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Weak XXXVIII

18 September 2012

No. 4,934 (cartoon)

I live each day like it’s my last.

Get it right.

19 September 2012

A Pox on Emoticons

Today is the thirtieth birthday of email emoticons, those wretched little ASCII faces obnoxious people insert in their email messages in order to be even more obnoxious. ;-) My point exactly. :-(

I blame Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University; he sent the first one thirty years ago today. I wish I was at the emoticons’ birthday party; I’d pour arsenic on the cake and put dog feces in the punch bowl. A pox on emoticons everywhere.

20 September 2012

Chase Putin Away!

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has joined the growing ranks of activists, artists, and politicians calling for the release of imprisoned members of the Russian musical ensemble, Pussy Riot. Vladimir Putin orchestrated their two-year sentence after the group released Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! The de facto czar was offended by the video of Pussy Riot’s unauthorized protest performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

“I don’t see why people shouldn’t sing whatever it is that they want to sing, and there’s nothing wrong with singing. I think the only reason why people should not sing is if what they are saying is deliberately insulting or if they sing terribly,” Aung San Suu Kyi posited.

I appreciated the Burmese politician’s support of the Russian dissidents, but why did she feel compelled to denigrate if not censor people like myself who sing worse than terribly?

21 September 2012

Love the Profit

Some hateful American idiots made a trailer for a nonexistent film, The Innocence of the Muslims. It was a technically inept video intended to anger Muslims by denigrating the Holy Prophet Muhammad, and it worked. A few cretins with a cheap video camera have provided the catalyst for protests that have killed scores of innocents. (Is there an irony hall of fame?)

The kleptocracy that runs Pakistan jumped on the hysteria bandwagon, and declared that today is a national holiday in Pakistan: Yaum-e-Ishq-e-Rasool, or Love the Prophet Day. Great idea! Another two dozen people died in violent protests.

It gets worse.

Willard Romney’s minions tried to jump on the bandwagon, but caught the wrong train. (Is there any greater joy for a would-be writer than mangling metaphors? Methinks not.) The Republican candidate for U.S. president’s lackeys apparently decided this was a great opportunity to showcase their would-be despot’s ignorance of foreign—or any other—policy by declaring today Love the Profit Day.

Oy vey!

22 September 2012

ROLLER

Earlier today I put two broken mobile phones and a nine gigabyte hard drive between two sheets of damp, thick paper. I then put the assemblage on the street in front of a steamroller that drove over the aggregation both forward and backward. The broken phones remained broken, and the hard drive appeared to be unharmed.

I now have three worthless pieces of electronic hardware, and two “prints” of the objects. (They made a pleasing impression in the paper.) I also have a very short video documenting the steamroller’s backing and forthing, ROLLER. Are the print and/or equipment and/or video art?

Don’t know, don’t care.

23 September 2012

Gratuitous Photo of the Weak: Plumb Bob

I installed the first component of a work in progress, Earthquake Detector, a couple of days ago, and so far things are going well. The unit is a four hundred and fifty-one gram plumb bob; I suspended it from the roof of the Internet Archive’s Really Really Big Room. (There’s no relationship between the weight of the object and Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. At least not yet.) Some of my learned friends suggested that the brass bob might turn into a Foucault pendulum, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. At least not yet.

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©2012 David Glenn Rinehart