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Weak XXIX

17 July 2026

No. 6,250 (cartoon)

Thanks!

My problem.

I’m sorry; I meant “no pleasure.”

18 July 2026

Thirst Draft

Imelda invited me to Thirst Draft: Write Drunk, Edit Never, an event for writers at a local bar.

Write & Mingle: six to seven
Share on Stage: seven to eight
Drink & Discuss: eight to nine

I gracefully declined. There wasn’t one thing wrong about the premise; everything was wrong.

It’s annoyingly stupid to associate drinking and writing. Over decades of drinking, I’ve never found a single word or idea in a bottle.

But what about Hemingway, the poster child for drinking and writing? When he was sixty-one, he was asked to write a single sentence for Kennedy’s inauguration. The suicidal writer couldn’t do it, and confided to a friend, “It just won't come any more." Kinda makes you wonder if the unanimous clinical description of alcohol as a depressant might be true, doesn’t it?

The first hour of Thirst Draft is for writing and mingling, but I’ve never heard of writing being anything other than a solitary pursuit.

The second hour is for reading the recently written words on stage. Dumb.

And then there’s an hour of drinking and discussing the new work. Dumber.

The evening is all about instant gratification for people with fantasies about writing; it’s the literary equivalent of an air guitar recital.

Writing is hard work, and a few paragraphs are plenty for me today.

19 July 2026

It’s Not Soccer, and That’s Not a Ball

Nora was surprised that I didn’t watch a minute of the final game of the world futbol contest, so I explained that I found looking at guys kick a ball around a huge field even boringer than baseball.

“It’s not a ball,” she replied, “it’s a truncated icosahedron.”

She went on to explain that the “ball” is actually thirty-two faces comprised of a dozen pentagons and twenty hexagons. She added that that’s the same structure as the Buckminsterfullerene molecule in chemistry.

I stopped her there and changed the subject before she could tell me all about Bucky and more. I was amazed that her explanation of the pseudosphere’s beautiful math was almost as tedious as the beautiful game itself.

20 July 2026

Meet the New Boss

Daniel Ortega led the Sandinistas during the Nicaraguan Revolution when they overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. The same Daniel Ortega is the president of Nicaragua today. And forever: he just announced that there will be no more elections there to prevent “the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country” from being in the government.

Once again, a revolutionary who overthrew the old dictator becomes the new dictator. That story is so old I found only one mention of it in the news.

We will get fooled again; it happens all the time.

21 July 2026

Search Up

If it wasn’t for Alphabet’s battalions of lawyers, “Google” might become part of the English language as have aspirin, elevator, and zipper.*

Alphabet more or less replaced Google’s “Don’t be evil” with “Do the right thing.” (Translation: “Make lots of money,” and not a reference to Spike Lee’s 1989 film of the same name.) That’s why I’ve avoided using “Google” as a verb. And so, I was quite pleased to learn that Kids These Days have replaced “Google” with “search up.”

That’s all I have to report, and if you’d like to know more, you know what to do: search it up.

*Expired trademarks of Bayer, the Otis Elevator Company, and the B.F. Goodrich Company, respectively.

22 July 2026

Leftover Salmon From a Good Home

Iris cooked us up some good vittles for dinner last night, and sent me home with the salmon we didn’t eat wrapped in the foil on which it was broiled. I was tempted to photograph it when I pulled it out of the reefer today, and didn’t resist the temptation after I came up with the title for my new piece: Leftover Salmon From a Good Home.

The wording was an inside joke, a play on the name of a local band, Leftover Salmon From Good Homes. I discovered while editing this that the joke was on me: Leftover Salmon and From Good Homes are two different groups, from Colorado and New Jersey, respectively.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart