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Weak XL

1 October 2025

No. 3,807 (cartoon)

You loathe and despise me; no other words will do.

You need a better thesaurus.

2 October 2025

Fearghas McKay 1963-2025

My friend Fearghas died yesterday, exactly two weeks before his sixty-second birthday. I don’t do obits, but I will note that I’ve never met anyone who knew more about all things computery. Had it not been for his initial encouragement and support, I probably wouldn’t have spent the last thirty years slapping up sloppy flapdoodle on this vanity Internet site. But that was decades ago, and I forgave him for that long ago.

That’s no way to conclude an unobit, so I’ll share one of my many fond memories of Fearghas that have accumulated in my brainpan like the empty wine and whisky bottles at one of our multifarious dinner parties for two.

Twenty years ago, I was the artist in residence at Old Chain Pier, a pub Fearghas owned on the Firth of Forth. I made Have a Pint for Me there, and promised I’d give him a set of prints from the project someday. I’m heartbroken that he left us before mañana.

3 October 2025

Dingaling Tommyrot

I needed an enabler to support my procrastination, so I called Antoinette.

“I was thinking of beautiful women, so I thought I’d give you a little dingaling,” I began.

“You called just to be gratuitously rude?” she replied.

That led to a ridiculous argument about whether dingaling means “the sound of a small bell” or “a foolish or crazy person.” She resigned from the silly squabble by announcing that she’d “just wasted ten minutes of my short life talking tommyrot.”

A ten-minute delay in getting back to work, not bad! And, as a nice bonus, she added “tommyrot” to my vocabulary.

4 October 2025

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day, so I asked Conrad for help coming up with petty, snarky remarks. He proved predictably useless and gave me a little lecture about how my “juvenile myopia made no rhyme or reason.”

That’s it! No rhyme or reason is why I am again ignoring National Poetry Day.

5 October 2025

Eno and Picasso: No Shit

The New York Times published a nice interview with Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. I came away with one marginally quotable quote.

“We’ve imputed a moral dimension to art. And all I’m saying is that I think it’s much more biologically functional than we think it is. I don’t think it’s such a spiritual, moral business being an artist.”

That reminded me of a Pablo Picasso quote.

“Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”

And that brings us back to Eno, as is often the case. In the transcript of the video, the newspaper published a throwaway line: “I think it’s quite possible that, as some people now insist, Picasso was a bit of a [expletive].”

I listened to that part of the recording and discovered that the Old Grey Lady is priggish; “shit” was the deleted expletive.

No shit.

6 October 2025

Sundial

Angelina wasn’t impressed with my latest piece, Sundial. No, that’s an understatement. Her exact words were, “That’s incredibly stupid, even for you, David.” She complained that it wasn’t a dial and it wasn’t functional.

I protested that its function was to amuse me, and this it was chugging along as intended, at factory specs.

7 October 2025

One Glass a Day

Freddie invited me over for a drink tonight, literally. He was hitting the bottle until the bottle hit him harder, so he’s limiting himself to one drink a day.

Well, that’s what he said. And then ...

As we talked about the price of tea in China, I watched him topping off his huge goblet of wine until he’d finished the entire bottle by himself.

“What happened to your one drink a day regimen?” I asked.

“It’s going great!” he enthused.

“But I just saw you drink four or five glasses of wine,” I replied.

“No,” he protested, “I had one drink that I periodically refreshed.”

I wasn’t surprised at his alcoholic sophistry. After all, Freddie’s the guy who also claimed that, since wine comes in a glass bottle, one bottle is one glass of wine.

8 October 2025

Half Banana FauX-Ray

Never refrigerate a banana.

Most people know that, but Evelyn ain’t one of ’em. I discovered that when I was searching for mustard in her reefer, and found half a banana that had turned as dark as a mummy’s big toe. She asked me to compost it, but I didn’t.

I could get into a discussion about composting banana peels (or not), but instead I’ll explain that I recognized the curved fruit’s aesthetic potential. I reversed the tonality of the dark banana on a white background to make Half Banana FauX-Ray.

Once again, the title makes the piece and vice versa; that’s as close as I’ll come to artistic perpetual motion.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart