 1685.

That got me to cogitatin’. Why is Bernoulli’s discovery called Euler’s number? And why is pi, another mathematical constant, so popular when I just heard about Euler’s number for the first time? I think the answer to both questions is spelling. Anyone can spell pi, but no one can spell Bernoulli or Euler.

6 September 2024

Do Flies Vomit on Our Food and Make Us Sick?

Do flies vomit on our food and make us sick?

Yes.

The End.

I thought my one-word answer to that question in today’s Washington Post was just fine, but, unlike Lindsey Bever, I don’t get paid by the word. She managed to fluff out her reply to seven hundred words. I’m not critiquing her, oh no I’m not. A gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do, and I’m sure she needed the dosh to help pay off her student loans from journalism school where they learned her to write real big like that.

7 September 2024

I Don’t Get It

Kiliaen is one of those artists who believes that nothing can be good if other people like it, so he was disappointed in my reaction to his latest pieces: I thought it was some of his better work. I should have lied and said, “I don’t get it.”

I was reminded of John Cage’s remark, “Whenever I’ve found that what I’m doing has become pleasing, even to one person, I have redoubled my efforts to find the next step.”

My work is what I do, but it’s not who I am. I create for myself, so I’m indifferent to reviews and critiques. No matter what I hear I’m not going to do anything differently.

Kiliaen has a lot to learn about being a curmudgeon, but I’m not going to give him a single hint. He can figger it out for himself, like I did.

8 September 2024

Culinarrily Speaking

Annalee’s mind is so sharp you could cut cold butter with it. And her temper is so hot that her brain melts butter too. It’s a very versatile brain, culinarrily speaking, especially if you like butter.

(I note that “culinarrily” appears nowhere else on the Internet but it’s definitely a real word: I just coined it.)

9 September 2024

Brave New Illiterate World

Apple introduced a new line of electronic doodads and gizmos featuring “Apple Intelligence” today. The reworded corporate press releases, er, news reports, I saw weren’t very informative, but apparently the latest breakthrough is an apple-flavored version of artificial intelligence.

What can you do with the new twelve-hundred-dollar phone that you couldn’t do yesterday? Here’s an unedited quote from a respected publication:

During a segment promoting Apple Intelligence, the company promised an ability to create custom emojis based solely on prompts like “cowboy frog.”

If you’re not smart enough to spell “cowboy frog,” the astounding new technology will generate the emojis, pictographs, and hieroglyphics you need to communicate with your illiterate friends. In other words, just another day in our brave new world.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart