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Weak XXXIII

13 August 2026

No. 3,988 (cartoon)

I’m sorry; I’ll never do that again until I do that again.

I can’t trust you; that’s what you said last time.

This time it will be different.

14 August 2026

Rabid Piranhas?

Way out west here, we got your human-shredding grizzly bears, we got your savage great white sharks, we got your venomous rattlesnakes, we got your homicidal spiders, and we got more nasty vermin and varmints that you can shake a Glock 40 Gen4 MOS at.

And what do they got back east? Puny ticks waging biological warfare with Lyme disease, and that’s it. At least that’s what I thought before I came across my favorite headline d’jour:

Maryland state park partially closed after rabid beavers attack visitors

Jeez, what do you do when a rabid beaver is coming for your jugular vein after you’ve emptied your last clip? Coincidentally, I also read about wild piranhas in the lakes there. I concluded that life back east isn’t as bad as I thought; it’s even worse.

Hold it; there’s no need to be so negative. Maybe the piranhas will eat the beavers and die of rabies. Or maybe the easterners will be plagued by rabid piranhas; stay tuned!

15 August 2026

Nepo Babies and Slop Janitors

I’m going to go off topic before I even mount the topic and talk about nepotism in general and nepo babies in particular. You know how it works: the head honcho of a company hires one of his kids to be, say, Senior Vice President for Triangles. Honcho Junior can’t tell a triangle from a biangle, so s/he hires an “assistant” to do the heavy lifting.

That’s how scions succeed.

The same thing is happening in the animation industry, only this time Artificial Intelligence is the boss’s baby. AI can crank out animation in less time for less money than a human could; shrewd business move! But AI delivers AI slop, dumb business move!

Enter the slop janitors, the animators reduced to damage control by trying to make animated silk purses from digital sows’ ears. The boss saves three dollars and fifty cents by releasing bland AI crap, and shareholders rejoice.

That’s how scions succeed with Artificial Intelligence, their new nepo babies, and the slop janitors who empty their diapers.

16 August 2026

Archiving Chronicles, Part III

When I set out to digitize my old darkroom photographs, my plan was to make an exact copy of the original print to preserve my original genuisness. That was before I discovered that I wasn’t as nearly good as I thought I was.

My portrait of my late friend Jim Marshall is a great example. I was disappointed to see that the tonality of the gun, whisky, and Leica was flat and muddy. I scanned it anyway, and was surprised that computer software shared my disappointment and added the contrast that should have been there when I pulled the print out of the developer. Too bad it didn't also burn in his right sleeve and make other needed corrections and improvements.

That discovery changed everything. Now, instead of making scans that are ready to print and hang on a wall, my new objective is just to create high-resolution files that someone else can work with. I’ve only just started my archiving ordeal, and I’m already bored with spending so much time in the past.

Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome; time for this one to come home.

17 August 2026

Golf Sierra Zulu Yankee

I'm very familiar with typos; we’ve been together for decades. I may have just discovered the oldest one; it goes all the way back to my days at sea.

When I was on the real Rainbow Warrior in the early 80s, the ship's call sign was GSZY, or, using the military phonetic alphabet, Gulf Sierra Zulu Yankee. At least that's what I've been saying for forty-some years. I now see that the word is “Golf,” not “Gulf.” That shouldn't bother me, but it does.

Ships sail in the Gulf of This and the Gulf of That, and golf is a self-evidently stupid game, so that’s like comparing apples and orange roughies. To make matters worse, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization says the proper pronunciation of “Golf” is “Gulf.”

The Rainbow Warrior is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so I suppose it no longer has a call sign. Regardless, I've spent too much time on a trivial albeit ancient typo, so it's time to get the foxtrot out of here.

18 August 2026

Audio Evolution

I don't spend much time looking in the rearview mirror; I'm much more interested in what's in front of me and around the next bend. That's why I am frequently surprised when I look over my shoulder and see something I never imagined. In this case, I'm talking about seeing music, both figuratively and literally.

Seventy-five years ago sheet music was the most common way that people brought music into their homes, and sixty-five years ago LP (long-playing!) records replaced that. Thank you, vinyl!

Let's make the math easy and assume that each album has ten songs on it. That means I have the equivalent of six thousand records stored in my pocket computer, colloquially known as a phone. Even if I could purloin that many albums, I couldn’t tote twenty-five hundred kilos of music to the other side of town.

Those statistics used to make me sound like a modern kinda fella, but I certainly ain’t. Kids These Days don’t bother with computer files; they pay twelve dollars a month to access hundreds of millions of recordings. They’ll find out the hard way that the song they listened to online today might not be there tomorrow if the Bighuge Records licensing agreement expires at midnight.

Let's see; now that I have disparaged both the past and the future, all that remains is the present, so I think I shall stop scribbling and enjoy that ephemeral gift.

19 August 2026

Billionaire Bums

If The New York Times is to be believed—sometimes it is and sometimes it ain't—being fashionable sounds like a lot of work. I'm thinking of a couple of recent articles giving what sounds like dubious guidance.

Charlotte Collet is featured in an advice column, She’ll Make You Rethink How to Wear a Shirt. Let’s see; after deciding whether or not to tuck the shirt into my pants, the only other choice is whether to turn it inside out or not. That depends on which side has the most stains, so not much of an intellectual challenge there.

Another piece advises, This Fall, Consider Dressing Like Your Living Room. I don’t have a living room, so I didn’t read the details. Perhaps I should have; there might be an option for dressing like your bathroom for people like me.

I pity the neurotic New Yorkers. Here in Sans Frisco, no one can tell whether you’re a bum or a billionaire, and that’s as it should be. After all, a billionaire is just a bum with a billion dollars.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart