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Weak XXXI

30 July 2025

No. 3,770 (cartoon)

I hate you.

Think twice about that.

Now I despise you twice as much.

31 July 2025

Love Kills

I just read that you can die from a broken heart. That’s not technically true; a Danish study concluded that intense grieving over the loss of a loved one shortens one’s lifespan. It’s unclear whether that’s only in the case of death, or if the traumatic end of a romantic relationship is also a nail in the coffin.

I was pleased to see that the researchers also concluded that there’s no cure for love; I wouldn’t have it any other way.

1 August 2025

Hoaxed!

As anyone who reads the nutrition label for these notebook entries may know, the amount of truthiness varies from day to day. On some occasions what I write is absolutely chock full o’ reality, and on other days there’s only a scintilla or less. As a result, no one knows what to believe, and I think that’s a perfectly healthy place to be.

I was delighted when Dr. Hagedorn told me that something I cited as factually correct last month was in fact his practical joke. I’m not going to reveal which notebook entry that was; not knowing is half the fun. In any case, I enjoyed the taste of my own medicine.

2 August 2025

Jerry Day Money Grab

San Francisco politicians have declared that today is Jerry Day, even though Garcia fled San Francisco to die an early death with the affluent junkies in Marin. City bureaucrats enthused that turning the city into a Deadhead Disneyland and feeding off the corpse of the late guitarist would bring “thirty million dollars into the local economy.”

Keith Richards pretty much summed up my contemptuous opinion of the gratefully dead parasites’ money grab: “The Grateful Dead is where everybody got it wrong. Just poodling about for hours and hours. Jerry Garcia, boring shit, man.”

My friend Deirdre passed along that insightful quote, but she too is getting in on the feeding frenzy by selling the t-shirts she designed: “I’ll be very GRATEFUL when they are all DEAD.”

3 August 2025

Oakland Photo Walk

Nancy invited me to the East Bay Photo Collective’s photo walk, so I joined her. I even brought a real camera even though I couldn’t imagine taking the lenscap off. Two or three dozen people met at the nonprofit organization’s headquarters, then walked a kilometer to Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, where everyone started drinking and talking about cameras.

I can’t understand why Popular Photography printed its last edition in 2017 since the medium’s popularity hasn’t decreased, at least based on the photographers I saw drinking at the saloon.

4 August 2025

Black and White Bladesmith Marketing

Take my Swiss Army knife, for example. Just joking, some already did, so I’m looking for a Victorinox Swiss Army Spartan to replace it. I never understood the relationship between Swiss bladesmiths and the ancient Greeks in Sparta. I buy ’em for the knife and the corkscrew, not any fabled provenance.

The black version costs forty-three dollars, twenty-three dollars more than the exact model that uses white instead of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene and Cellidor. The black plastic converts most wavelengths of light into heat, so I suppose it’s preferable in frigid climates. I doubt I’ll ever return to the Arctic, so I went for the less expensive iteration.

I am pleased to report that it’s extraordinarily efficacious at yanking a cork out of a bottle of wine, as if uncorking a leaky bottle of olive oil.

5 August 2025

Vida and Malka

There’s something very unusual about the photograph—maybe even a portrait—I made of Vida and her cat Malka. I never photograph my friends unless asked, so she commissioned me with a couple glasses of wine. (That shows what a savvy negotiator I am.)

I have dear friends I’ve known for forty-some years I’ve never photographed for a very simple reason. When I think of the people I love, I want to savor a hazy montage, perhaps even in amber, not a figurative or literal slide show. For that reason, I’m glad I don’t have a single second of video of my late father.

Having concluded my little purist sermon, I’ll admit that I do like the image of Vida, even though I will again lament that the visual nuances of my f1.2 lens are invisible to anyone not looking at my large monitor.

6 August 2025

Creative Mathematics Solutions

I had a flashback to my high school days at Interlochen when I saw this headline: Valedictorian Student’s Mother and Tutor Caught Breaking into School to Steal Exam Papers.

I got almost perfect academic grades through academic bulimia. I’d gavage all the textbook data I could between my ears, as if I was making foie gras out of my cerebrum, then vomit it out on a test. That worked every time.

Until it didn’t.

I was in my third year of advanced math when the cram and regurgitate method stopped working. By then, I was only interested in photography. (That, and sex and drugs and rock and roll.) I only had a few weeks to go in the course, so I broke into the teacher’s office and stole copies of the exams on the nights before the tests. That allowed me to ace the remaining exams and retire from mathematics.

I never could have pulled that off today, just ask the Koreans who were caught on reconnaissance cameras. I was so fortunate to be a teenager before the surveillance state triumphed over so many civil liberties, including creative mathematics solutions.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart