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Weak XXIV

11 June 2019

No. 641 (cartoon)

I feel better when I’m not drinking at all.

I also feel better when I’m drinking a lot.

The perfect balance!

12 June 2019

Invoice Season

I was confused when Enrico and Abbie told me that they’re receiving a steady stream of invoices from their relatives. I’ve never heard of any of their kin selling goods or services, and, even if they did, why would they send invoices to family members?

Enrico ’splained it all: about this time of year, they receive a tsunami of invitations to graduations, bat mitzvahs, housewarmings, barn raisings, et cetera. Many if not most of these come from relatives with whom they haven’t talked with in years, as well announcements from a few complete strangers.

In fact, these invitations aren’t really invitations at all; no one’s expecting Enrico and Abbie to actually show up. These are actually implicit requests for money. Abbie said they dealt with the annoyances by keeping up the family tradition of ignoring each other.

“There’s nothing we can do about the parasites,” she said philosophically. “You can pick your nose but not your relatives.”

13 June 2019

Basebat and Baseglove

I haven’t thought much about my old baseball glove since I gave it to Nancy several weeks ago. Until today, that is, when I saw a man wearing a shirt featuring the image of a long, slender club with the word “basebat” underneath.

Of course!

The word “ball” is redundant, since all it’s used for it to hit balls and burglars. I like that logic. Since a baseball glove can’t be used for anything else like washing dishes or pulling a hot pizza out of the oven, and since baseball is the only popular game in the United States that uses bases, it follows that “baseglove” makes more sense than “baseball glove” with a redundant syllable.

Play base!

14 June 2019

Exposure Record

I was eighteen when I made my first entry into the first blank sheet of my new workbook, Exposure Record, “Designed and Copyright by Ansel Adams.” I was a technically accomplished photographer way back then, maybe even borderline precocious. I knew if I applied myself, I could carry the torch of photographic brilliance passed down to me from Ansel, Edward Weston, et al.

I was an idiot!

Thousands of photographers currently carry that torch of photographic brilliance; they’re flaming fools. Despite my hard work, I failed to be one of them.

Close call!

I’m not sure about this, but I think most of my biggest accomplishments in life are the failures to carry out my stupid plans.

15 June 2019

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 I’m going to talk about David Dunning and Justin Kruger, not because they’re stooopid—they certainly ain’t—but because they identified the eponymously named Dunning-Kruger effect. You may not have heard of it, but you'll know it when you see it. (Unless you’re suffering from Dunning-Kruger, that’s the Catch-69.)

Here it is: some stupid people are too damn stooopid to realize that they’re incompetent, and are proud of their hallucinatory expertise and brilliance. The social psychologists published their insights twenty years ago in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

I don’t really think they discovered anything. Socrates described the Dunning-Kruger effect over twenty-four hundred years ago when he said, “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.”

On this special day, it’s worth remembering what Albert Einstein may or may not have said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.”

In closing, here’s a corollary from Frank Zappa, “There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

16 June 2019

Audio Spring Cleaning

Summer will be here in five days; it’s about time to think about spring cleaning.

I just exterminated all of my Bollweevils. And good riddance to Catherine Wheel, too. Things are looking better already!

Bollweevils and Catherine Wheel are the names of two ensembles I found in my music library. I have no idea how they ended up there since I’ve never heard of them. I decided to listen to the recordings to answer one critical curatorial question: would I experience even the slightest of losses if I never heard these songs again?

I don’t mean to disparage the work; there’s nothing wrong with it. For me, though, if the highest praise I can give is, “There’s nothing wrong with it,” that means there’s something wrong with it.

After purging hundreds of songs, I’m down to forty-one thousand six hundred and nineteen audio files remaining. I could probably delete ten thousand more, but I got bored seeking out boredom. And anyway, more spring cleaning is just over nine months away; I can wait until then for more tidying up.

17 June 2019

David Hockney’s Faux Retrospectives

My friend Byron is a disgruntled writer. No surprises there; I’m the only gruntled writer I know, and that’s probably because I’m not really a real writer. Byron is whinging that the world’s largest bookseller is rife with fraudsters, scumbags, and all sorts of parasitic merchants who make it impossible for him to peddle his books.

I was skeptical until he gave me a few examples of similar titles on offer: David Hockney: Print Retrospective (1973), David Hockney: A Retrospective by David Hockney (1988), David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective (1996), and Hockney’s Pictures: The Definitive Retrospective (2004).

I had to admit that he was right; the books were all fakeries! David Hockney is very much alive, it’s impossible for him to have a retrospective until he pops his clogs.

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart