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Weak XLI

9 October 2024

No. 5,631 (cartoon)

9 October 2024
No. 5,631 (cartoon)
I am a mature artist at the height of my powers.

You are a boring old galoot.

Same thing.

10 October 2024

My Drinking Problem

I enjoy a charmed life in general and improbably good health in particular. I only see my doctor once a year, but it’s more of a social visit with an intelligent woman than a medical exam. She knows that I know what I need to do to live a few more years, and she’s also aware that I ain’t gonna do it because I’d rather live better than longer. We enjoy a wonderful relationship.

In our last session, she brought up something I’ve heard before: I drink too much. I love sharing that with my friends; most of them respond with a smug, silent, I-told-you-so smirk.

And then I deliver the punch line: my doctor says I have low sodium levels in my blood because I drink too much water. Yep, I swear on the tomb of Hippocrates that’s the truth and nothin’ but.

Randall sympathized, and suggested I avoid icy drinks like margaritas and stop adding water to my whisky. He had good intentions, but I never make margaritas; that’s too much work. And I never ever never ever never ever water down my Scotch or bourbon, even though my sophisticated friends insist that it “opens up the taste.”

Bollocks!

There’s an old saying in my family that I just made up, “Dilution is pollution.” I suppose I could have a liter of beer instead of a liter of water after a long bike ride, but my beer is ninety percent water, so I guess my drinking problem is one I’ll have to live with ...

11 October 2024

Passing the Iphony Buck

I made this snapshot with my iphony standing at the kitchen sink. The Monarch of the Glen stuck his tongue out as if to mock me for washing dishes inside on a sunny morning.

Marketing weasels still call our pocket computers “phones,” even though fewer and fewer use them for voice communications. I think of mine as the first camera of last resort. The venison on the hoof would have sauntered off by the time I grabbed a good camera, so I used my crappy pocket camera instead.

That got me to scratchin’ my noggin, it did. Is an image captured with a “phone” a phone-o-graph? And with that innocent query, I’ve wiggled my way into a semantic tight spot.

It seems someone—perhaps Alexander Graham Bell hisself?—already secured the rights to the word “phonograph” for an entirely different device, so I’m abandoning any thoughts of expanding the English language for today.

12 October 2024

Can’t Trust Nobody

I’m going to do this backward and give away the moral of this story before I even tell it ...

You can’t trust nobody these days, not the police, not drug dealers, not nobody.

Oregon police pulled over some criminals in a stolen car, and seized a large pouch labeled, “Definitely Not a bag full of Drugs.” It was definitely full of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and oxycodone. The cops couldn’t be trusted to respect the perps’ clearly labeled personal property, and the pushers weren’t trustworthy either: they were selling fake oxycodone pills.

And at the risk of being repetitiously redundant, you can’t trust nobody these days, not the police, not drug dealers, not nobody.

13 October 2024

It Stands to Reason

I was leafing through the latest copy of the International Journal of Epidemiology when I read that Australian researchers concluded that standing at a desk isn’t good for you; it may cause varicose veins, deep vein thrombosis, that sort of thing.

For at least a decade or two, I’ve been told that I should have a standing desk, but I’ve been too lazy and parsimonious to get one while I sat around and thought about it. And now, I have yet another example that procrastination pays.

Still, I have my doubts after some scientific reasoning. I note that the Australians stand upside down in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe those of us in the north would not suffer such deleterious effects. There’s only one rational response: I shall sit on the sidelines for this debate and keep my eye on new studies until there’s a definitive conclusion.

14 October 2024

Bonkers Journalism

I just read the latest reports from the World Conker Championships, so it’s time for another philippic about the twaddle that passes for journalism these days. Here’s a brief synopsis of the story I read.

David Jakins, doing business as King Conker, was suspected of cheating after conker authorities found a steel conker in his pocket. He claimed he kept it for its “humour value” and insisted he never marked the strings. Conker investigators are investigating.

I could nitpick and rhetorically ask if conker investigators do anything other than investigate, but that’s trivial compared to The Big Question.

What in Gehenna is a conker?!

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart