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18 June 2020

No. 6,900 (cartoon)

I can’t believe a word you say.

Of course you can’t, I’m fictitious.

19 June 2020

Positive Thinking

Ruth was unimpressed when I told her that I only had to wear a pesky mask briefly for two or three times a month since moving my studio to a remote compound in the New Mexican desert ten kilometers from the nearest store. She chided me for “always being so negative” and suggested that I think positively about all the things I could do where wearing a mask would be preferable to going without one.

Hmmm ...

After giving the question more thought than it deserved, I came up with three activities: armed robbery, hijacking a plane, and scuba diving. In theory, I would appreciate wearing a mask all day if I pulled off a big heist in the morning, commandeered a plane to a tropical island, then went diving.

Gosh, that seems like a lot of work. I think I’ll just save the mask for the next time it’s time to replenish the larder and liquor cabinet. That seems much more sensible; life on a tropical island is almost as tedious as wearing a mask.

20 June 2020

Small Family Farms

Anything goes with cheap red wine, including cherries. The ones Stewart served this afternoon were extremely yummy, and I told him so.

“They’d better be tasty,” he replied. “They cost a fortune because they’re from a small family farm.”

Ah, that explains everything even though he couldn’t tell me what kind of small family enterprise it was. Doesn’t matter. If they’re small as in short, they could only have harvested the fruit from the lowest branches leaving most of the yield for the birds. Or if it was a small family because it was a two-person operation like Sandford and Son, then there’s not enough labor to pick many cherries.

Again, it doesn’t matter. I commended Stewart for supporting small family farms instead of discriminating against people who are vertically challenged and/or practice effective birth control.

21 June 2020

Just About a Jerk

“I was in a lackluster mood this morning until I thought of your lustrous self,” Veronica told me. “You exude luster in your own goofy way, and therefore I am no longer lacking in it.”

“Aw gosh,” I replied, “that’s just about the nicest thing anyone ever said about me!”

Oops, wrong reply.

“Just about?!” she ranted. “I go out of my way to be nice to you and you trash me with your slimy ‘just about’ weasel words. You’re such a jerk.”

And with that, Veronica and I were again reminded that no good deed goes unpunished.

It took some wine and a bit of fancy tonguework on my part, but I eventually convinced her to promote me from jerk back to my previous rank of agreeable ne’er-do-well.

22 June 2020

Blursday

Today is Blursday, but then every day of the week during Coronarama is Blursday. I’m reminded of Dwight David Eisenhower’s memorable observation, “Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.”

That was how I remembered his quote, but I wasn’t certain. I asked the Internet to check the wording and got an introduction to Garson O’Toole. He says that he’s a quote investigator; he may be the only quote investigator. I didn’t investigate so I have no idea.

“Hate” is a strong word, so I’ll just say that people like O’Toole really refry my frijoles. He provided documentary evidence, footnotes and all, that the quote is originally from a 1948 real estate company ad in an Amarillo, Texas newspaper. Eisenhower never said that, nor did Gerald Ford, to whom it’s also been attributed.

Merci garçon. Nah, not really. Why didn’t O’Toole spend the afternoon cataloging his stamp collection instead of depriving generations yet unborn of some great albeit fictitious quotations?

23 June 2020

Milky Way Photographer of the Year

Some shady enterprise doing business as “Capture the Atlas” is promoting its “Milky Way Photographer of the Year” scheme. There doesn’t appear to be any corporate entity behind the dubious racket, just some guy named Dan.

Every photograph comes from just one of the hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way: this one. This whole farce sounds like the “world series” of baseball, where only teams from North America are allowed to compete. This is clearly a scam; there’s no other possibility.

If one of the denizens from the edge of the galaxy sent a photograph today at the speed of light it wouldn’t arrive for two hundred thousand years, yet the Milky Way Photographer of the Year results have already been posted. Yep, the fix is in.

Those objections are relatively trivial compared to the fundamental conceptual flaw that Bela Bartok identified long ago: “Competitions are for horses, not artists.”

24 June 2020

Rhode Island Redux

I wasn’t surprised when bureaucrats in the smallest state in the union announced plans to choose a better name for their little patch of land. After all, the other forty-nine states have more kilometers of roads, and Rhode Island obviously ain’t an island; it’s not even a wee little peninsula.

All of my friends who’ve visited there describe it as unmemorable if they can recall it at all. I think something like Amnesialand would be a fine name indeed, but no one asked me. Instead, they want to change the name to ...

... wait for it ...

... a little more ...

... Rhode Island!

Rhode Island?!

I discovered the full name is The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and anyone can see that’s way too many words and syllables. And apparently it recently dawned on elected officials that some people might not appreciate the references to the state’s shameful historical embrace of slavery. Better late than never ...

I still prefer my proposal, but a rose by any other name would still be as tedious.

25 June 2020

(One Minute of) Work

Most of my movies feature inanimate objects; filmmaking is hard enough without having to consider anyone’s stupid ideas except my own. That changed when I discovered a visually interesting construction site in the New Mexico desert, and thought it would make an entertaining motion picture. That’s how I ended up with a cast of dozens if not hundreds of actors in (One Minute of) Work.

How many thespians in their shiny exoskeletons are there? Dunno; you tell me. I don’t have the patience let alone the interest to do this myself, but if anyone wants to make a scientifically accurate* count, s/he’s welcome to do a freeze-frame analysis and let me know.

*Count their legs and divide by six.

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart