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Weak XIV

3 April 2025

No. 2,066 (cartoon)

You’ll come back to me.

That would be like a dog returning to its own vomit.

I know you too well.

4 April 2025

Potemkin Library

Once upon a time I copied my friends’ audio recordings when I visited and amassed a collection of over forty thousand songs. (Are the four movements of a symphony one song or four?) But that was a long time ago, and now anyone can have access to a library of millions of songs on the Internet for the low, low price of only eleven dollars a month.

Or, in my case, free.

I bought a pair of Apple headphones, and, in a sign of faux largess, the corporation gave me a three-month pass to all of the recordings on the company’s servers. (That’s the classic drug dealer’s business model: the first one’s free.) I was amazed at what I found, or, more accurately, what I didn’t find.

I’d imagined a portal into the Library of Congress, but it was more like a garage sale on steroids. When I looked for recordings by a given band, many of its best recordings weren’t there.

Feh.

I’ve heard this story before. As Apple and Google have demonstrated, corporations aren’t libraries.

I’m not sure whether this is a happy ending, but I disabled the servers’ copy protection, copied over ten thousand tracks, canceled the subscription, and moved on.

5 April 2025

Acceptable Technical Expertise

When I got to Jerry’s studio, the first thing I did—after accepting a drink—was to whinge about my bicycle’s dodgy brakes.

“Too bad Megan’s not here to have a look at it,” he replied. “My daughter could probably take care of it.”

“Is she a good mechanic?” I asked.

“Let’s put it this way,” he explained. “There’s nothing she can’t take apart, and almost nothing she can’t put back together.”

Too bad I had to leave before she returned; that kind of technical expertise has always been good enough for me.

6 April 2025

Palmerland

A week or two ago I mentioned something about seeing the Great Wall of China from the moon. In response, Dr. Palmer wrote ...

Sorry to prick yet another bubble of your musings, but the claim that the great wall of China can be seen from the moon is actually wrong—you can't see it. Same with the pyramids. Can't see them from the moon either.

Before I go on, it’s time to talk about Antarctica.

Have a gander at the map. See that big thing sticking out pointing toward South America? That’s whatcha call the Antarctic Peninsula, née the Palmer Peninsula. The Palmer branding is now only a big chunk of real estate on the peninsula called Palmerland, named after Nathaniel Palmer, who sailed those parts in 1820.

Dr. Palmer was being very modest when he gave his lunar examples: he didn’t mention Antarctica even though he’s related to Ol’ Nate. When I mentioned that to him, he told me that he was mistaken about the relationship with the famous sealer; he recently learned that his mother had been barking up the wrong family tree.

Here’s my warmhearted reply ...

Thanks for your note, Mark. I appreciate your good intentions, but it pains me as a friend to see you confined within the claustrophobic prison of reality with the albatross of truth around your neck. You should stick with the original story and get special treatment the next time you’re in Palmerland.

Never having left the planet, I remain open-minded about what I might or might not see should I go to the moon. I don’t think much about that, or anything else.

Dan Nadel just published Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, probably the definitive biography of the artist, possibly the only one. At four hundred and eighty pages, it’s a weighty tome, i.e., a book I’ll never read. I did, however, skim a review, and scavenged a great quote.

“When I took LSD I realized I was trying to be smart all the time. And LSD made me realize that doesn’t matter at all. If you trust your instincts … it’s all right there.”

I’m not going to talk about my relationship with lysergic acid diethylamide, but I will say that I gave up trying to be smart in my teens and have led the charmed life of a self-indulgent artist ever since.

8 April 2025

Bucatini no. 15 Pasta and Antipasta (Diptych)

I came up with the idea for Bucatini no. 15 Pasta and Antipasta (Diptych) a very long time ago, way back in the film days. Making this in a darkroom would have been way too much work, so I put it in my Work in Progress folder, the pugatory where visions go to die.

Much to my surprise, manaña arrived with a little help from my bucatini muse and my twelve-year-old computer and pirated software. Even after a lot of wine, I cannot understand why Kids These Days are using relatively primitive film again. I’ll stop now before I start ranting about vinyl ...

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart