Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXXIX

24 September 2015

No. 1,262 (cartoon)

You think too much.

Don’t think that I haven’t thought about that.

25 September 2015

Here to There and Back Again

I usually visit Aurora at least once a day, usually more. She’s charming, beautiful, and is always glad to see me, so I’d be an even bigger fool than I already am not to spend lots of time with her.

I can get from Here to There in under ten minutes on my bike. But for reasons I can’t begin to understand, I always cycle down Anza Street en route There and ride back to Here on Cabrillo Street. There is forty-three meters higher than Here, so it seems logical that one route would be preferable to the other.

I’m clearly thinking and acting irrationally. Since I do that with alarming frequency, I suppose this particular instance is unremarkable. And with that, I shall stop remarking.

26 September 2015

Volkswagen’s Image Problem

Volkswagen’s engineers are a clever bunch; they programmed the computers controlling their cars’ diesel emissions to burn the fuel cleanly when government agencies were testing them, then to spew lots of toxic pollutants when people were actually driving them on the road. The malefactors made the most serious mistake a cheater can make: they got caught.

I think the whole brouhaha will blow over quickly. After all, the executives of an automobile company with lineage going back to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis know how to handle image problems. They got rid of the swastika in the original logo a long time ago, and I’m sure they’ll pull off a clever public relations putsch, er, coup with this latest episode as well.

27 September 2015

Timeless versus Dated

Emilia said that any timeless art is dated and vice-versa. I’m not sure about that, but I’m not giving it much thought. I’ll discover the ratio of my (relatively) timeless to dated work after I’m dead. I’m in no hurry.

28 September 2015

No Roller

Every September for the last few years I’ve made prints by pressing objects between two sheets of thick, arty paper.

With a steamroller.

The first time I did it in 2012 I ran over two mobile phones and a hard drive. I even made a short documentary, ROLLER. I crushed fifty-seven packets of ketchup in 2013, and (empty) cans of Rainier Ale last year.

Duncan knew that today was steamroller day, and asked me what I flattened.

“Nothing,” I answered, “I had a flat tire.”

“You can’t pull the snow over my eyes,” he replied, “a steamroller can’t get a flat tire.”

Clever lad; not much gets by him!

I explained that the steamroller didn’t have a flat, but that my bicycle did. By the time I fixed it, the ’roller had smushed its last smoosh, or perhaps vice versa. And so, I didn’t make any art today.

Duncan said that more people should make no art. I think that he may be on to something!

29 September 2015

Coffee Crisis Alarm

There’s a coffee crisis brewing, a big one. Yep, this is a cataclysm in the making alright. Heck yes!

Even as we don’t speak, government bureaucrats and coffee industry heavyweights are meeting at the Global Coffee Forum in Milan, Italy, to try and figure out what to do about a projected shortfall of fifty million bags of coffee. What’s worse, they’re talking about the gargantuan sixty-kilogram burlap bags the child laborers drag around the Brazilian plantations from where most of the world’s coffee comes.

All I gots to say is someone better come up with a solution soon before we’re all too somnolent to do what needs to be done.

30 September 2015

The Eleventh Avenue Doors

I was riding up Eleventh Avenue when I spotted a garage door that was so visually interesting that I stopped and photographed it. When I got back on my bike, I noticed that almost all the garage doors had a different design.

It was just as William Blake predicted. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

I suppose my appreciation of the Eleventh Avenue Doors wasn’t exactly what William Blake had in mind. Or Jim Morrison, either. Still, they look like the low-hanging fruit of an easy visual art project, my favorite flavor.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2015 David Glenn Rinehart