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Weak XLVII

20 November 2024

No. 5,718 (cartoon)

I sure got flooty-patootie jallooned last night!

You’re an embarrassing alcoholic.

I most certainly ain’t; they go to meetings.

21 November 2024

My Friend Multiplication

Multiplication and I didn’t get along when we were first introduced in elementary school. Why should I bother to learn a new skill when addition was serving me well? What was the point of multiplying three times five when I could simply add up a column of threes or fives?

That was a long time ago, and now multiplication is my friend, especially when it comes to hair and fingernails. You see, hair grows at about ten millimeters a month, three times as fast as fingernails. But, of course, you can’t see that, and that’s where multiplication comes in.

Dust off your cypherin’ apparatus and you’ll see it takes about eight years to grow a meter of hair. You can stop right there, because fingernails that long are too disgusting to contemplate.

Multiplication is also great for annoying friends and foes alike. My friend Shirin drinks coffee daily, as any sensible person would. She doesn’t have a gram of it in the house, and only drinks at coffee shops, “where it’s only a few dollars a day.” Whenever she laments that she can’t afford something, I ruffle her feathers by using simple multiplication to point out that she’d have an extra grand a year if she learned how to brew coffee at home.

That ending is too simple.

If you never clip your toenails, they’ll be a meter long on your fiftieth birthday. A toenail clipper costs five bucks. Do the math; there’s no multiplication required.

22 November 2024

Cryptic Pregnancies

I don’t know much about biology, but I understand the basics of sexual reproduction, at least enough to have successfully avoided it. There’s one type of gestation that remains an incomprehensible mystery to me, a cryptic pregnancy.

It works like this. Let’s say you’re a woman, a biological necessity for human pregnancy. One day it’s time for a toilet break, but instead of urination or defecation you’re surprised to discover a third option: you’re going into labor and there’s another human inside of you demanding to get out.

You had no idea you were pregnant, surprise!

With over eight billion people, I suppose that from time to time someone will be that obese and ignorant to experience a cryptic pregnancy. That’s one of the marvels of the human race: we’re capable of amazing behavior, most of it abysmally stupid.

23 November 2024

Remembering Frank

Frank stole fifteen thousand dollars from me twenty-some years ago, so of course I haven’t talked with him since. I now know that I never will; Steve just reported that he’s dead.

His demise reminded me of a great quote from Jackie “Moms” Mabley. “I was always taught never to say anything about the dead unless it’s good. He’s dead. Good!”

24 November 2024

Guinness World Records

A recent news story got me to thinking about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the author of Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon (The Diving Suit and the Butterfly). I don’t know anything about litterature; the only reason I heard about his work was because of how he produced it. The writer had a massive stroke that left him almost entirely paralyzed. He dictated the text by blinking his eye.

I was reminded of his tragic life and remarkable accomplishment when I heard about Omkar Palav’s Guinness World Record for typing the alphabet with his nose in only twenty seconds. There’s really no correlation between that and the two hundred thousand blinks Bauby used for his book; I wrote this silly introduction to bring up a question that’s been on my mind for years,

Why is there no Guinness World Record for drinking Guinness?

25 November 2024

A Good Day for Burials

In the course of doing yesterday’s minimal research, I noted that the Guinness World Record for the fastest hearse is one hundred and eight-six kilometers an hour. That puzzled me, since when you’re dead you have all the time in the world and beyond. What’s the hurry?

I scratched my cranium for a while until I remembered that in some of the hottest places on earth the locals believe a corpse should only be washed. If you’re not quick about it, the fast-working decomposition juices can result in the internal bits expanding so rapidly that the abdomen literally explodes. That’s a darn good reason right there to have a speedy hearse.

I was thinking about hearses this morning when I walked past the Green Street Mortuary and noticed that there were only four huge shiny Cadillac limousines and hearses in the body shop’s parking lot. Presumably all of the others were on their usual routes dropping off clients. It’s cold, clammy, and wet, and ’twould appear that the undertakers are taking advantage of the good burying weather.

An automotive aside: Cadillac has been building hearses since 1916, but other manufacturers have been far more prestigious for decades, so why do most cadavers still prefer Cadillacs? Corpses never answer marketing questionnaires so we’ll never know.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart