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Weak I

1 January 2010

No. 4,877 (cartoon)

This isn’t right.

It isn’t even wrong.

2 January 2010

Old Whine in New Bottles

This is my fifteenth year of publishing this notebook on the Internet. For the last thirteen of those years, I used the same simple design I came up with when the Internet as we know it was relatively new. I didn’t know much about designing Internet sites in the last millennium, but I was astute enough to build narrow pages for small computer screens.

A millennium later, I still don’t know much about Internet technology. I have noticed computer monitors are much larger, so I made my notebook pages larger as well. If I continue to be diligently lazy, I should be able to coast on this new design for another thirteen years.

3 January 2010

Bike People and Horse People

I didn’t get the response I anticipated when I showed Molly a photograph of Florian’s bloody arm. Instead of recoiling at the fresh aftermath of his bike accident, she launched into a diatribe.

“You cyclists are such pantywaists!” she exclaimed.

Her remark surprised me; that was the first time I’d ever heard someone say, “pantywaist.” She went on to say that such a little scrape wouldn’t merit comment let alone sympathy at her barn.

Well, how about that? Even though I regularly cycle to get from here to there and back again, I’m not really a bike person. And I know almost nothing about the horse world, so I was surprised to learn about the apparent rivalry about who’s tougher.

I shall remain a poltroon. That’s always served me well, missing finger notwithstanding.

4 January 2010

Polly’s Missing Eyebrow

Polly told me that her eyebrow fell off. She was just sitting there, eating breakfast, and her eyebrow dropped into her oatmeal. It was so desiccated that it broke into tiny pieces when she tried to wash it.

Since she couldn’t afford an eyebrow transplant, Polly used makeup to draw a trompe l’oeil eyebrow. It’s fairly convincing if you don’t look too closely, and who looks at eyebrows?

5 January 2010

No Smoking, Depending

I met Melanie and a couple of her friends at the Regal Ground, a coffee shop near my studio. I’d never been there before. (I have an espresso machine and a corkscrew in my studio, so I rarely frequent coffee shops or bars.)

I asked about the curious warning sign on the wall, “No smoking, depending on what it is.” This led to an uninformed, inane discussion of whether smoking marijuana was still illegal. Lots of anecdotes and a paucity of facts made for an enjoyable discussion.

6 January 2010

Death, Detroit, and Christmas

A federal grand jury in Detroit indicted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab today for attempted murder for trying to explode his underwear bomb on the Christmas flight to Detroit. It should be an interesting trial, if his case makes it that far.

I can imagine the “Detroit defense.” Given the choice between death and Detroit, a number of sensible people would choose the former. Using similar logic, there’s also the “Christmas defense.”

Of course, those are just hypothetical legal arguments. From all I’ve read, it seems clear that Abdulmutallab is guilty of violating the first rule of suicide: don’t take anyone with you. Even on Christmas, and even in Detroit.

7 January 2010

Fifty-Four

Another birthday.

Exclamation point.

Or not.

8 January 2010

Can Natives Go Native?

Judith sent me a photograph of her in Guatemala, where she’s spending months and months. She’s wearing a poncho or a serape. She looks serene, happy.

When I first looked at the image, I said to myself, “Self, Judith’s gone native.” That confused me, since, as a native American, she was native to begin with.

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©2010 David Glenn Rinehart