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Weak XVI

16 April 2022

No. 6,589 (cartoon)

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.

Liar! You did everything on purpose.

I really am sorry I only hurt you; I meant to destroy you.

17 April 2022

Easter Sing-along

Theresa celebrates Easter by putting chocolate bunnies in a hot frying pan and singing along with their screams as they melt. I know that sounds like a tall tale but I insist it’s true; I saw it with my own ears.

18 April 2022

Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy

In my early years as an artist I enjoyed complete anonymity; I still have most of it left. That gives me complete freedom with almost no responsibilities; what could be better than that?

Nick Duerden looked at what life in anonymity is like for fashionable artists who went out of fashion in his book, Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars. I’m not going to read it since Cyril Connolly gave away the plot when he wrote, “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.”

19 April 2022

The Song Remains the Same Eighty Years Later

It’s not hard to conduct an orchestra after you’ve memorized these dozen words: Wave the baton until the music stops, then turn around and bow. When I listen to the symphonies I used to play in my youth, all of the recordings sound fungible with one exception: when Wilhelm Furtwängler is conducting.

I’d rather listen to his wartime recording of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, even with the poor audio quality and audience noise—than anything else I’ve heard including albums featuring Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan.

But all is not well; I still choke a little when I hear “wartime recording.” The war is World War Two, and eighty years ago tonight Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s choral symphony in Berlin on the eve of Adoph Hitler’s fifty-third birthday. I saw a remarkable photograph that showed the maestro in the vortex of a sea of musicians. Oh, and there’s a huge banner of a Nazi swastika as well.

Furtwängler will forever be associated with the Nazis, a complex discussion I’m not going to address here with a few one-liners. (As a relevant aside, I don’t hear many people remark that Böhm saluted Hitler from the podium or mention that von Karajan, unlike Furtwängler, was a member of the Nazi party.)

Tanks are rolling across borders in Europe again, and Russian artists and athletes tainted with the stench of Putin will be shunned elsewhere. Until, like Furtwängler, they’re not.

Some things never change. Alas.

20 April 2022

Everybody Needs an Editor

The New York Times Magazine had a very long feature article explaining that a computer program—Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Three—running on a Brobdingnagian computer with two hundred and eighty-five thousand central processing units held together with duct tape, glue, and spit, can generate fluent prose.

If “fluent prose” appears here, you’ll know I’ve subcontracted my writing chores to a machine, kinda like Mark Kostabi but without paying anyone to do my purportedly creative work for me.

I’m going to sidestep all the moral, economic, and political questions about breeding “thinking” machines; I have nothing to add to those complex ongoing debates.

I think the conceptual basis of the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Three is fundamentally flawed. The world doesn’t need more fluent prose; we suffer from an abundance of that. No, we need less crappy prose. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest creating text terminators to scour the globe for disagreeable writing to eradicate; we have human censors and religious fanatics already doing that with alarming success.

The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Three should be repurposed as an editor and copywriter. I’d love to wake up some morning and discover that the silicon editor had gone through every file on my computer, corrected every single typo, and rewritten everything in my entire notebook to make it wrote real good.

That ain’t gonna happen, but a guy can dream, can’t he? Sure beats working!

21 April 2022

Snarge Revisited

It’s been decades, but one of the highlights of my trip to Finland was the sprawling snarge buffet at the Hotel Katajanokka in Helsinki featuring dozens of types of snarge, the deliciously fatty Scandinavian delicacy.

That’s a nice culinary picture, but it never happened. Snarge is what remains of a bird after it’s been sucked into a jet engine.

I don’t have anything to say about snarge, clever or otherwise. It’s a great word, one I haven’t used here in well over a decade, so I chose it for today’s filler to address that omission.

22 April 2022

Probing Uranus

A popular periodical rarely provides a valuable public service, but that’s what the writers at Wired magazine (or is it just an Internet site these days?) just did to their credit. Here’s an excerpt:

On Tuesday, a team of planetary science and astrobiology researchers released a detailed new report called a decadal survey, which lays out research priorities for their field. The researchers argue that a Uranus orbiter and probe should be considered “the highest-priority new flagship mission” that could be developed and even launched within the next decade.

Sounds rather innocuous, doesn’t it? No, the headline writer is the hero of this timely warning; here’s the slug: Get Ready for a Decade of Uranus Jokes.

With all the stories about learning more about Uranus, probes and all, it’s a great time to be a sniggering teenage boy, but a long, annoying interplanetary decade for the rest of us.

23 April 2022

My Singular Ambition

I don’t know what got into her, but Cheryl decided to give me some constructive criticism. She should have known better.

“Have you ever thought about how you got to where you are now and where you’re going from here?” she asked with an annoyingly earnest expression.

“Sure!” I replied cheerfully. “I got here by coming in through the door of your studio, and now that we’re near the bottom of our second bottle of wine I’ll be headed to the toilet soon.”

“Very cute, Mister Smarty-Lederhosen,” she replied.

Having concluded the conversational foreplay, she went straight for the jugular of the biscuit.

“You have no ambition, that’s why you’re where you are today,” she declared.

“That’s just not true!” I protested. “I’m extraordinarily ambitious.”

“Give me an example,” she demanded.

“My ambition is to be free of ambition,” I explained. “I know that’s a Catch Sixty-Nine thing and I’ll be wrestling with it until I die, so please don’t say that I’m not ambitious.”

I played the bladder card and headed to the bathroom. I knew I could never win such an inane debate, so I was happy to settle for a draw.

I know that’s not much of an ending, but then it wasn’t much of a story, either.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart