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15 May 2022
No. 7,243 (cartoon)
Our love drove us apart.
Our hatred keeps us together.
Forever and never!
16 May 2022
The Creatives
I’m seeing a lot of ads these days that are ostensibly targeted at “the creatives,” but that’s not true; that’s not true at all. The advertising weasels are actually trying to appeal to the unimaginatives and the stupids; that’s where the big money is.
As for the creatives, I like Alan Partridge’s insight when he was interviewing Steve Coogan. After Coogan said, “I’m creative,” Partridge commented, “The arrogance! The only other person I’ve heard describe themselves as creative is my accountant and he’s in prison now.”
Idiots who refer to themselves as “creatives” are pretty darn funny on their own, so here’s a bonus punch line: Alan Partridge is a fictional television presenter played by the man who created him and writes all his lines, Steve Coogan.
17 May 2022
No Real Togolese Meals
It seems like the only food on offer here in Flint, Michigan, is fatty, greasy, and salty. There’s obviously nothing wrong with such tasty fare, but even I like other things now and then. And so it was that I was pleased to find a dive selling real Togolese food from a small window in a nondescript commercial building underneath an awning advertising Real Meals Togo.
It wasn’t exactly like grabbing some street food in Lomé, but I liked the concept. The reality, however, was a fiasco.
“Do you have ablo?”
“No.”
“Agouti?”
“Akume?”
“Fufu?”
“Kokonte?”
“What do you have?”
“Fried chicken in gravy.”
Dang; another perfidious fraud. Oh well, the roasted cassava and maize plate at the Burkina Faso joint down the street was surprisingly good, i.e., edible.
18 May 2022
The Wet-Bulb Temperatures Are Rising
I used to be worried about the environment in general and the climate in particular, but I stopped fretting a decade or two ago when my learned friends assured me that we’d passed the tipping point, the point of no return, or something like that. The specifics weren’t important; I got the point.
I just read a great article by David Wallace-Wells, and things are much worse than I imagined. For example, fire season started early this year.
That seems like a normal, declarative sentence, and I suppose it is these days. Having said that, I don’t recall ever hearing about a “fire season” until five or ten years ago. And today is almost certainly the first time I’ve heard, “wet-bulb temperatures,” in one of the most alarming pieces I’ve read in the last couple of years.
The wet-bulb temperature has nothing to do with tulips or incandescent lights; it’s a combination of heat and humidity. The alleged experts can’t quite agree on a specific number, but a wet-bulb temperature in the low to mid-thirties is fatal, no matter how much cold beer you drink. (So much for another of my cherished scientific beliefs ...)
Parts of the planet may no longer support human life year-round. Don’t get too glum, chum, at least not yet; there’s more! Here’s my favorite new statistic: “Over half of all of the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that have ever been produced in the history of humanity have been produced in the past thirty years.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And if you do, don’t worry about the heat or the carbon emissions you generate; we can all relax soon. I know I am: I’ll be dead in a few decades, very possibly much sooner, and the kids can figure it out for themselves as is tradition.
19 May 2022
Gun Art in the News
Timothy Sled shot a man in Kingsland, Arkansas, just to see him urinate. That’s the allegation against a man facing two felony charges, but I got my facts mixed up. First time for everything!
No one shot a man and no one urinated, but appearances can be deceiving. There’s a silhouette of Johnny Cash on the town water tank in Kingsland where the musician was born. Someone with a powerful rifle, allegedly Sled, put a bullet through the groin of the painted figure. As a result, over a hundred thousand liters of water a day are leaking in a stream that looks to the untrained eye as if the profile was urinating from the punctured tank.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it’s clearly Great Art, but the thousands of dollars the aesthetically rewarding prank will cost the tiny town is real money in those parts, and it’s impossible not to feel at least some degree of pity for anyone who lives in Arkansas.
As for Sled, that ol’ boy’s in a heap o’ legal trouble, in addition to having one of the most unflattering mug shots ever made seen by millions of people. I hope he uses the only defense available, “I guess I just wasn’t usin’ my head, yer honor.”
I also hope he’s sentenced to community service at the closest shootin’ parlour, the Ooda Ranch Gun Range. As John Hinckley Junior for president campaigners used to say, he had a shot at the man, now let’s give him a shot at the job.
20 May 2022
Longway Planetarium and Contrail
Even though it’s a safe bordering on formulaic image, I like my photograph, Longway Planetarium and Contrail. (The contrail, or “sky worm” as Ansel Adams would have said, in the upper left-hand corner isn’t visible in a small reproduction. I was about to erase it when I decided that I liked the word in the title.)
I’m pretty sure I was in that same planetarium when I was a boy, but don’t have a single memory. I have no idea why they even admit children; everyone knows planetariums are useless except for experiencing hallucinogenic drugs and/or clandestine sex.
Coming next weak: more of the same.
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