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Weak XXIV

11 June 2018

No. 6,577 (cartoon)

Float like a water buffalo!

Sting like a turtle!

What could be better than aquatic pugilism!

12 June 2018

Solstice Parasites

I’m not really aware of the changing seasons here in Sans Frisco since everything seems more or less the same all year except the length of time between sunrise and sunset. Today, however I noticed another seasonal development: I had to dodge hordes of little post-fetal parasites swarming through the park on one of my usual bike routes. I guess schools are no longer in session.

I looked at my calendar and discovered that summer technically begins in nine days. The summer solstice is a major annual event for me; that’s when I conclude six months of noting that the period of daylight is longer today than yesterday and spend the next six months noting that the period of darkness is longer today than yesterday.

More light! Less light! A low entertainment threshold is your best entertainment value.

13 June 2018

The Art of Writing

I was most disappointed by Mike McCormack’s new novel, Solar Bones. The International Dublin literary award judges obviously appreciated it; they awarded the author a hundred thousand pounds in real prize money.

I don’t follow litterature, but after I saw the headline noting that McCormack’s work was only a sentence long, I decided to read it. I figured that the newspaper article would quote the whole book/sentence in its entirety, but I was wrong: the sentence rambles on for some two hundred and seventy pages. I shall cite Solar Bones the next time someone complains about one of my run-on sentences; thanks, Mike!

As for the writer’s windfall?

“I have a very modest plan,” he announced. “I’m going to buy a chair. The chair I was writing in collapsed under me last night.”

That sounds most prudent to me. As Mary Heaton Vorse observed, “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

14 June 2018

Leica Jewelry

Leica makes fine cameras and optics unhampered by decades of progress; I’ve been using the same lenses for forty years. Today, though, more Leicas are sold in boutique stores than camera shops. (I just made that up but it’s probably true.) There are more people wearing Leicas as ten thousand dollar necklaces than there are folks using them as antiquated photographic tools.

And now it’s official: Leica Camera AG is in the jewelry business. Soon you’ll able to buy a ten-thousand dollar Leica watch—featuring no technology developed since the eighteenth century—to go with your Leica necklace. I imagine Leica designer glasses will be on offer sooner than later.

15 June 2018

Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day

This is the fifteenth day of June, time to again observe Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day. It’s a joyous time to savor his insight, “Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”

This year’s winner is a woman who goes by the nom de Internet of JennJoe. She managed to write something that was breathtaking for its simplicity and incredible stupidity: she misspelled the first person pronoun in both upper and lower case in the same sentence. Example: “Aye’m not going to fabricate where aye live to try to alter an outcome.”

Brilliant! Aye can’t top that so aye’m taking the rest of the day off!

16 June 2018

Five Touching Archival Imges

Minnisha, one of my learned colleagues here at the Internet Archive, complained about my recent work.

“I’ve had quite enough of your conceptual crap,” she whinged. “How ’bout some touching images; what’s wrong with some damned kittens?”

That was certainly a logical suggestion. After all, the Internet was created to disseminate images of kittens and cats. The problem is that my main patron—I’ll refer to him as Brewster since that’s his name—dislikes cats. Oh well; he’d be annoying if he was perfect.

I decided to do something with Braille, but what? Superimposing Braille characters over images was an obvious possibility, but that was too obvious. Or maybe not. I ended up going with the straightforward approach but used crude halftones instead of my usual high-resolution photographs for Five Touching Archival Images. Blind people can “see” the images with Braille dots and the rest of us can view the images with Ben-Day dots.

17 June 2018

Happy Birth Control Day!

Today is Father’s Day, another of those faux holidays foisted on us by flower and greeting card conglomerates. Feh and double feh, that’s what I say.

I had a nice lunch with Marge and Ranger Dave followed by a lovely dinner with Karen. We ignored all the Father’s Day crap and celebrated Birth Control Day. None of us has ever bred, and the world’s a better place without our unwanted spawn.

Happy Birth Control Day y’all!

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart