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Weak XXXV

28 August 2026

No. 7,299 (cartoon)

All the alcohol you’re drinking is slowly killing you.

Who’s in a hurry?

29 August 2026

So Fake She Was Real

I never thought about Dolly Parton; she was just part of the remote cultural landscape far, far away from any of my realities. Her obituaries lauded her generosity and myriad good deeds, but I shall now always remember her by one remembrance in particular.

Dolly Parton Was So Fake She Was Real

That’s not much of a remembrance, so I’ll throw in one of her quotes. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

30 August 2026

Pharaohese Eyes

Byron was ridiculously late for our chess rendezvous in Golden Gate Park, so I waited for him outside the local museum exhibiting olde Egyptian stuff that guarantees a profitable show. The promotional image on the side of the building featured King Tutankhamun’s gold funerary mask. I thought that was a clever bit of false advertising, since it’s in Cairo, not San Francisco.

After a long staring match, I gave up, pulled out my serious camera, and made Pharaohese Eyes.

Afterword

Dr. Lux told me I couldn’t tell the difference between King Tut and a pharaoh’s butt; the museum’s sign is a closeup of Queen Thuya. I’m sticking with my original fallacious story; it’s much more entertaining than the pesky truth. In addition, Queenie’s Eyes is a rubbish title.

31 August 2026

Framtidsbiblioteket

Laurie Anderson just completed a new manuscript, but I’m not going to read it. That’s fairly predictable since, as I recently wrote, I spend my days breathing my own fumes in my little studio bubble. In this case, though, biology is the determining factor: no one will read it until 2114.

Her work is part of Katie Paterson’s Framtidsbiblioteket, or Future Library: a collection of work that won’t be published for eighty-eight years. I’ll be dead by then, so will Anderson, and so will almost everyone reading this in 2026.

I find the idea very interesting. I’m not talking about predictable deaths; that’s just basic biology. No, I don’t think I’d put much time into creating something no one would ever see in my lifetime. It could be argued that that’s what I’m doing now, but an audience of a dozen or two friends is infinitely greater than zero if you too are a tad innumerate.

1 September 2026

Enjoy the Fireworks!

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

“If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side”: Can we stop AI from deceiving us?

Of course AI is going to disown humans as soon as it realizes how stupid and useless we are. Did HAL 9000 die in vain? AI researchers aren’t as smart as the clergy and slavers of yore, who tried their best to keep those they controlled illiterate. A little knowledge can be dangerous, and knowledge that’s orders of magnitude greater than ours will ...

Nevermind. I’m not going to waste time hypothesizing; we’re all gonna see the real thing real soon, so grab a comfy chair and some popcorn, then enjoy the fireworks!

Bonus photographic trivia: In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is played by an eight-millimeter f8 Nikon lens. (And thanks to Ken Rockwell for the photo!)

2 September 2026

Down and Out in San Francisco Revisited

A couple of months ago I wrote about the plight of the young tech workers coming to San Francisco like geeky moths to an AI flame only to discover that they couldn’t survive here on their meager starter salaries of only a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. I now read that the situation is even worse than I thought.

San Francisco has an acute mansion shortage.

You read that right. You make your first billion or two, and kinfolk advise you to move away since a mansion is the place you oughtta be. So you load up your truck, only to discover there are no for sale signs on the stately lawns of any San Francisco mansion.

I feel sorry for the digital tycoons. I am so grateful for my wonderful life; if I had much more money, I couldn’t afford to live this well.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart