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Weak XVI

16 April 2025

No. 6,197 (cartoon)

I’m in a race against time.

Time always wins.

You’re in the wrong dimension.

17 April 2025

New Heavenly Blue

I dutifully followed Wolfgang and Ludwig’s instructions when I was playing the French Horn in my teens, but wished I could play something a bit more contemporary. I was thinking of John Alec Entwistle and the Who, and ... well, that was the beginning and end of the list of popular music horn players.

And now we shift the conversation (which is actually a monologue) to jazz. I’ve never been comfortable in the jazz world: too much limp noodlin’ and not enough hard bangin’. And although I could manage the sunglasses at night, I look sillier than usual in a beret, and I can’t tolerate Gitanes.

And now the story from over a half-century ago gets cloudy. Let me take five for a moment, and note that even I’ve heard of Dave Brubeck and his son. (Poor Chris, he’s a great musician but will forever be known as Dave Brubeck’s son.) Chris and his band, New Heavenly Blue, performed at Interlochen, my high school, and I may or may not have joined them on stage as part of the backup orchestra. I just can’t remember. Meanwhile, back in the present ...

On a recent music pirating spree I looked for the band on a whim, and found a New Heavenly Blue album from 1970! There were a couple of good songs, and I was astounded that I remembered them fairly clearly even though I could only could have heard them once or twice at a sound check and the performance.

I remember very few things about my early high school years, and the few things I imagine recalling may or may not be true. If only the rest of my memory was one percent as good as my musical recollection. If only.

18 April 2025

Deep in the Bosom of Texas

Texas is a parody of Texas, a constant dark amusement of arrested thinking and the resulting farces. If my work is not already banned in schools there it will be now since I’m reproducing the Virginia state seal featuring the Roman goddess Virtus with one of her breasts exposed!

I’m in my thirtieth year of publishing this notebook, and I’m reasonably certain that I have never published any image of a breast. Have a gander and learn a little bit about anatomy ... unless you’re in Texas, in which case you should be fixin’ to burn the electronic device you’re using and report me to the relevant state and local authorities since that titillating image is banned in schools there.

And have a nice day, y’all!

19 April 2025

Olo

I’m completely unqualified to talk about an alleged new color since I’m a chromophobe, but ignorance has never stopped me before and I’m not going to let an almost complete lack of knowledge get in my way when it comes to olo.

Olo is purportedly a hue that no one had ever seen before boffins at the university down the street fired lasers into parts of the retina that normally don’t respond to natural light. Or so they claim.

The inexact representation they presented looks kinda like a lot of other vomit green turquoise coloration I’ve seen; yawn. Call me an ignorant skeptic and you’d be right, but I doubt it can be a new mathematical formula that’s not among the billions of colors already defined on the visible spectrum.

If you’d like to get an idea of what all the hubbub’s about, just plug these coordinates into your computer’s imaging program: HSB: 168, 100, 100, Lab: 90, -61, 9, RGB: 0, 255,205 (RGB), or CYMK: 55, 0, 30, 0.

In conclusion, days like today and news like this that make me happy that I’m a chromophobe.

20 April 2025

Snapshot Art Film Camera

Decades ago I had an excellent Yashica film camera, and I see the company is again back in the analog photography business. This time, though, they’re selling a thirty-dollar piece of plastic junk that has one very dim aperture, one shutter speed, and a “focus-free” lens. Even the company’s promotional product shot is blurry. It’s not hard to see who they’re targeting: trendy wankers and/or gullible people who equate film with art.

The irony is that with the overwhelming dominance of digital photography, you can get a pretty good used film camera with a pretty good lens for under a hundred dollars. Instead, I think this will sell well to anyone who’s happy to have a garish camera that only works at one level of very bright light.

Given their fondness for all things retro, I imagine it won’t be too long before a band of hipsters records an album on wax cylinders.

21 April 2025

Enough Is Enuf

Samantha told me that she was sorry that she couldn’t speak English fluently, but I told her that I wouldn’t accept her apology until I was more articulate with Mandarin than she was with my native tongue. I’ve always realized it was almost impossible to speak English flawlessly, especially since there are so many flavors of “perfect” English; that’s why I don’t take grammar, spelling, and punctuation too seriously.

I’m not alone. Mark Twain is alleged to have said, “I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.” And then there’s the Speling Reform Asoshiashun, née Spelling Reform Association, founded in 1876. (I’m not sure if the group remains active, but A Fonetic Furst Redur,: Printed in the Alfabet and Speling ov the Speling Reform Asoshiashun is still in print.) I’m grateful to Gabe Henry for introducing me to such a fine organization in his recently published book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell.

From my perspective, texting shorthand is the latest white flag when it comes to spelling, if u c what i mean. And then there are the nincompoops who’ve given up on writing and instead communicate by sending “emotive” little pictures back and forth. [insert annoying smiley face here]

Enough? Enuf? It doesn’t matter; I’m done.

22 April 2025

Sympathy for the Firefly

It’s now been over a month since the vernal equinox marked the springing of spring, and that means it’s time to sit outside at dusk and admire the fireflies’ glow, and that could be a problem. As for as I can figger, there are no fireflies around Sans Frisco, or at least I’ve never seen one in these parts in the forty years I’ve had a base here. But that’s not a problem unless you make it one.

You don’t need fireflies for that pleasant radiation, you want luciferin, the magic molecule that gives the otherwise nondescript insects their bioluminescent derrières. Don’t despair if you don’t have any handy; skip to the next paragraph and I’ll give you the simple recipe.

Add a solution of p-BQ (51 mg, 0.47 mmol) in MeOH (1 mL) to a solution of L-cysteine methyl ester (80 mg, 0.47 mmol) in MeOH (1 mL) at room temperature, stirring regularly. After concentrating the mixture to dryness, dissolve in NH₃ aq. (28%, 1 mL) redissolved in MeOH (3 mL). Add a solution of p-benzoquinone (152 mg, 1.40 mmol) in MeOH (2.5 mL), followed by HCl aq. (2N, 2.5 mL). [I’m sorry, but I must stop here because I’m running out of server space, but its easy to find the last steps on the Internet.]

Now that we all have luciferin, I’ll conclude with a glance at the word’s etymology: it comes from the Latin word “lucifer,” or “light-bearing.” Thus in Jagger and Richard’s Sympathy for the Devil, Mick’s really singing, “Just call me light-bearing.”

23 April 2025

Gravitational Study: Fig Newton Suspended in Steam Bath (with Retrieval Cup)

This was a very challenging photograph to make, something that gives me a bit of irrational pleasure because of the preposterous equation that the harder the art was to create the better it is. Regardless of those concerns, this piece was a scientific failure. By the time I’d jumped through all the technical hoops to make Gravitational Study: Fig Newton Suspended in Steam Bath (with Retrieval Cup) I forgot to take any measurements.

A small step for an idiot, business as usual for idiotkind.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart