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Weak XLVII

20 November 2022

No. 5,559 (cartoon)

Too much is a good start!

Nothing succeeds like excess!

We can’t go on like this ...

21 November 2022

Undocumented Aha!

I was just a-sitting there this morning, caffeinating and minding my own bidness, yes I was, when it struck me!

Aha!

That doesn’t sound quite right; “struck” sounds violent or aggressive, but it wasn’t like that at all. I could have said that it hit me, but then there’s the same problem with it sounding too physical. No, it was more like the apple bonking Newton on the noggin with an enlightening thump. I felt inspired after it hit me, but that makes me sound like a masochist, and that certainly ain’t me.

What I can say with certainty is that something like that is extraordinarily rare. I should have written it down, because now I can’t remember what it was.

Tarnation!

Easy come easy go, easy come again ...

22 November 2022

Stillborn Diptych

Louise’s Laundromat has two vents coming out of the back of the building. I have no idea what they’re discharging—toxic dry cleaning chemicals?—to make the brown excretion dripping down the wall beneath.

Did I mention two of them? Ah yes, I see that I did, and that spells diptych. I made a couple of photographs and it did not go well. There was too much texture in the sunlit peeling paint; I needed to go back on an overcast day to photograph it again. I discovered the drains were at different heights and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted the same number of cinderblocks in each image or the drain outlets in the same place in each photograph.

I finally decided to abandon the project. I’ve already done two diptychs this year of different things that appear similar, and it was all too much work just to eat my cabbage twice or thrice.

23 November 2022

Quettakvetching

The editors of Merriam-Webster’s Scrabble Dictionary added hundreds of new words to the latest edition, including babytalk words such as “adorbs” and even trademarked business names like “Google.”

Feh; what’s the world coming to?!

Curmudgeons like me have been kvetching about Kids These Days for well over a millennium; that’s what makes English such a great language, don’tchathink?

Meanwhile, the ladettes and lads at the General Conference on Weights and Measures just made some useful additions to the language. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but they’re all related to measures and weights. Here’s what I read ...

At the top end of the scale are the new prefixes ronna, which stands for a billion billion billion, and quetta, which is a thousand times larger still. At the bottom end is ronto, meaning a billionth of a billionth of a billionth, and quecto, which is a thousand times smaller than that.

In practice, we can now describe the weight of our planet without using any zeros: it’s six ronnagrams. That’s important; there’s a shortage of zeros since computers need so many of them to function. (Then why are there still plenty of ones, I wonder ...)

Even though the additions are all prefixes and not proper words at all, I’ll bet those sloppy, airheaded editors at Merriam-Webster’s Scrabble Dictionary will add them to the next edition.

Feh redux!

24 November 2022

Pregnant Turkey

Today is Thanksgiving, the tradition where people of non-color celebrate stealing the country from the indigenous people who welcomed them.

Big mistake!

Today is also the third anniversary of Jorge’s prank that converted his nephew Seymor into a committed vegetarian; here’s the trick.

He invited his brother’s family over for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, including the obligatory oversized turkey chock full o’ hormones, antibiotics, stuffing, and, for that memorable dinner, a wee Cornish game hen in the body cavity as well. He carved up the carcass until he got to the little hen. He pulled it out of the turkey and screamed. “My God! It was pregnant!”

Unless you share my sense of humor, hilarity did not ensue.

Eight-year-old Seymor screamed and ran away crying, and it took the so-called grownups two hours to convince him that turkeys reproduce by laying eggs, not gestation in a womb. Nevertheless, the kid hasn’t had a bite of meat since.

Jorge prepared a delicious pesto pasta dinner with lots of kale for today’s feast; that’s what I call a happy ending.

25 November 2022

Soporifically Perfect Photographs

I went through a timewarp the other day when I wandered into a library for the first time since Coronarama infested the planet. And there I was back in 2019! I went to the periodicals room and glanced at the art magazines, arty like it’s 1999: Crappy Art in America, Craptacular Artforum, Crapacious ARTnews, et cetera.

I then had a look at LensWork, a quarterly periodical I’d never seen even though it’s been around for thirty years. After leafing through a couple dozen pages, I went through yet another timewarp that took me all the way back to 1969 or 1979, when f64 was the aperture of choice and Fine Art Photography was made from eleven zones of grey.

There they were, all the photographs I revered during my formative teenage years: the mysterious trees in the fog, magnificent jagged granite peaks slicing through billowing cumulous clouds in an inky sky, misty waterfalls, perfect autumn leaves floating in bubbling brooks, the usual clichés.

The periodical featured classic twentieth-century reportage in addition to the nature photographs: dignified, hardworking Romanian peasants piling a mountain of hay onto a horse-drawn wagon, dignified, hardworking Indian villagers with missing teeth and faces lined with deep crevasses, and, with a nod to relative modernity, dignified, hardworking miners and their huge machines, the usual.

These predictable photographs were different than the almost identical ones I saw half a century ago: they were technically perfect. Each image featured classic composition and impeccable technique: there wasn’t a pixel out of place.

It makes numerical sense: a good editor selected the best of what a million people who may imagine themselves as a latter-day Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, et al, could create over many years. It also makes technical sense: today’s cameras and lenses are far superior to anything one could buy in the last century, and the resulting images were digitally enhanced to a level of technical excellence the boys in Carmel probably never imagined.

And speaking of gender, I think all the photographs in the only four issues of LensWork in the library’s periodical room were made by men, just like the halcyon days of the sixties when women were usually in front of the camera and rarely behind it.

Given the classic c. 1969 aesthetic, I’ll never see photographs better than the ones in LensWork, which were literally picture-perfect. I’m sure there’ll be a katrillion more of them, which is why I’ll never glance at that flawless periodical again. Perfection is boring, as are the photographic lemmings who work so diligently and tirelessly to arrive at that ideal dead end.

As Salvador Dali noted, “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2022 David Glenn Rinehart