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26 June 2020

No. 5,751 (cartoon)

Pain is all in your mind.

So I’m just imagining that being whipped hurts?

27 June 2020

Tour de Farce

I don’t wager on athletic events or anything else, but, if I did, I’d bet Brandon will probably win this year’s Tour de France. Ordinarily, I’d never consider him to be a contender in the world’s most famous cycling event, but nothing is ordinary during Coronarama.

The race was originally scheduled to start today, but it’s been pushed back nine weeks in order to let the virus thin out the crowds of spectators who occasionally spill out onto the roadway. Brandon says he was never officially notified about the delay, so he started pedaling away from Nice just before noon to get a head start on the rest of the pack.

Being the only rider in the Grand Départ has its disadvantages. For example, he won’t benefit from the wind resistance from the other riders; there won’t be any. Nevertheless, I doubt any of the more accomplished riders will be able to overcome his sixty-three-day lead.

Although ...

There’s a reason I said “probably” in the first sentence: I’m thinking of a Tortoise and Hare scenario. (I don’t want to run afoul of The Aesop Publishing Rights Trust so I’m not going to even hint at the synopsis.) It’s not too hard to image Brandon drinking a lot (as cyclists are wont to do), falling in love with a French woman, then waking up one morning a few weeks later and seeing the peloton flash by him.

Hmmm ... that’s actually the opposite of The Tortoise and Hare, so perhaps The Hare and the Tortoise?

Nevermind.

Enjoy the race!

28 June 2020

The Less than Immaculate Restoration

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I wonder what percentage of stories in Stupid Tales start that way? I’m not going to bother with any research, so I’ll just say most of ’em in general and this one in particular.

An art collector in Valencia, Spain, paid a furniture restorer over a thousand dollars to clean The Immaculate Conception, a baroque painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. (It’s a Spanish thing, like having your gardener clean your teeth.)

What a brilliant move! It all starts with a tedious 1678 painting of a woman floating on a cloud of babies. (Are they dead or alive? Weren’t condoms available then?) I think a third of a millennium is more than enough time to look at any image.

That timeline may have been what the furniture repair hombre cum art restorer was thinking as well, in the unlikely even he was thinking about anything other than money.

The resulting “restoration” was, in fact, a completely new look at a worn-out cliché of a very young—bordering on child pornography—mother. (God, what was s/he thinking?!)

Art experts were aghast, appalled, and lots of other agonized words that begin with the first letter of the alphabet. They always get their pretentious knickers in a twist when anything changes.

I was delighted by the fresh imagery. Now that the Louvre is closed during Coronarama, les administrateurs et les bureaucrates should bring in a légion of furniture restorers to freshen up all the stale work that’s accumulated there for too long.

29 June 2020

Milton Glaser, Exterminator of Words

News just reached me here in the hinterlands that Milton Glaser died a week ago on his ninety-first birthday. Most of his obituaries described him as something like, “the graphic designer who created the look of the sixties,” but I remember him for another dubious achievement.

Glaser set back the development of the written word by at least several millennia with his famous design proclaiming his love for his hometown:

I [image of heart]
NY

With that one simple move of replacing a straightforward four-letter word with a picture, Glaser took written communication back to a cave in Lascaux. I cry and decry bull!

I have a lot of really smart friends, and even those who should know better—the ones who graduated from third grade—have started using pictograms, colloquially known as emojis, instead of elementary words like sun, beer, smile et cetera.

I really can’t blame Glaser for the mass dumbing down and gutting the printed language; he just happened to be the one who tapped into the rich vein of seemingly universal laziness and stupidity.

30 June 2020

Deunking the Centipede

I like to balance my relentless aesthetic pursuits with rigorous scientific inquiry, and that’s what brought me to the centipede, or should I say, “centipede?” Most improbably, this is my second discussion of etymology and entomology in as many months.

I saw the rarest of centipedes yesterday: a (mostly) physically intact one. Such a sighting is almost unheard of here in New Mexico since people usually squish every one of the venomous anthropods on sight. I discovered my specimen at the base of a toxic cactus; its brittle prehistoric body was mostly intact, desiccated by the searing desert heat.

I took the rare discovery back to my mountain laboratory, made a cursory examination under the centipedoscope, and made a most amazing etymological and etymological discovery.

I’ll begin with etymology. Every schoolgirl and even a few of the schoolboys know that “cent-” is the Latin prefix for “hundred.” “Centipede” literally means a hundred pedestals, as their legs are known in the scientifical community.

And now on to entomology. The vicious predator I examined didn’t have a hundred pedestals, not even close! I’m not sure about the exact number; I stopped counting when it became clear that the wee beast had fewer than fifty.

My astonishing discovery sent shock waves through the international centipede community. After a spirited bidding war, my astounding specimen is on its way to the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (Swedish Museum of Natural History) in Stockholm, and I’m on my way to Larry’s Liquors for a celebratory bottle of Bunnahabhain. Unlike art, science pays!

1 July 2020

Briefly Fashionable

Julia sent me a note this morning and congratulated me for being so fashionable.

The nerve!

I’ve never so been insulted in all my month!

She backed up her derogatory derogation with an article, “Slob style is the Covid-19 fashion statement.” Morwenna Ferrier, an “acting joint fashion editor” (whatever that is), talked a load of bollocks about that dubious proposition. (I’m not being critical; is there any other way to talk about fashion?) She tried to validate her codswallop with a lot of hooey from GQ, née Gentlemen’s Quarterly, that being a slob is a conscious act of “power dressing.”

Even if the consortium of would-be dandies has agreed (that’s how the system works) that dressing like a slob is today’s haute couture, it certainly won’t be tomorrow’s. Jean Cocteau said it best, “Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.”

I’m going to ignore Julia’s rude and inflammatory correspondence and deny that I’m a fashion plate. I’ll be right about that even before I can figure out how to get all chain oil from my bike out of my disgustingly stylish jeans ... if I ever do.

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