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Weak V

30 January 2016

No. 875 (cartoon)

I heard a lie about you.

How do you know it was a lie?

It was rather flattering.

31 January 2016

There Actually Is Another Word for It

“I’m simply furious,” Buzz fumed. “There’s just no other word for it.”

I didn’t tell him that, according to my thesaurus, there are at least a dozen synonyms for “furious.” He was enjoying his petty tantrum so much that I didn’t want to ruin the pleasure of being righteously indignant.

Colitis Mondegreen

The girl with colitis goes by, or does she? Nope, that was Lady Mondegreen, and the state of her colon remains a mystery.

Someone didn’t understand the lyric, “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” in the Leninist-McCarthyism song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds; that’s the source of the colitis.

The other character is Sylvia Wright’s spawn from her essay, The Death of Lady Mondegreen. In the Scottish ballad, The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray, “... and laid him on the green,” was misheard as, “... and Lady Mondegreen.”

For reasons too complicated and personal to address here, I’ll probably never know more about Lady Mondegreen, alas. Oh well, at least I don’t have colitis.

2 February 2016

On Toilet Paper

When I was recently sitting in the room most conducive to meditation, I looked at a roll of toilet paper and wondered how people took care of their personal hygiene before toilet paper was common. (Surely the ancient Egyptians didn’t use cuneiform tablets to wipe their bottoms. Or maybe they did, then destroyed them because they were so disgusting?)

Whilst engaged in thoughtful contemplation in the urination chamber, I wondered when toilet paper came to be? I’d never thought about that before, since I take everything that existed when I was born—including all forms of paper—for granted.

I reasoned that since it probably required a complicated mechanical process to make the thin, absorbent paper, that it must have been invented in the last century or two. That was a perfect example of my rational thought; I was completely wrong. The Chinese used toilet paper fourteen hundred years ago. Again, I don’t know nothing about nothing. I can, however, pull a triple-negative out of my hat to partially cloak my ignorance.

3 February 2016

The Wrong Tree

The woman in front of me at the grocery store checkout line was complaining to the cashier about the outrageously exorbitant price of almonds. The cashier listened patiently to her tirade before silencing the ranting customer with a brilliant riposte.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she interrupted, “but I am almost certainly the wrong tree for your bark.”

That’s most certainly a line worth plagiarizing, if only I can remember it.

4 February 2016

Working Less by Degrees

I told Kim that I couldn’t understand why someone as fiercely curious as her would go through time, trouble, and expense of pursuing something as narrow and specialized as a doctor of philosophy degree. Not surprisingly, she gave me a perfectly logical answer.

“It’s simple,” she explained. “I now only need to work half-time to be as poor as I was working full-time.”

For a moment, I toyed with the idea of using my computer graphics program and high-resolution printer to make a prestigious degree for myself. I quickly abandoned the idea when I spotted the flaw in Kim’s plan: it still involved much too much work.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart