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Weak XII

19 March 2026

No. 7,017 (cartoon)

Tomorrow was wonderful.

Anything has to be better than this.

Nope; next week was a horrific nightmare.

20 March 2026

Kansans Will Be Kansans

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

Kansas revokes driver's licenses of hundreds of trans people

(I’m sticking with my “headline d’jour” setup, but that news is from three weeks ago. News leaks out of the hinterlands slowly, and the lands don’t get much hinterer than Kansas.)

I suppose transphobic Kansans can breathe a sigh of relief now that they needn’t worry too much about the genitalia of fellow and not fellow drivers, but why stop there? I predict that it won’t be long until politicians propose separate (but equal!) highways for heterosexuals and homosexuals.

I’m opposed to such hateful nonsense, but I’d be conflicted if it became reality. My friends of every persuasion describe me as hopelessly hetero, but I think the gay highways—gayways?—would have to be much nicer.

I’m going to end my conjecture there, since driving in Kansas once, in the seventies, was once too often.

21 March 2026

No Satisfaction

I glanced at a recent issue of The Lancet Psychiatry, and noted that a new study “raises concerns about AI chatbots fueling delusional thinking.” Perhaps I should be more concerned, but I’m not. Not at all. Advertising’s raison d’être is to fuel delusional thinking, so I can’t imagine new technologies can make things significantly worse than they’ve always been.

22 March 2026

Sniper Insurance

Andrew met a guy at a party who had what seemed like a very unusual job: he was a sniper. The rifleman corrected him, and said there were many snipers hiding wherever lots of people gathered in for sporting events, political rallies, and even concerts.

Mr. Sniper pooh-poohed the Hollywood portrayal of the heroic marksman who blows off the bad guy’s head while he’s holding a knife against the hostage’s throat; that’s extraordinarily rare. Instead, he admitted that his work was extraordinarily tedious, and usually involved sitting in a lofty perch at boring events with his sniper’s rifle on a tripod, awaiting orders that never came. He closed by predicting that he’ll probably never pull the trigger while he’s on the job.

I concluded that a sniper is basically just an insurance agent with an expensive rifle.

Tom Stoppard said it best: “What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”

23 March 2026

Better With Bacon

I like to eat all the food in my kitchen; why else would it be there? When it’s time for chow, I just combine various odds and ends, starting with the ingredients that are moldy, wilting, or otherwise starting to decompose, add dried chili peppers and/or rooster sauce, then wash down my latest concoction with some beer or wine.

I ain’t fancy, but I’ve never made an inedible meal, or at least one I couldn’t eat. I’ve never understood why people use recipes when my approach works so well.

And then there’s Walter. He’s always searching for new recipes on the Internet, and he’s usually disappointed. I could let that be my conclusion, but I haven’t gotten to the part about the bacon yet. So I will.

He noticed that almost all the reader comments about the recipes had lines like “It was greatly improved after I put in some bacon,” or “I didn’t care for this until I added bacon.” He investigated and discovered that the American Bacon Producers Council had paid an electronic sweatshop in Myanmar to have slaves manually type the bacon praise.

Walter was surprised, but I wasn’t: never misunderestimate the pernicious avarice of the American Bacon Producers Council.

24 March 2026

Putting the Pickleball in the Cornhole

I don’t intentionally follow sports, but I can’t ignore headlines like the one about the “professional cornhole player and quadruple amputee” under arrest for murder.

Cornhole?!

What kind of professional sport is that? And speaking of stupid names, I wonder if it’s related to pickleball, whatever that is. Maybe the guy with no arms and legs was really good at putting the pickleball in the cornhole, or something like that.

25 March 2026

Scrabble Tiles: Chair Table (Sketch)

I have a folder in my computer labeled “ideas,” but so many of the files have languished in there so long that I can‘t tell whether or not they are in painfully slow gestation or stillborn. “Scrabble letters” was one of those. I‘ve carried a bag with a hundred tiles in it for years, but could never come up with a way to use them. I toyed with different options, but they were mainly for using them as captions in a photograph.

I can‘t explain it, but I found the sight of my jacket, casually draped over a kitchen chair, very visually appealing, and thought I would photograph it with the word “chair“ spelled out in the Scrabble letters. As I was setting up the photograph, I had a minor epiphany. I decided to use the words “chair” and ”jacket” by combining them in a cross, sharing the letter “A,” as one would do in a Scrabble game.

I‘m not sure what to make of Scrabble Tiles: Chair Table (Sketch). Like so many of my other pieces, it doesn’t work well in that the tiles are illegible in a small Internet reproduction. I also considered the idea of using the numerical score of the characters in the title, ten plus nineteen equals twenty-nine, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work either. That’s why I called it a sketch.

Perhaps one day I will decide on how to do a series, but for now I‘m settling for rescuing the idea from purgatory.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart