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Weak II

9 January 2019

No. 7,664 (cartoon)

I’ll never stab you in the back.

I trust you.

I’ll do it from the front so I can enjoy your expression.

10 January 2019

Forbidden Horseograph

I never thought I’d say this, but the purported art here is Santa Fe is even worse than other parts of the country I’ve visited. Elsewhere, dealers peddle art that looks like art; that’s always profitable. Here, though, they hawk art that looks like New Mexican art. (Clarification: I’m talking about art from the state of New Mexico, not contemporary Mexican art.)

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I fell for an old visual cliché this morning: antique horses in a sunny storefront window on Galisteo Street. I photographed them mindlessly; that’s the only possible way to make such images. I’m sure I would have recycled the trite snapshot in order to reuse the ones and zeroes for a better photograph, but then a curious thing happened.

I was walking down the same street this afternoon when I noticed a sign in front of the gallery that admonished passersby, “Please respect our policy of no photography.” That got my dandruff up; how dare those commie sons of witches tell me what I can and can’t photograph while standing on a public sidewalk.

Feh!

There’s no photograph like a forbidden photograph, so I’m publishing it here in the hope that I annoy them even more than they annoy me.

11 January 2019

Hopeless Texans

I don’t know why, but I’m seeing more than a few handsome old guys with long white hair in tailored designer “Western” clothes here in Santa Fe. The getup usually includes spotless cowboy hats festooned with lots of claptrappy silver trinkets and boots crafted from iguana toenails that have never touched a molecule of manure.

I wonder: did they move here and start dressing like that in order to fit in with their demographic, or did they buy the costume first then move here because they got laughed out of Manhattan? Molly’s a native, so I asked her which scenario was correct.

“None of the above,” she replied. “They’re just from Texas. They’re just hopeless.”

12 January 2019

Blank Canvas

I told Melanie how much I disliked the bleak, miserable, bitterly cold desert landscape, but she pooh-poohed my pooh-poohing. She insisted that I needed to abandon all my preconceived notions about the barren vistas and instead envision a blank canvas and see my involuntary surroundings in a new light.

I took her admonition literally, but the desolate wasteland was no more appealing with the addition of a pleasingly proportioned white rectangle.

13 January 2019

String Theory and Dark Matter Drivel

Since time immemorial—1965, give or take—lazy people have been taking drugs to break on through to another realm. According to Whacked-Out Physics, one of my favorite scholarly periodicals, they may have been wasting their time and brain cells since the whole damn universe is already expanding into a higher dimension. Allegedly.

I should probably leave it at that, since the rest of the article documented the ongoing war between string theory mathematicians and the proponents of dark energy. This where I get completely lost, since understanding string theory requires acknowledging that there at least ten dimensions; that’s six more than the ones with which I am familiar. Some scientists argue that we need to accept that there are at least a centillion (the numeral one followed by a hundred and one zeroes) dimensions to account for the dark energy bubbles that are percolating us to new worlds. Purportedly.

There’s a reason why it sounds like our universal future is being determined by some virulent case of cosmic indigestion, and the reason is this: I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. I’m just spewing drivel, so it’s obviously time to stop writing. Or maybe that’s not obvious at all; that may be why so many people incessantly blather on about the most inane twaddle. Life has to be better in some other universe ...

14 January 2019

The Great Molasses Flood Revisited

Tomorrow is the hundredth anniversary of the Great Molasses Flood. That sounds like a scene from a bad vaudeville movie, but the twenty-one victims who were killed by the ten-meter tall “wall of goo” didn’t die laughing, and I don’t suspect that any of the one the hundred and fifty people who were injured even cracked a smile.

On 15 January 1919, a shoddily made behemoth steel tank in Boston split into halves just after noon from the weight of a full load of over twelve and a half million kilograms of molasses. Almost nine million liters of the sticky syrup raced through the streets at over fifty kilometers an hour, then turned to the viscosity of tar when the temperature dropped. Half of the dead perished because they were simply stuck after the tsunami; some bodies weren’t recovered until months later.

Yesterday, Stu Jones, owner of Stu’s House o’ Pancakes near the site of the original devastation, briefly offered a “Molasses Madness” promotion on the Internet offering half-price breakfasts with, “rivers of molasses that just won’t stop.” He pulled the ad campaign after only a few hours of ferocious vitriol from journalists, politicians, members of the Pancake Marketing Board, and everyone else.

“I apologize if I may have offended anyone,” he wrote, then added, “Maybe too soon, I guess.”

What chutzpah! He offended everyone, then only offered a weasel-worded ifpology. Sweet!

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart