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Weak XXIII

5 June 2018

No. 8,632 (cartoon)

I don’t know the meaning of fear.

You will before sunrise.

6 June 2018

Photographic Blindness

The more you photograph the less you see.

I’ve been saying that for years, maybe decades, and now I have company. Here’s a quote I read in an Internet publication of dubious merit.

“Psychology research has shown that under some conditions taking a photo of something actually makes it harder to remember,” the British Psychological Society writes.

?!

The British Psychological Society can publish something, it can cite something, but a society is a corporate entity that can’t even write its own name.

And that’s quite enough pedantry; I’m not going to quibble with any animal, vegetable, mineral, or corporate entity that’s wise enough to agree with me.

. . .

After writing the above, I found that the illiterate writers who said “the British Psychological Society writes” were referring to Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm’s paper, Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect, that was published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition and cited in the British Psychological Society Research Digest.

That’s too many facts to include in an entertaining run-on sentence; I prefer my snarky version. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

7 June 2018

Ballad of a Yapper

Despite everything I say and write, I do in fact quite like a few wonderful dogs. (I’m talking to you, Harley and Junebug!) In general, though, dogs are like poets: I wouldn’t miss almost all of them if they gracefully disappeared.

Or if they dramatically disappeared like Pippa.

Pippa was one of those annoying little yapper dogs, the kind that tries to pick a fight with any creature larger than them, such as a New York subway rat. Pippa gained a fair amount of fame in Australia for chasing large crocodiles back into the Adelaide River surrounding Goat Island Lodge.

According to news reports, the spectacle of the wee beast running around like a biker on bad meth and annoying crocodiles back into the water amused her owner Kai Hansen and his guests.

“She got away with it for ten years,” Hansen observed, but that was before “something that had a high probability of happening sometime” just did.

Pippa mounted her usual aural assault but picked the wrong reptile. The surprisingly agile croc lunged, locked the little whining cur between its massive jaws, and retreated back into the depths of the river.

The End.

Or maybe not. I’m currently working on the lyrics for my new composition, Ballad of a Yapper; here are my lyrics in progress.

Kippa made a dare,
Croc didn’t scare,
Yapper’s without air,
In a crocodile’s garden lair,
beneath the waves.

She’ll writhe and shout,
no sounds come out,
from the crocodile’s snout,
among the doggie graves,
beneath the waves.

I know that’s not very good (yet), but Richard Starkey says he won’t sue, and if I pull it off I can tap into the lucrative market for doggie snuff ballads.

8 June 2018

Parts Unknown

Anthony Bourdain killed himself today; Kate Spade did the same thing on Tuesday. I understand they were famous, but that’s about all I know. I never really heard about Bourdain since I haven’t had a telly in going on forty years, and all I knew about Spade was that she peddled popular designer crap of no interest to me.

I suppose they were both trendy to the end; American suicides are up by almost a third in the last couple of decades. (I was surprised that a quick check on the Internet failed to find a musical ensemble called American Suicides; who says all of the good band names are taken?)

I have a theory why the news of two famous, rich, and attractive people taking their own lives made headlines: it’s because they were famous, rich, and attractive. That is a component of my broader hypothesis: most people enjoy a bit of schadenfreude hearing that people who are better off them by any objective criteria are suffering because of it.

Somewhere in Mississippi, a couple of people leading grim, brutal lives are sitting in the squalor of their musty, decaying “mobile” home and consoling themselves that even though they’re poor and in debt, fat, ugly, and depressed, at least things could be worse. They could be famous, rich, and attractive; just look at how wretched their lives must be.

In closing, I see Bourdain committed suicide while working on his television series, Parts Unknown. I suppose that’s where he is now if he’s anywhere at all.

9 June 2018

Not to Her Face

Willy and Fiona threw a lovely dinner party; I was delighted they had the poor judgment to invite someone like me to their feast. I decided to try to atone for my bad manners and questionable behavior by toasting Fiona and the incredible meal she cooked.

After the hear-hears and wine glass clinking died down, Fiona thanked me (note to self: good move after breaking the champagne glass!) and proclaimed that her culinary skills were one of the pillars of her seventeen-year marriage.

“Willy has never once complained about anything I’ve served him!” she proclaimed.

“At least not to your face!” Willy added cheerfully.

He wasn’t cheerful for very long; none of us were. I could provide the details, but I think it would be more interesting for the reader—that would be you—to imagine how the evening ended.

(Hint: it wasn’t pretty.)

10 June 2018

Another Useless Computer

There’s a new computer on the market, the Summit. It can make two hundred quadrillion calculations a second, and it would appear to be quite a bargain at only two hundred million dollars. I wonder what could I do with that?

Let’s see; my camera has twenty-four million pixels. At two hundred and fifty-six shades of grey per pixel (I’m a chromophobe), that’s just over six billion possibilities for a single photograph. I suppose 6,144,000,000 to the 256th power would be the number of all possible photographs with those dimensions; I wonder how long it would take the Summit to make all of those images? That’s a rhetorical question; after spending all that money on the computer I wouldn’t be able to afford all the floppy disks I’d need.

And then there’s the great American novel: the Summit could probably crank out a dozen of ’em every hour without breaking a sweat. But who wants to read a novel these days let alone write one?

Even though the Summit sounds great, there’s always a gotcha, and with computers, it’s usually the batteries. After spending a couple hundred million dollars on a shiny computer that won’t be mostly obsolete for a while, a year or two or three from now there’ll be a thirty million dollar invoice for new batteries.

It gets worse: the Summit weights three hundred thousand kilograms, and I know the airlines will concoct a way to tack on a surcharge for scientists who want to get some work done on the thirteen-hour flight from CERN to Shenzhen.

The Summit is obviously impractical if not completely useless; I’m sure the only reason the Americans built it is was to annoy the Chinese who’ve had the fastest computer in the world for the last five years.

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart