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Weak L

11 December 2025

No. 3,234 (cartoon)

You will never meet anybody like me again.

Of course I will; I work with the lunatics in the psych ward.

12 December 2025

Competitive Lounging

“When lounging, you always worry that someone, somewhere, is lounging better.”

That was my favorite line from a piece on airport lounges in the current New Yorker. Despite being aggressively slothful, I’ve never considered the idea of competitive lounging before. I live in a capitalist, consumerist society, so when I think about getting ahead of the Johnsons, I imagine comparing who has the most expensive This, the fastest That, and the rarest Other Thing.

Competitive lounging seems like an oxymoron. If I’m concerned about whether someone might be chomping on cashews while I’m munching on peanuts, then I’m thinking too much, and that’s the opposite of relaxing. For the third time this year, I’ll repeat that comparison is the thief of joy.

13 December 2025

Keeping an Ear to the Ground

Medical advances are afoot in China, figuratively and literally.

A woman working in a Chinese factory, conceivably the one where this computer was assembled, suffered a horrific accident. A machine grabbed her long hair and ripped off her scalp and some of the skin on her face. Oh, and an ear as well.

Her doctors needed a safe place to keep her ear for months while the skin grafts on her face healed, so they attached it to her foot. It worked. That may have been a medical first, but I’ve seen an ear on a living human being before.

Friends, roamin’s, and countryfolk, lend me an ear or two, for I am about to tell you the tale of Stelarc’s ear. But fret not; it will be over by the end of this paragraph. The artist grew an ear on his arm almost twenty years ago with the help of surgeries, and implanted a wireless microphone so his third ear actually worked. Hear hear!

And so, life imitates art, art imitates life, and the aesthetic circle of life continues to amuse me, hoary clichés and all.

14 December 2025

Grandma’s Solitairey Advice

Gerrit and I were talking about the olde days, and compared notes about hiking for a week in the wilderness without the benefit of a single electronic device. We marveled at how we managed to navigate with only a topo map, a compass, some whisky, and no satellites.

I got misplaced a few times, but never all that lost, thanks to my grandmother’s advice. She told me to always hike with a deck of cards in case I completely lost my bearings. She explained that all I had to do was start playing solitaire and ask for directions when some damn fool came by to suggest the next move.

I never needed that safety net, but I’m glad that I had it.

15 December 2025

“Potentially Divisive” Nooses and Swastikas

The American Civil War ended when the racists surrendered in 1865, right? And World War II ended when the Nazis and Japanese surrendered, right?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Those were the dates when the armed forces in uniform stopped fighting on the battlefields, but the racists and Nazis continued with guerrilla warfare. If you’re skeptical, have a look at the latest edition of the United States Coast Guard’s new workplace harassment manual.

When a black sailor goes back to his bunk and finds a noose hanging there, that’s not a symbol of hatred, just “potentially divisive.” Same thing when a Jew finds a swastika scrawled on his locker: merely “potentially divisive.”

The racists and Nazis haven’t made a comeback; they never left. And with that, it’s back to the trenches.

16 December 2025

Whelmed

Here’s the score. In my little world, I’ve recently had two friends die, two go into hospice, two leave their homes to go into assisted living, and I stopped counting how many people have cancer diagnoses, and how many others are in and out of hospitals.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “score” in the first sentence. Life is not a game, or at least not a contest where the final outcome is in any doubt. When it comes to battling inning after inning with biology and time, the house always wins.

Mary provided the only positive perspective on the grim personal landscape. I told her I was feeling almost overwhelmed, and she assured me I wasn’t overwhelmed, just whelmed. I know it’s just clever sophistry, but it did make me feel better, even before I took a little cocktail break while whelmed.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart