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Weak IV

22 January 2016

No. 7,843 (cartoon)

I’m lost in thought.

Oh dear, terra incognita.

23 January 2016

Traditional Courtship Strategies

Penelope asked me what Internet sites I’d recommend for finding a new romantic partner. I told her that all that Internet courtship razzmatazz was just so much jellified blarneystone on an electric stick.

“You should stick to the traditional mating methodologies,” I suggested.

“What would you recommend?” she asked, then added, “I can’t believe that I’m even listening to someone with your lack of credentials.”

“I think you should rely on alcohol and bad judgment,” I explained. “After all, that’s where most of us came from.”

24 January 2016

Poseur with Delusions of Adequacy

I was making a photograph at the coast when Kanye West drove up in a pretentious sports car and parked it fifteen meters away. I wouldn’t have recognized the gay fish were it not for Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s classic portrayal of the pretentious poseur with delusions of adequacy.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’d like to make a photograph.”

“I bet you would,” he scowled, “you’ll probably never see Kanye West again.”

“I should hope not,” I replied, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d park somewhere else so I can get my shot.”

He looked shocked. I wonder how long it’s been since he talked with someone who wasn’t a sycophant?

25 January 2016

Invisible Zebras

Scientists at the University of Calgary and the University of California Davis, using some digital whiffle-poofle, have come up with a preposterous theory that a zebra’s stripes provide no camouflage.

What nonsense!

If the hypnotic black and white stripes don’t allow it to hide in plain sight, then why have I never seen a zebra? I’ve never even met anyone who’s seen a zebra except for Gareth, and he wouldn’t have spotted it without using a very long teleflouride lens with an esoteric chromomagnetic filters.

I’m afraid that the bungling researchers need to spend more time experiencing the empirical world and less time staring at computer monitors.

26 January 2016

Torturing Censors

Charlie Lyne is my kind of filmmaker. He just completed Paint Drying, a ten-hour movie that no one would ever watch in its entirety unless they were paid to do so. And that’s the point.

Filmmakers who want their work shown in England must pay censors working for the British Board of Film Classification, an “organisation that works to protect children,” to rate all films shown there. It’s a good racket; they charge thirteen dollars a minute to watch each movie in order to render their verdict.

As a protest against what for many small filmmakers is a prohibitive fee, he forced the censors to watch all six hundred and seven minutes of Paint Drying. Although it’s a nice conceptual piece, I’m not sure if the bowdlerizers were that aggravated; Lyne’s film was probably more interesting than a lot of the other insipid rubbish they review.

27 January 2016

Marvin Lee Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky died a few days ago. I’m not intelligent enough to really appreciate his work. All I know is that people much smarter than me said he was much smarter than them. I especially liked Nicholas Negroponte’s remembrance.

The world has lost one of its greatest minds in science. As a founding faculty member of the Media Lab he brought equal measures of humor and deep thinking, always seeing the world differently. He taught us that the difficult is often easy, but the easy can be really hard.

I have no idea what he meant by that, but I’m enjoying pondering the apparent paradox. That’s perhaps the best someone of my relatively limited intellect can do.

28 January 2016

Sticky Theological Queries

“Remember happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have. It depends solely on what you think.”
—Buddha

“Remember happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think ”
—Dale Breckenridge Carnegie

There are three possible explanations for the two attributions for the same quotation:

Carnegie plagiarized the Buddha.

The Buddha quoted Carnegie over two millennia before he was born. I’m not a Buddhist, but, since I’ve been preplagiaried—about which more tomorrow—I’m sure that the Buddha could have pulled it off as well.

Dale Breckenridge Carnegie is the Buddha.

Like every other theological question, I’m going to wait until I’m dead to investigate.

29 January 2016

A Posthumous Pox

Moses Bruine Cotsworth annoys greatly me. I agree with Aelius Donatus, “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.” (A pox on those who have declared our bright ideas before us.)

Cotsworth preplagiarized me in 1902 when he came up with The International Fixed Calendar, which essentially is my creation, The Davidian Calendar, poorly realized.

Despite the inferior execution, Cotsworth’s inferior version was not without merit. The Eastman Kodak Company used from 1928 to 1989. Kodak began the slide into photographic irrelevance in 1990. Most pundits attribute the collapse to the company’s failure to embrace digital technologies for the decline, but their abandonment of a primitive version of The Davidian Calendar may in fact be the real cause.

I’d like Cotsworth to acknowledge his preplagiarism, but, given that he took the coward’s way out and died in 1943, he’ll never do it. A posthumous pox upon the scoundrel; feh.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart