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Weak XXIX

17 July 2025

No. 4,122 (cartoon)

Sex is the answer.

What’s the question?

Who cares?

18 July 2025

Weather Report(s)

It’s coolish here; I’d say fifteen degrees. That’s neither cold nor uncomfortable, especially since everything is still. There’s no sunshine, just an overcast, grey cloud ceiling with wisps of fog. And that concludes today’s weather report.

And thanks to Meghan O’Rourke, that’s two weather reports in one; she introduced me to the concept of interior weather. Today’s exterior weather and internal weather are the same, and I’m enjoying the equilibrium.

19 July 2025

Seventy Words for Bill

Bill’s a gourmand, someone who knows how to prepare more than nine dishes. (All of my seven recipes are great, and I see no reason to make more work for myself.) He invited me to his seventieth birthday party, and I knew what that meant: great grub.

There was a catch. Of course. There’s always a catch. Instead of asking for a simple gift like doilies or monogrammed toothpicks, he asked all the guests to write seventy words for his birthday. Not a few words, not something short, nope: seventy words.

I’ve never been a hack as a writer; I’m not that good. I assume a professional writer is proficient at writing exactly as many words as s/he’s assigned (or is paid for), but I found it a tad challenging to meet the seventy-word requirement.

I enjoyed birthdays at Uncle Bob’s farm when I was a boy. Animals came and went, sometimes to the dinner table, but he always had eleven cows, seven pigs, and fifty-two chickens to provide supper and eggs. When I was old enough to notice, I asked him how he had decided on that arrangement.

“After thinking about it for the last sixty-nine years, I concluded the ideal number is seventy.”

I’m not the least bit proud of my little ditty, but it was my ticket to a great party. Having spent all that time on what I hope will be the last writing assignment of my life, I’m inserting it here for lack of any better material for today. That’s two quotas for the effort of one!

20 July 2025

Typos Are Forever

Thanks to my friend Brewster, these words should be available on the Internet in perpetuity, give or take. I doubt anyone will find or read them, though, given that I’m within spitting distance of anonymity. Only one piece of my writing from forty-some years will be cited and reread: an impassioned editorial to save the polar bears in Antarctica. (There are no polar bears in Antarctica.)

I was reminded of the immortality of blunders when I read about a scribe’s mistake some nine hundred years ago; he wrote “elves” instead of “wolves.” Two researchers recently discovered the unknown scrivener’s error, a misprint that’s survived long after most other writing from the period has vanished.

Save the Antarctic polar bears!

21 July 2025

Where There’s a Hit, There’s a Writ

Tom, Dick, Harry, et al are accusing Damien Hirst of plagiarism, but I’m not sure why they bother. The artist hisself said in an interview, “All my ideas are stolen,” so why take the time to accuse a larcenist?

The Independent, a newspaper that morphed into an Internet site, piled on the scrum then pulled its punches after being reminded that Hirst is notoriously litigious. An editor wrote, “HAVE BEEN ASKED TO REMOVE THIS LINE BY LEGAL.

“It is not the first time the artist has been accused of stealing, having faced at least sixteen documented claims of plagiarism in the past. Over the years he has settled with at least three artists for undisclosed sums after they accused him of duplicating their work.”

Problem was, the comments were published anyway, complete with the struck-through text. Just another day in the dynamic world of Internet journalism.

Pardon the royal “we,” but since we’re talking about plagiarism here, I’ll add that we, er, I, lazily lifted a lot of the above verbatim from another fine online publication that proudly proclaims, “‘Gossip peddled as fact’ since 2000.”

22 July 2025

The Problem With Goats

Amanda loves almost every flavor of critter, so I sent her a snapshot of the trip of goats up the hill from my studio. (Today’s semantic bonus: a herd of goats is called a trip.) I was happy when she opined that they were adorable, since I’m an old goat on a hill as well.

The goats munched the dry underbrush and more: an evil goat chewed through the optical fiber that provides my Internet connection. I was offline for a day before the bits and bytes detectives identified the culprit, and by then the perp had vamoosed.

Feh.

I wish I could have caught the evildoer so I could make a big, bloody sacrifice of biblical proportions as a warning to the other goats, and to appease the Internet deities. I’m going to compromise and order a goat burrito the next time I’m at a taqueria; I hope that does the trick.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart