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5 March 2023

No. 9,835 (cartoon)

You’re a whiner; get the H out.

Winer!

Zackly!

6 March 2023

Carlos Castañeda

Fifty years and one day ago Carlos Castañeda née Carlos César Salvador Arana made the cover of Time magazine. The cover featured an illustration, with tightly cropped photos inside that Eddie Adams made of the anthropologist and author.

Or did he?

There’s a good reason the profile described him as, “an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla.” That may be an imposter Castañeda sent to the photo session. His supernatural experiences with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Juan Matus probably never happened ... or did they? Was he really married? And so on.

My opinion is that Castañeda was the rarest of performance artists: a good one. And not a bad philosopher either; here’s a passage from Journey to Ixtlan I’ve always appreciated.

This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which* could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.

Reality aside, that’s some real good thinkin’ right there, with or without peyote. And so, I’m pouring me a glass of wine while there’s still time.

*All my electronic editors are screaming at me to change “which” to “that.” I wonder if Castañeda had a real editor or if this is an example of magical grammar thinking.

7 March 2023

Horses in Trees

Suzette and Juanita asked me to join them on a walk in the park with their three-year-old daughter Samantha. I rarely pass on an opportunity to go into character as Mean Uncle David, so I was glad I had the opportunity to confuse a little girl.

I was pleased to hear that she still insists on having mustard on her bananas after I explained that yellow mustard on a yellow banana is obviously the right combination. Today’s lesson: how to spot horses hiding in trees.

She was adamant that there are no horses in the trees because she’s never seen one there, so I had to use logic. I asked her if she’d ever seen birds in trees, which of course she had. I explained that she saw the birds because they don’t hide in trees and that she’d never seen a horse in a tree because they’re brilliant at camouflage.

I later convinced her that we’d spotted a horse in an oak tree a couple hundred meters away on the other side of the canyon. She wanted to approach it, but I told her that it was a bad idea to wake a horse up from a nap if she didn’t have an apple or a carrot to give it for a snack.

When it was time to say goodbye I told her that we could come back another day and feed it. I’m counting on her memory and attention span being as bad as mine. For now, she can annoy her mothers with questions about horses in trees while she’s eating her bananas and mustard.

8 March 2023

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flew from Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014 and landed ... well, that was nine years ago and no one knows what happens. Even worse—or better, depending on your perspective—we know less each year as even the few “facts” about the missing jet are disputed.

The captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was depressed and took everybody on board with him when he committed suicide. Or maybe the Americans shot it down to prevent someone and/or something from reaching Beijing. Or maybe the Russians stole it to draw attention away from the war in Crimea.

And that’s it for today’s annual aviation head-scratching. Here’s my prediction: on the tenth anniversary a year from today, some alleged experts will claim that there never was a Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax.

9 March 2023

Sharp and Fuzzy Atoms

Joey told me that there’s a new camera with a shutter speed of one trillionth of a second. That’s fast enough to record sharp images of atoms.

He said if I had such a camera I’d no longer need a tripod, but he is wrong. A tripod does more than just hold the camera steady; it forces me to think about the photograph I’m about to make as I adjust the camera position by a few centimeters here and a couple degrees there.

The new camera from the clever boffins at the Université de Bourgogne and Columbia Engineering raises a new concern, sharpness. If a trillionth of a second exposure can render atoms clearly, does that mean that every photograph I’ve made to date is fuzzy because the atoms are blurry?

I used to insist that my quest for highly detailed photographs was an aesthetic concern, or possibly a flashback from the f64 pixie dust Ansel Adams used in the gin cocktail he poured me over forty years ago. Now, however, I have to acknowledge that it’s nothing less than a visual fetish since no one else can see it unless they’re looking at the same large computer monitor.

Now that I’ve acknowledged the folly of my folly, I’ll go back to my usual one-second shutter speed. That has to be a trillion times better, no? And if anyone chides me for the blurry atoms, I’ll resort to the justification mediocre artists have always used: “I wanted it that way.”

10 March 2023

Swale Hoop

I wish I was a better artist, but I couldn’t resist making a pretty picture of the bubbling stream in the backyard of my friends’ house where I’m staying. They liked the purdy photo, so I sent them a copy. When I did, I discovered that I preferred the photograph upside down and with the basket welded over the storm drain in color ... kinda looks like a basketball net hanging from the forest ceiling, no?

I don’t know which is worse: the urban nature photograph or the image with two gimmicks. I made Seven Swale Mouth Poles (Triptych) over a year ago and should have stopped there. Since I didn’t, I’m putting this photo in my notebook as a reminder not to be so lazy and stupid in the future.

I’m not optimistic. Photographs that look like good photographs aren’t good photographs, but I can never seem to keep the tripod stowed and the lens cap on when presented with a tempting cliché.

11 March 2023

Dinosaurian Ways

The British Broadcasting Corporation won’t be broadcasting a special show it commissioned because of fear of a “rightwing backlash.” Apparently the timid bureaucrats are afraid to air a documentary on how greedy people and corporations have bollixed up the environment with their “dinosaurian ways” for fear of offending the greedy people and corporations that have bollixed up the environment with their dinosaurian ways.

I don’t want to get mired down with pesky facts; I’m interested in the phrase, “dinosaurian ways.” I pet my peeve vigorously when I hear stupid people refer to dinosaurs as biological failures; they lived on the planet over five hundred times as long as humans. If anyone would like to debate this, get back to me in a hundred and sixty-four million years; I’m usually available Thursday afternoons.

Or maybe, just maybe, someone was being clever by saying fossil fuels are responsible for the climate change and environmental destruction we’re watching from our front-row seats.

And so, stupid or clever? That’s easy: I almost always win when I bet on stupid. And there’s a reason that the BBC is pronounced “Twittish Broadcasting Corporation.”

12 March 2023

Peer Pressure from Dead People

Katia started a successful business without wasting her time getting a university degree. That was over thirty years ago, but some in her family haven’t forgiven her for not attending an Ivy League law school and becoming a miserable attorney like almost everyone in her family has done for generations.

I told her that I admired her for taking a difficult and more rewarding path in life, but she just shrugged off her relatives’ disapproval by noting, “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart