Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XLII

15 October 2026

No. 8,554 (cartoon)

Thank you for saving my life.

I wanted to watch you suffer longer.

16 October 2026

Planning for the Leap Hour

As I’ve always said, why put off fixing a nasty problem until tomorrow when you can deal with it in thousands of years? I’m chuffed to report that the technocrats at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures have finally come around to my way of thinking.

Anyone with a calendar knows about 29 February; that’s the extra day we get every fourth year. In addition to that relatively crude leap year correction, boffins with atomic clocks also correct for discrepancies with leap seconds. Or rather, to finally get to the point, they used to do that.

Apparently, such precision is problematic for all sorts of sophisticated systems, so the world’s timekeepers voted to replace the pesky leap seconds with a leap hour. Don’t worry about updating your calendars just yet; the clockmasters guesstimate we’ll need a twenty-five-hour day “thousands of years from now.”

Let generations yet unborn tackle the problem in a few millennia; problem solved!

17 October 2026

The Bad Art Network Revisited

The Washington Post published a puff piece about the Museum of Bad Art without even a passing reference to the Museum of Particularly Bad Art. That reminded me that I hadn’t heard anything from that august Australian institution in a long time. After a bit of investigation—probably more than the Post “reporter” did—I discovered the Aussie museum has been dormant since 2010.

How can this be?!

I’m certain that there’s no dearth of particularly bad art and worse. That takes me back to something I wrote on 11 February 2024.

And that brings me to my latest stillborn project, The Bad Art Network. I’d charge museums around the world, say, five hundred dollars a year to be an institutional member. And if, say, the Millicent Rogers Museum refused to pay up, I’d have to come up with some form of legal extortion, such as shaming them by putting them on a list of Institutions in Denial. I figure that kind of bad publicity is worth five Franklins a year to avoid.

I’ll sell all rights to The Bad Art Network to anyone for a burrito and a beer; have your peoples call mine.

18 October 2026

Vida at Mono Lake

I’m confused by my reaction to the photograph Vida sent me from Mono Lake: I liked it because it looked like an image I would have made had I been standing beside her. I can’t figure out if that’s a compliment and/or an egotistical remark.

I applied my computer’s chromophobe filter to convert half the photograph to greyscale, that way I don’t have to decide.

19 October 2026

Honor Among Literary Thieves

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

Acclaimed Author Denies Using A.I. but Admits Plagiarism

Bravo! Thélyson Orélien didn’t stoop to none of that computerized hanky-panky; he used good ol’-fashioned thievery. Things are grim all over, but it’s refreshing to see one writer who still knows his craft.

20 October 2026

Centsless Analogy

“I just read that six percent of Americans didn’t recognize an image of Abraham Lincoln,” Cedric reported.

“That doesn’t seem right,” I replied. “After all, his profile is on over half a trillion pennies.”

“You might want to consider that the mint stopped making pennies last November,” he suggested. “My guess is that six percent of Americans may not know what a penny looks like either.”

21 October 2026

Creativity Through the Ages

One of the best photography shows I ever saw was in (Santa Fe?) New Mexico in 1977. I marveled at how good it was, and aspired to improve my work to at least that level of excellence. As I was leaving the gallery, I glanced at the curator’s statement on the wall and discovered that five-year-old children made all the photographs. They created fresh images because they didn’t know how good photographs are supposed to look, something I’ll never be able to unlearn.

Or maybe there was more to it than that.

I read about a study that concluded that adults aren’t as inventive as kids because they’re anxious and afraid of appearing to fail. That may be true for most people, but I don’t care what anyone who’s not a close and trusted friend thinks about my work. I agree with David Salle: “It’s good to do work that makes your friends nervous and your enemies gloat.”

The best I can figger that creative muscles weaken and atrophy just like all the other ones if they’re not used regularly. I’ve just written almost two hundred words, and that’s plenty of exercise for now.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2026 David Glenn Rinehart