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Weak XXVII

2 July 2023

No. 9,717 (cartoon)

How ’bout them apples?

Behemoth bulging buttery bison bollocks beasty buggeration bigly!

Where did all the sequiturs go?

3 July 2023

Cow Game

“Cow!” Brewster shouted. “I won!”

?

He explained that he’d just triumphed in the Cow Game: the first person to see a cow and say “Cow!” has won the game for the day. Simple, no?

No.

Mary picked us up to go to a party on the Aurora, and after driving half an hour she exclaimed—you guessed it—“Cow!”

She challenged Brewster’s claim that she couldn’t be today’s champion since he’d already won, and the dispute is headed to the Cow Game Arbitration Panel in Slaughterville, Oklahoma.

This has to be one of the stooopidist games ever; I like it!

4 July 2023

Eight Thawing Hot Dogs (Diptych)

Today is the Fourth of July, a holiday celebrated with fireworks and hot dogs. Photographs of bombs bursting in air bore me, so today I’m pointing my camera at the ultraprocessed tubular meat products.

My eight models cost less than twenty cents each. (I’m not going to bother with lab tests, but the blended waste from the slaughterhouse floor is probably within a few molecules of the cheapest dog food, if not identical.) I froze them to delay flaccidity during the summer heat, and got quite a surprise when I pulled ’em out of the reefer: the meaty discharge had bonded the ersatz frankfurters with the piece of white cardboard on which I’d placed them.

I appreciated the visual gift, and leaned the aggregation against a cabinet on the patio. The thin backing quickly collapsed from the warm summer gravity, sending four hot dogs to the floor. When another fell soon after I made the first exposure, I realized I’d created Eight Thawing Hot Dogs (Diptych). I thought the number five was significant, so I opened a fifth of Scotch and had a self-congratulatory drink.

5 July 2023

Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy

I’ve been happily without an automobile for thirty-some years, and it’s been great. I’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, and I’m almost certainly in better physical shape from cycling and walking than I would have been had I spent more time traveling around hanging off a steering wheel like a large, pudgy primate.

And there are the political considerations. Drive a Ford? Henry Ford was an enthusiastic anti-Semite who admired Adolph Hitler, the Volkswagen’s godfather. I’ll stop talking about the legacy companies and skip to Tesla and Elon Musk.

I used to admire the businessman before I came to agree with Harry Shearer’s prescient observation, “Musk is Trump for nerds.” I’m not the only one who was a slow learner; I saw this mea culpa bumpersticker on a Tesla: “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.”

I don’t have such partisan concerns with my bicycle, and not just because it has no bumpers. Although there are a handful of little shops where artisan mechanics build bespoke bikes, almost all the rest come from only three gargantuan Chinese factories. So yep, my cycle, built by underpaid workers toiling in barbaric conditions, represents my small part to support a repressive authoritarian government.

Hot dog, I say cool it man ... ’cause all I want to do is bicycle, bicycle, bicycle ...

6 July 2023

Waiting for the Metal-Eating Microbes

It’s important for me to pet my peeves on a regular basis, helps prevent ’em from going feral. Today’s healthy little rant is about recycling and composting.

With only three disposal bins from which to choose—recycling, composting, and landfill—sorting should be so simple that a ten-year-old could do it. That’s just conjecture; I rarely see anyone that young. What I do know, based on visits in many households, is that none of my otherwise wise friends could pass that test.

Here’s what I’ve seen in the compost container on recent visits: a piece of aluminum foil with a smear of guacamole on it, an empty can of beans, a plastic yogurt container, and worse. The sun will explode before any of those things biodegrade.

If these fairly smart people are being so very dumb, is there any hope for humanity? I doubt it, yet here we are after all these millennia waiting for microbes to evolve that eat metal and glass.

7 July 2023

A Real Work of Art

I saw a real work of art at Rufus’s party a few days ago; it was easy to spot.

First, it was a portrait of a beautiful woman; that’s a good start. Second, it was an oil painting; that’s the definition of art for some punters. Third, the cracked and discolored painting was clearly old, and had thus withstood the test of time, or at least it wasn’t lost to a fire, flood, or some nefarious miscreant. And finally, it had an ornate goldish frame; the minor damage wasn’t a problem (see previous sentence).

As Altamash Urooj said, “I don’t know what art is, but I know it when I see it.” (That cliché is endlessly repeated, but Altamash Urooj was the only citation I could find on the Internet. Well played, Altamash!)

8 July 2023

Brunch versus Lupper

Anastasia and Willy postponed our brunch tomorrow by a few hours; we all agreed that was too early to arise on a Sunday—or any other —morning. We’re having lupper instead.

Go-getters eat lunch/brunch before noon, but I got mine a long time ago. Having a meal between lunch and supper, lupper, makes a lot more sense. I can wake up anytime before noon and meet in someone’s kitchen at a relaxed hour in the afternoon without hurrying. Heavy grazing on a big spread is a great way to go into a food coma and then on to the Land of Nod.

[some ending]

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart