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Weak XXXVIII

18 September 2025

No. 5,987 (cartoon)

Someone in London gets stabbed every fifty seconds.

Poor bugger.

19 September 2025

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

I told Enrico that even though I’ve been glugging rum since breakfast, the only thing on my plate for International Talk Like a Pirate Day was a scrawny nothingburger.

“Sounds like you’ve been hornswaggled,” he opined.

“Well, shiver me timbers,” I replied, “and thank you for that, matey!”

“For what?” he asked.

“We just had a bona fide talk-like-a-pirate exchange,” I explained, “so now I can take the rest of the day off.”

(And I did.)

20 September 2025

Sully Sullenberger, Take the Wheel

Bernard Arnault, the richest man in Europe, claims raising his taxes would be “deadly for our [French] economy.” Of course he said that; he’s one of those ridiculously wealthy people who can never have enough money, especially when the poor have too much.

The joke of the day was too predictable to be funny, so I shall move on to tragedy.

Brett James Cornelius suffered a fatal overdose of gravity yesterday when his plane crashed. I’d never heard of him, but he seems to be best known for his song, Jesus, Take the Wheel.

The accident is under investigation, but I have to wonder if Jesus might be the culprit. If I were piloting a Cirrus SR22T, I wouldn’t give the controls to a guy who died almost two thousand years before the airplane was invented.

21 September 2025

Enchanted Black Hole

Black holes fascinate me. I’m not talking about astrophysics; those black holes are unfathomably unfathomable. No, I prefer the black holes that I can photograph with a fifty-millimeter lens.

The black hole I discovered this morning was on Encantado Loop between the intersections of Encantado Circle and Encantado Circle. If that sounds nonsensical, please remember that “encantado” is Spanish for “enchanted.” Since both of these roads—as well as Encantado Road itself—are in New Mexico, “the land of enchantment,” I called it what it clearly is: Enchanted Black Hole.

22 September 2025

Stone Skipping Scamdal!

News travels slowly from Easdale, Scotland; this just made it all the way from the Firth of Lorn ...

The World Stone Skimming Championships have been rocked—no pun intended—by a cheating scamdal. (I meant to type “scandal,” but discovered a new word (new to me, that is) instead. A happy accident indeed!)

Instead of following the rules and using stones “naturally formed on Easdale,” nefarious mountebanks used doctored, performance-enhancing rocks. Some of the four hundred contestants reported the subterfuge to Toss Master (yes, really) Kyle Mathews, who disqualified the perfidious rascals.

And now, for the happy ending: Lucy Wood won for the sixth time, securing her place in the pantheon of stone skippers as well as the Guinness World Records.

23 September 2025

Rasputin the Centipede

Just as I was about to turn off the last lamp, I noticed a centipede on the brick floor by my bed. If you’re not familiar with living in the desert, the predatory myriapod invertebrate might appear to be just another predatory myriapod invertebrate. If you know your desert critters like I do, though, you appreciate that the little demon can attack and leave you in severe pain.

With that in mind, I remembered the old adage, “Do unto others before they do unto you.” I put a couple sheets of toilet paper on it, then stomped on it with my boots until I could see its insect guts soaking through the tissue.

That was last night. After caffeinating this morning, I went to clean up the scene of the bedtime battle and saw the centipede had managed to crawl a few centimeters from under the toilet paper shroud. I’m sure it was feelin’ mighty poorly, but it wasn’t dead.

I placed my thirty-eight-legged nemesis on the stained tissue, and made a few photographs. Even after using tweezers to remove some of the detritus that it had picked up slithering across the floor, I was dismayed to see lots of minute schmutz in the high-resolution image.

I put the incapacitated invertebrate in a glass of water to clean it for its posthumous portrait, but the cheeky bugger held on for almost two more days. After I rinsed and dried its segmented corpse, it was no longer visually interesting, so I decided to use the imperfect image of the bug on a shroud after all.

I named the late centipede Rasputin, after Grigori Yefimovich (rhymes with Sonovavich) Rasputin, who was poisoned, beaten, shot, stabbed, but didn’t die until he was thrown in the Malaya Nevka River, where he finally drowned. (I heard that some killjoy historians say that never happened, but I’m not going to let anyone ruin a good apocryphal tale.)

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart