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Weak II

9 January 2026

No. 8,089 (cartoon)

Our love is a sham.

One person’s pretense is another’s placebo.

Fraud will keep us together.

10 January 2026

Remembering David Robert Jones

David Robert Jones, dba David Bowie, died a decade ago today. I admired him for his brilliance, and disdained him for his laziness, and pissing away too much of his short life on moneymaking schemes like Bowie Bucks. Or was it Bowie Bonds?

I shall conclude this brief anniversary remembrance with a wonderful quote of his.

“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.”

11 January 2026

Plato Banned in Texas

For generations, American universities have been melting pots of disparate ideas and ideologies, where students develop critical thinking skills and graduate with degrees certifying that they are less stupid than when they entered. Texas A&M University is part of that rich tradition, with a crucial difference.

The Board of Regents there encourages academic freedom and vigorous debate, with a notable exception: no one is allowed to acknowledge, let alone discuss, anything that the administraitors find objectionable.

And that’s why they forbade a professor from talking about Plato.

Yes, really.

Frank Zappa was on to something when he said, “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

And if you want mindless indoctrination, go to Texas A&M.

12 January 2026

Take a Peak

I worked with nonprofit organizations until I retired from the employment racket after the first half of my life to date. (I read that the male brain isn’t fully wired until a guy is in his thirties, and my empirical evidence suggests that that’s true.)

After that, I volunteered to work on projects of interest many times, and with only one exception, I was treated like donkey dung or worse. Paradoxically, when I was a mercenary billing my services at three figures an hour, I was always treated very well indeed. That’s because of the almost universal stupidity of viewing everything through the lens of money. If the nonprofit group is paying me a lot of money, then I must be very valuable, but if I’m asking for nothing, then that must be about what I’m worth.

And that brings us, if you’re still with me, to Andy Jones, who was blacklisted after fourteen years as a volunteer at the Sussex National Trust when he offended the bloody pillocks who run the English organisation. He pointed out that the Trust’s Internet site was chock full of incredibly stupid typos and misspellings including, “permanant,” “toliets,” and “take a peak.”

One might be tempted to conclude that the message of this anecdote is, “Never provoke a numbskull,” but I think that’s a mistake. As George Bernard Shaw may have said, “Don’t wrestle with a pig: the pig enjoys it and you get dirty.”

13 January 2026

Long Live Dilbert

Another day, another death.

Today was Scott Adams’ turn. I will miss his brilliant Dilbert comics with lines like, “Certainty about the future is a sign of mental illness.” I will ignore good manners and speak ill of the dead: I’m glad he’s finally done spilling his racist vomitus. I wouldn’t go to one of his dinner parties even if I sat beside Gina Lollobrigida, who’s even deader than he is.

I’ll never understand how someone so clever and funny can also be so vile and stupid. I don’t worry about it; one of the basics of intelligence is the ability to hold conflicting ideas in your brain at the same time.

Scott Adams is dead; long live Dilbert!

14 January 2026

f64 at f2.2

The local deli is so busy that customers take a little numbered paper tab from a dispenser to determine who gets served next. I got F64, an auspicious f-stop for olde photographers that was popular almost a century ago. And now it’s on to the photographic numbers.

I photographed the ticket with my phoney camera’s seventy-two square millimeter sensor at ff.2. The film area on my eight-by-ten view camera is almost fifty-two thousand square millimeters; that’s where f64 comes in handy. That’s a seven hundred and twenty-two to one ratio if you want to get all mathematical about it.

My little brain ran out of steam after all that ciphering, so I have no idea whether f2.2 is the new f64.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart