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Weak XL

1 October 2018

No. 2,474 (cartoon)

You have a drinking problem.

There’s not a drop of alcohol in the house.

Then we have a drinking problem.

2 October 2018

Jack White’s Watch

Lily reported that Tom Waits stole Jack White’s watch after a recent San Francisco performance. She’s fixated on stealing White’s watch from Waits or getting White to steal her watch.

That’s just every flavor of wrong.

The entire story sounds most improbable since no one wears a watch these days. On the other hand, neither well-known musician needs the press from such a publicity stunt.

As for Lily, she’ll never get within eyesight of the famously reclusive Waits. And even if White needed another watch, one of his minions would have purchased a new one within hours. After all, that’s what minions are for.

And so, Lily, I’m afraid these few paragraphs that may be read by up to seven people are all the media attention your ridiculous plot is going to generate.

I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and I don’t anyone’s watch to know it’s time to move on from Lily’s silliness.

Having said that, please do watch the plain clothes.

3 October 2018

Toodle-oo, Mr. Womb Slasher!

Adios, Mr. Testicle. Farewell, Mr. Duck. Goodbye, Mr. Crazy. Sayonara, Mr. No Underwear. See You Later, Mr. Sheep. So Long, Mr. Naked. And toodle-oo, Mr. Womb Slasher!

What’s in a name?

Things are getting tediouser in Turkey, what with the police state and everything. In a most unusual move, bureaucrats have temporarily suspended much of their bureaucracy involving changing names. As a result, tens of thousands of people are taking advantage of the opportunity to replace their problematic surnames.

Surnames are a relatively new change to Turkish culture; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced them in 1934. Since he was first in line, he got a great one: Father of the Turks. Others didn’t choose so wisely, resulting in some of the names I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Those amusing and/or stoopid names are about to disappear. I can’t blame the Turks for sparing their descendants from the embarrassing names their grandparents chose, but I’m personally disappointed that Turkey is becoming even boringer. That’s yet another good reason to never go there, not that I needed one.

4 October 2018

National Poultry Day

Elias told me that he had fried eggs for breakfast, a turkey sandwich for lunch, and that he’s going to have fried chicken for dinner. He explained that he’s celebrating National Poultry Day, a holiday he created that no one else observes.

His strategy—albeit not much of one—is a quixotic attempt to replace National Poetry Day with National Poultry Day. Unfortunately, he’s not very good at business or anything else, and has been unable to get any funding from the factory farming industry.

I’m not sure if celebrating nasty avian hormones and carcinogens is better or worse than crap poetry. I’m personally observing the fourth day of October as Nothing Day, and that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

5 October 2018

Academia Über Alles

I like academia because it has much funnier clowns than the circus and with no abuse of lions, tigers, and elephants for the most part.

Take Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. (And if you do take it, please dispose of it quickly.) The publication’s editors allege “rigorous peer review of your research.” That may or may not explain why the “scholarly social work journal from feminists’ points of view” accepted Our Struggle Is My Struggle, a paper that was just large chunks of Hitler’s Mein Kampf updated with some academic jargon.

And then there’s Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon that was published in Gender, Place & Culture, A Journal of Feminist Geography. That too was a hoax. The authors explained they did it, “to see if journals will publish papers that seek to problematize heterosexual men’s attraction to women and will accept very shoddy qualitative methodology and ideologically-motivated interpretations which support this.”

I thought it was a brilliant idea: using dogs’ bollocks to demonstrate that much too much of academia is, well, dogs’ bollocks.

6 October 2018

Letting the Priests Prey

The Catholic Church in Chile has a problem with sexually abusing children: its priests are getting caught doing so at an astounding rate. To address the scandal, the church published helpful guidelines on its Internet site to answer questions about what the godly can and cannot do.

Is it acceptable to touch children’s genitals? No, big surprise there! How ’bout sleeping with children? Again, negatory. Oh, and don’t photograph naked children because such images just might be “misinterpreted.” And it turns out the clergy shouldn’t even kiss youngins on the lips; how radical is that?!

It’s interesting what failed to make the verboten list: sex. No mention that it’s not permitted, just some pious weasel words about avoiding “equivocal signs” and “painful acts.”

I personally found that the most troubling thing about the proposed new rules is that they don’t go into effect until April. I suppose the church can’t abandon such longstanding traditions too hastily. Or maybe they won’t enforce them at all; the recommendations have disappeared from the Internet.

The news account I read didn’t say if the guidelines were apparently withdrawn because the men of the cloth found the strictures too restrictive and/or because Catholic apparatchiks have learned not to put anything in writing after paying out billions of dollars in settlements to the thousands of people molested and raped by priests.

And so, it looks like business as usual for the disturbingly high percentage Catholic priests who, when they prey, it’s on children.

7 October 2018

Hello Wendell, Goodbye f64

A very nice man named Wendell came by my studio this morning. After coffee, he gave me four hundred dollars and left with my, er his, 250mm f6.7 Fujinon lens.

And that was that.

I now feel pleasantly lighter after shedding the last of my large format camera equipment except for perhaps my focusing cloth, the large rectangle of faded black cloth I first draped over my head when I was a teenager. It’s just a piece of black fabric, but it’s the oldest photographic equipment I own, even older than my Leica lenses.

Maybe I’ll frame it, but most probably I won’t.

8 October 2018

Shredded Girl with Red Balloon

Banksy’s Girl with Red Balloon just sold for within spitting distance of a million and a half dollars. I guess spray paintings aren’t as common as I assumed. I think kids these days call it “aerosol art,” but since there aren’t any young folks around at the moment I’ll have to let that slide.

Moments after the auctioneer’s hammer came down, a shredder in the painting’s frame started whirling and sliced the cheap painting into neat little strips, not unlike fresh pasta. The circus proceeded as choreographed. Banksy’s enthusiasts smugly laughed at the idiot collector who just paid all that money. And the allegedly imbecilic collector smugly laughed at the morons and their misplaced schadenfreude since she now owned a Banksy original valued at least a couple of million dollars by “art world” mercenaries who view such creations only in terms of dollars and no sense.

And so, here’s the score at end of the latest inning: Banksy got a zillion dollars of free publicity, the auction house got a lucrative commission, and the investor got a quick thirty or forty percent return on her acquisition of an entirely unique spray painting, an edition of one.

There is no art world; there’s just art. There is, of course, a money world, and I’m pleasantly amused at all the fun Banksy and his co-conspirators are enjoying there. Better them than me!

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart