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Weak XI

13 March 2016

No. 867 (cartoon)

You’re slimy and repulsive.

I shouldn’t have come out of my shell.

14 March 2016

Rounded Up Pi Day

Huzzah!

Today is Rounded Off Pi Day, and the excitement is almost palpable, perhaps even pulpable. After all, this only happens once every century. (Pi is 3.14159 to five decimal places, and rounded of to four decimal places it’s 3.1416. Today is 3.14.16 in Sans Frisco and nearby environs.)

Pi is a most interesting number, especially when compared to two of my other favorites, the square root of two and “e” (natural log). That’s the title of a piece I made some time ago, The Square Root of Two, “e” (Natural Log), and Pi Compared to One Million Decimal Places.

I particularly liked what I found when I looked at the first million decimal places of Pi:

0: 99,959
1: 99,758
2: 100,026
3: 100,229
4: 100,230
5: 100,359
6: 99,548
7: 99,800
8: 99,985
9: 100,106

As my late grandmother Beulah would have said, “How ’bout them apples?”

15 March 2016

Green Anaconda Casket

I’ve been thinking about making a casket for the longest snake in the world, the green anaconda, Eunectes murinus. They can grow to over eight meters long, or over four times my height. I have no carpentry skills, so I should have said that I’m thinking of commissioning the fabrication of such a coffin. Perhaps I’m having delusions of adequacy, but I doubt there’s ever been a casket with such an unusual proportions.

On second thought, perhaps I should pay attention to the maxim that’s become a cliché: think outside the box. A tubular, coiled coffin might be more interesting. I have no idea how I would get such a massive snake inside such a pipe, but I do know a woman who knows a guy who knows an ophidiologist.

That’s one of the many thing I love about being an artist: I do the alleged thinking and someone else does all the work.

16 March 2016

Too Much Evolution

Birds evolved from dinosaurs, and sixty million years later they may be headed back. Scientists at the University of Chile are working on genetically modifying chickens to have dinosaur legs. Imagine that, feeding a small village with a chicken or two.

I don’t find this news shocking at all. I’ve been familiar with the idea of dining on diningosaurs ever since I was a boy watching the Flintstones. I read about the scheme in Evolution, but I think it may be time for the august journal to change its name to Reverse Evolution. Members of the musical ensemble Devo have been predicting devolution for years; ’twould appear that they were very prescient. More and more people are already living in caves; it’s all starting to make sense.

This could work out to my advantage. Since I’ve always been too cheap to buy a good kilt, perhaps I should skip the intermediate step and go straight to a loincloth. Yabba dabba doo!

17 March 2016

Bosch’s Derrière Music

Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych has been around for over half a millennium, and during that time hundreds of thousands—in not millions—of people have examined its mesmerizingly beautiful, hellish imagery. It took over five hundred years for someone to literally figure out the score. I’m referring to Bosch’s musical score that “an Oklahoma college student named Amelia” recently transcribed to contemporary musical notation.

(Ah, the Internet is such a font of knowledge! The six words in quotation marks are all the entire Internet has to say about the woman who made the discovery.)

Amelia was able to transcribe the music Bosch painted across some tortured man’s derrière so that it could be finally be heard after all these centuries. It wasn’t very good. I’m personally not bothered that he wasn’t a great composer. His visual art still holds up extraordinarily well, and I can’t think of any other music that old that I’d like to hear either.

Derrière music, what a concept! I wonder if that makes Bosch one of the earliest—if not the first—conceptual artists?

18 March 2016

Making Gallimaufries

I don’t particularly like or dislike very young children. They’re sort of like squirrels: they can be cute and/or give you rabies, but I generally have nothing to do with them. Having concluded that irrelevant introduction, I do appreciate many of the photographs toddlers make. They have no idea what a good photograph is supposed to be, so they inadvertently make photographs rich in entropy that aren’t hackneyed or clichéd.

I’ve considered making such images, but I keep running into a familiar catch sixty-nine. If I drink enough whisky to disable my thinking process to have the mental acuity of a three-year-old, I’d probably be well past LD₅₀, real estate I always avoid for all the practical reasons.

The best I’ve been able to do is to find the word to describe the photographs I’d like to make: gallimaufries. Gallimaufry is a French word my dictionary defines as, “a confused jumble or medley of things.” It’s a de facto synonym for the English English phrase, “dog’s breakfast,” but it tastes better in the ears.

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©2016 David Glenn Rinehart