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Weak XVII

24 April 2025

No. 3,600 (cartoon)

I need a hand with my art project.

I suppose no one will ever miss it.

I love making sculptures in the crematorium!

25 April 2025

Gobstoppers and Jawbreakers

Kids have been enjoying gobstoppers for over a century. If you’ve never heard of that spherical candy, it’s probably because we call ’em jawbreakers in North America. And, as Javeria Wasim discovered, the latter name is most appropriate.

The nineteen-year-old student decided to make a video demonstrating her amazing ability to chew the hard candy. She was new to show business, and failed to appreciate the value of a dress rehearsal. Had she done a run-through, she would have discovered that jawbreakers are as soft and chewy as a hardened steel ball bearing.

After that setup and foreshadowing, we all know what happened next.

Wasim bit hard on the largest gobstopper commercially available, and it worked! From the candy’s perspective, that is. She fractured her mandible in two places—a literal jawbreaker!—and damaged several teeth. She suffered horrific pain, but her endeavor was nevertheless a complete success.

She set to achieve fame and notoriety, and it obviously worked since I just wrote about her slapstick stunt even though I didn’t get a product placement payment.

26 April 2025

Chongqing

What’s the largest city in the world? I’m in a munificent mood, so I’ll give you a hint: the ten most populous megalopolises are in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, and Japan.

Give up?

Chongqing.

It’s in China: thirty-four million people living in an urban sprawl that’s larger than Austria. And I never heard of it until today. If I didn’t have a face that was made for radio, I could be The Ignorant American poster boy.

In other population news, India is now home to more people than China. Why people keep making babies, that I will never understand.

27 April 2025

The Sunday New York Times

I started a week-long party with Lizzie today. It might look like catsitting to the untrained eye, but Lizzie really knows how to whoop it up, especially after a few nibbles of salmon.

I was dinking on my computer by the window when I thought I saw something fly over the fence with my peripheral vision. I popped outside for a look-see and discovered the Sunday edition of the New York Times in a blue, plastic prophylactic. I took it inside to a sunny, cozy table to see if I could remember what reading a newspaper was like.

It was really a newsprint wrapper for a dog’s breakfast of inserts: magazines, catalogs, commercial circulars, and even a fundraising appeal in an envelope. I ended up just glancing at the headlines—just as I would on the Internet—because those were the only words that were easily legible. I had a hard time reading the body copy, even under bright light with reading glasses.

Just as I’ll never go back to using film and a darkroom, It looks like I’m done with reading words printed on paper. I doubt Johannes Gutenberg would have bothered inventing the movable-type printing press if he had a good computer monitor.

I’ll end on an atypically positive note. Newspapers have improved in one important way: I had no ink on my fingers after my brief foray exploring the printed landscape.

28 April 2025

The Perfect Protest Sign

I saw the perfect protest sign in a news report today. There’s no need to mention who was demonstrating where against what, and that’s my point. This sign would be appropriate for any rally anywhere: Down With This Sort of Thing.

And if there’s a circumstance where rabble-rousers are putting up a fight in favor of something, the perfect protest sign could be paired with its positive twin: Up With That Sort of Thing.

On the downside, both messages are easy to ignore, but that’s the nature of such demonstrations, innit?

29 April 2025

Intentionally Blank (Freeway)

This is the sixth Intentionally Blank photograph I’ve made since the first image in 2020. The annual installments are entirely coincidental, and dictated by chance, not a plan, since I ain’t got one.

It’s funny how my series work, or, more accurately, don’t work. I didn’t set out to make a finished collection, otherwise I would have been done after a few lackadaisical weeks. Instead, it seems that every year I have a surreptitious glance and spot the next addition, in this case Intentionally Blank (Freeway).

I shall leave the rest of the text intentionally blank:

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart