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Weak VI

5 February 2025

No. 8,236 (cartoon)

Sometimes I talk with myself.

That must worry you.

No; we all laugh about it.

6 February 2025

Getting Away With It

Here’s an excerpt from a recent David Sedaris interview.

When you’re walking on that edge, there’s a certain feeling you get, it’s a thrill. I don’t mean trying to shock people just for the sake of it. I mean you’re doing something you think is funny, but you’re just not sure how [it will pan out]. My agent called me one time and said, “I just got this angry call from this woman. It’s crazy—it’s just crazy.” He said: “She said she was with her teenage daughter, and you were signing their books, and you gave the girl a condom as a gift and told her she could only use it for anal sex, because you didn’t want to be responsible for her losing her virginity.” And I said, “Oh, I remember her!”

That’s certainly a nice little anecdote, and an insightful one as well.

Sedaris is talented, rich, and famous. In practice, that means he can say and do almost anything he wants with impunity. I can too, but that’s because I’m all but invisible to everyone except my loving, forgiving friends. I enjoy my relative anonymity, and respectfully disagree with Joseph Heller’s perspective.

“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis, and suicide. With failure comes failure.”

And here’s the final quote, from Charles Horton Cooley: “An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”

Postscript: I just discovered I used two of the above citations on 26 April 2023. Oh well, I plagiarize everyone else, so I’m going to eat my own dog food instead of rewriting this entry.

7 February 2025

Acme Invoice #VG5678798

I laughed when I got Invoice #VG5678798—Hi User!—for four hundred and sixty-one dollars and ninety-nine cents. This is the first time in my life that I smiled when I got a bill; that’s because it was from Acme Co. I haven’t done business with those perfidious rascals ever since the unfortunate incident with the jet-powered roller skates when I was a teenager.

Of course this wasn’t a real Acme invoice; it was an inept attempt at a swindle by a scammer too inept to replace “sample logo” on the letterhead. I’m guessing it came from North Korea; they’re the only ones who don’t know that Acme is a purveyor of malfunctioning explosive devices.

Having had my laugh, I’ll be ignoring the demand. But just to be on the safe side, I’ll submerge any packages I get from an unknown sender in the bathtub.

8 February 2025

Organizing My Feces

I’ll begin by repeating what I wrote on 10 October 2001 in case you missed it.

In any language one needs to know only three phrases:

- Another drink, please.

- Where’s the toilet?

- I love you.

In addition, I know the names of a few items and ingredients in Spanish for taqueria visits, but that’s about it for me. I mention my broad and deep ignorance to underscore that I would never ridicule anyone who speaks less than perfect English if it’s her or his second or third or fourth language. And that brings us to Penelope. That’s her new American name; almost no one can spell or pronounce the name she had before she came here.

After a glance at the entropy in my studio, she shook her head and declared, “David, you need to organize your feces.”

It took me a few seconds to parse that. I realized that was a literal translation of the slang, “get your shit together.” Penelope is very intelligent, so I’m not poking fun at her. It’s just another humorous example—to me, at least—of how amusing a very difficult language like English can be.

9 February 2025

Reel-to-Unreal

Mark has the stereo I always wanted when I was in high school: a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck and Bose 901 speakers. I once fantasized about copying all my friends’ records to put together a great library, and lining the wall of my studio with thousands of reels of tape.

Nice!

My teenage fantasy came true a couple of decades later, but with different media: I copied forty thousand songs from the compact discs in homes I visited to my computer, and later to my pocket computer, or “phone.”

(Here’s a completely irrelevant aside that I’m wedging it in because I’ll probably never use the word “disc” here again and because, well, just because. One might conclude that DVD stands for Digital Video Disc, but no siree; it actually stands for Digital Versatile Disc. So there.)

Mark’s a smart guy, and was wise to hang onto his equipment. I thought you could buy almost anything on the Internet, but you can’t. Only a couple of tiny boutique shops still make reel-to-reel tape decks; they’ve all but disappeared from regular distribution channels.

That’s fine with me; I’d need a shelf forty meters long to store all of my recordings on reel-to-reel tapes. My calculations may be way off, but I’m sure it would have to be at least thirty meters long, and that’s my final offer.

10 February 2025

The Perfect Boneless Chicken Recipe

I’ve always thought of eggs as boneless chickens ever since Shirin called them that. Sixteen characters is a lot of typing for me, so this is the first time I’ve called them that in writing. Anyhoohow ...

Eggs have been around as long as chickens, maybe longer depending where you stand on the “Which came first?” question. And it’s only now that scientists have discovered the perfect way to boil an egg. It’s complicated and takes over half an hour; that’s perfection for you. In any case, it was concocted by scientists, so you know that it has to be good.

I’m not going to repeat the formula since “the most convoluted way to boil an egg” should be easy to find on the Internet. As for me, I’m lazy with a primitive palate so I’m sticking with the methodology I perfected years ago in Three Rockridge Recipes.

11 February 2025

Le Soap

I don’t know if it would be fair or accurate to call Lucile a Francophile or a Francophone or neither or both, but fairness and accuracy are all but irrelevant on these conceptual pages, so I’ll cut to the chase, er, bathroom.

As not shown in this snapshot, her soap dish says Le Chat, but with the latter word covered, it appears to be Le Soap. It takes me back to the eighties, when everything was “le this” or “le that.” About the only semantic hangover from those wretched Reagan years is Harry Shearer’s weekly broadcast, Le Show.

Fin. (Le end.)

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart