Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXVII

2 July 2020

No. 528 (cartoon)

You are repugnantly odious.

No more drinks until you apologize.

I didn’t mean that to sound the way it means.

3 July 2020

Darker Days

I had an uneasy feeling all day: there was something different, but what? I finally realized what was going on as I was enduring another garish New Mexican sunset: it was taking longer than usual for the light from the sun to reach me.

I called Giovanni at the Mount Vesuvius Observatory near Napoli and he confirmed my observation after I woke him up. (It was four in the morning in Italy.) He told me our planet is about five million kilometers farther from the sun than it was six months ago. In practice, that means it’s now taking sunlight almost seventeen seconds longer to travel here than it did in January.

Whew!

I was relieved when he added that we’re also receiving seven percent less sunlight than we did then; that explains why my recent photographs have been slightly underexposed.

In retrospect, I should have asked him some more questions, but he was barely awake. I was happy to learn that I wasn’t imaging things; that was all I needed to know tonight.

I may ask him later if we’re all going to freeze to death as we head into the cosmic void. Nah, why spoil the uncertainty?

4 July 2020

GI Joe, Horn Specialist

I’ve always been fascinated by an image allegedly depicting an American Revolutionary War battle showing a drummer and a piper leading troops into battle with the Brits. What’s going on?

Were the Americans using psychological war to make the redcoats lose the will to fight and maybe even their will to live? Never underestimate the power of bad music! Or maybe the so-called musicians were chosen to lead the phalanx of advancing soldiers to absorb the first rounds of English musket volleys?

I was reminded of this improbable military strategy when I saw a model of GI Joe, a toy soldier, menacingly brandishing a French Horn. He’s in full battle drag and ready for carnage, but how? Just like the drummer and a piper from a couple of centuries ago, he needs both hands for his instrument.

When it comes to musicians, drummers are usually the first to die. I’m not sure why that is, most likely because the bad ones are so annoying. I bet GI Joe, Horn Specialist, will be the first one in his unit to get zipped in. He’s wearing camouflage paint on his face, but I think he’s only doing it to accent his cheekbones; he’s going to be easy to spot carrying around four meters of shiny brass tubing.

There’s only one thing accurate about the toy: the illustration. The painting shows GI Joe shrieking as if he’s bellowing a bloodcurdling battle cry. As a retired horn player, though, I know better. He’s screaming an obscenity after splattering the high B-flat in Richard Strauss’s first horn concerto; I’d recognize that wretched expression anywhere.

5 July 2020

(Not) Riding a Boneless Horse

Henri and Eric were arguing; that’s all they ever do. They both enjoy it and it seems harmless, so good on ’em.

It’s easy to argue with Henri. The very sound of his nasally French voice grates on the eardrums, and actually listening to the words is worse. For example, he proclaimed in an unconvincing imitation of Jean-Paul Sartre, “One cannot ride a boneless horse.”

Depending on your perspective, Eric rose or sunk to the challenge and a-loudly asserted, “Riding any horse is a crime against nature.”

And with that they were off like two broncos—with or without bones—sliding down a slippery slope into the depths of inanity. I’m not paying much attention to the race since I know the outcome will be the same as always: they’re both going to lose.

6 July 2020

Chuffed Irregardless

The editors at the Merriam-Webster publishing conglomerate may have thought they could quietly declare that they now recognize “irregardless” as a bona fide real word and no one would pay any attention.

Ha! They would have had better luck trying to sneak dawn past a rooster.

Gomez is livid and crimson with rage, as if someone had poured molten Linotype in his grammar hole.

“The fools!” he ranted. “The prefix ‘ir-’ and the suffix ‘-less’ negate each other, so the abomination has no place in the English language let alone a dictionary.”

I haven’t seen his knickers in such a twist since some reference volume declared that the word “nuclear” could be pronounced “nu-cue-lur” as George W. Bush, who at the time temporarily held the title of Dumbest U.S. President Ever, misorated it.

I have a very clear position on the debate. I’m going to chide and berate anyone who says “irregardless” as an ignorant cretin who should just point and grunt instead of attempting something too difficult for them, like using words. And when I’m around Gomez and his miserable ilk I’m going to mention The Unspeakable Utterance at every possibility, irregardless of how apoplectic their apoplexy becomes.

This is a wonderful etymological development! Some people will ignore the whole brouhaha about a string of a dozen ASCII characters. I am one of them and we are boring. Fortunately, the people who can’t tell the difference between their ASCII and their elbow keep the rest of us pleasingly chuffed.

7 July 2020

Nature Arrives Again

I usually eschew labels, but one on which I’ve been chewing recently is “nature photographer.” (Anyone who wants to pigeonhole me might find that to be a fit, but it certainly ain’t natural.)

Most idiot photographers pack a hundred kilos of camera equipment and set out looking for nature. That’s ridiculous; why go looking for nature when nature will come looking for you? Yogi Berra’s great insight comes up every other year or so, and here it is again: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

I didn’t have to even put on a jacket earlier this year to document the frost on my studio window. And today I photographed a weird thingie on the screen behind my monitor; I couldn’t tell if it was a stick or an insect. Carlos had a look at the image and definitively declared that it was a stick insect. That made both etymological and entomological sense.

Oh dear; I’m repeating myself with such frequency that I’m even annoying myself; I really must stop using words that being with “etym-” and “entom-” for at least the remainder of the calendar year.

I had to heavily crop the image I posted on the Internet of the prehistoric predator. I lost ninety-three percent of the visual information when I compacted the original to fit a cramped Internet reproduction, resulting in a moiré pattern from the screen in my window that obscured the photograph.

Those tedious technical notes conclude today’s talk on photographing the natural world that I should have ended before it began. Like Woody Allen, I am at two with nature.

8 July 2020

The Good Old Days

Here’s the headline in today’s Los Angeles Times: “This day in sports: Paul Goydos shoots a 59.”

Yep; on this very day a decade ago Goydos won a game of golf by whacking a ball with a stick exactly fifty-nine times in Silvis, Illinois. Ah, the sepia-tinted good old days ...

I’m old enough that I can still remember when the LA rag was a real newspaper that actually featured news. But that was a long time ago, but then everything before Coronarama seems quite distant.

Regardless and irregardless of the virus, “news” sites on the Internet still have a sports section to fill in order to sell ads. Almost all professional sports events have been canceled for months, hence the filler. (And yet, there’s inexplicably still no chess coverage, about the only game on the planet still being played at the highest levels.)

I see filler like “this day in sports” becoming a disturbing trend. All the restaurants are closed, so it’s just a matter of time before the food writer has a rhapsodic flashback to the memorable night in 1997 when he savored every bite of Vinny’s signature dish, Cod Cheeks in Giraffe Oil.

Writers can fondly recall other highlights from the impossibly distant past. Horrible movie theaters with rancid popcorn, sticky floors, and audiences talking throughout the film. Airports crammed with lumbering human cattle in the days when flying couldn’t get any worse (before it did). Orchestras playing the same music they’ve been repeating for centuries, accompanied by the timeless accompaniment of snores from unconscious concertgoers.

Nope; these are the good old days. I’m gonna fry me up a big batch of fresh pesto pasta rich in garlic, listen to King Missile on great speakers, and watch Alexander Donchenko demolish the opposition at the Ceske Budejovice Chess Festival in the Czech Republic on my high-resolution monitor.

Life is too short to live in the past. These really are the good old days, as well as the only days we have. Enjoy!

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2020 David Glenn Rinehart