Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XL

1 October 2023

No. 1,450 (cartoon)

Life is unfair.

I’ve always used that to my advantage.

2 October 2023

A Camera and a Tripod

Jorge asked me why I used a tripod to make the simplest of photographs in harsh sunlight.

“A camera without a tripod is like an automobile with no tires, only in reverse,” I explained.

Or maybe I didn’t say that; perhaps I was just the absinthe’s ventriloquist dummy.

3 October 2023

One Hundred Thousand Sunk

Yep, this really is what I do when I take off my artist’s smock and beret and put on my ridiculous naval commander hat with the gold braids: I play Battleship (2011). Or Monopoly (1991). Or another one I’m going to call Game Three (2008) since I’m too embarrassed to admit what goes on in the privacy of my computer.

Newgangled video games are too damned fangled. The dates above are when my versions of the games were first released; they only run on ancient (in computer years) electrocybergizmos.

This isn’t much of a point, but I finally got to it and here it is. It took me over eight years, but I finally sunk a hundred thousand Battleship battleships and submarines. (I can’t remember when I first started playing, but I reached thirty-thousand ships on 4 July 2018.) I thought the game programmers might have built in some sort of congratulatory message when I reached a six-figure lifetime score, but the event turned out to be a nonevent.

Too bad Esquire discontinued its Dubious Achievements awards in 2008; I woulda been a shoo-in.

4 October 2023

National Poetry Day

Clarissa asked me what I was doing today for National Poetry Day, so I told her: I’m drinking Scotch.

“What does that have to do with poetry?” she asked.

“Whisky is poetry in a glass, and if you can’t see that then you don’t know nothin’ about pottery,” I explained.

She looked most skeptical, so I added that “whisky” rhymes with “frisky,” “risky,” and “more whisky.”

She looked even more skepticaller.

Clarissa don’t know nothin’ about pottery, and neither do I. By design.

5 October 2023

The Photography Therapy Scam

Charlie said that the Brits are prescribing photography for mental health treatment; the program is run by Wex Photo Video, a chain of photographic equipment stores in the United [sic] Kingdom. There’s so much wrong with that I don’t know where to begin, but I will.

I wonder if they prescribe telephoto lenses for shy people and wide-angle lenses for extroverts, or perhaps the opposite. Of course not; they sell whatever has the highest profit margin.

I have several friends who are real therapists and work with a lot of very troubled people with disturbing and debilitating problems; that’s complex work that requires a great deal of expertise. I’m appalled that greedy cameramongers launched a marketing campaign masquerading as public health service to dupe desperate people. Calling camera peddlers therapists is even more ridiculous than claiming that bartenders are psychoanalysts.

I think anyone could do quite well using photography for art, reportage, business, or anything other than therapy. I’m not sure if this is relevant, but I’ll repeat my late friend Paul Raedeke’s dismissal of his neighbor’s wretched paintings, “I hope he’s doing it for therapy.”

6 October 2023

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

Once upon a very long time ago I lived in Verona. (The one in Wisconsin, not the one in Italy.) I remember visiting the capitol in nearby Madison and seeing a sign at the entrance: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.

That was in the seventies, and apparently things haven’t changed much since then. According to news reports, an unnamed forty-three-year-old man went to the governor’s office in the capitol building demanding to talk about “domestic abuse toward men.” He didn’t have a shirt or an appointment, but he did have a loaded pistol. The governor wasn’t there but the cops were; they whisked him off to jail and he was soon released on bail.

He returned that evening with an assault rifle to have a little chinwag with the governor, but it was like déjà vu all over again: no governor and lots of cops. The perp’s back in jail sans bail.

It didn’t have to be that way.

Had he showed up wearing a suit and a tie—and a shirt and shoes—with a valise bulging with cash he just might have been able to have an audience to discuss the pitiful state of oppressed privileged white men.

7 October 2023

My Cut of the Navy’s Budget

A while aback, I took a private tour organized by the Navy of its former Alameda, California, base to showcase the progress—and notable lack thereof—in cleaning up the toxic waste the swabbies left behind there. The deskbound sailors leading the show and tell show passed out little plastic bottles of water.

I never buy drinking water, but a cursory glance at the Internet showed my bottle costs around forty cents. The Navy’s budget is around two hundred and forty-five billion dollars a year, so I figure I got .000000000163465 percent of it.

I’ll drink to that! And I did. I appreciated sipping the water on an atypically hot day, but I have a lot to learn about gorging from the military-industrial trough.

8 October 2023

Consumer Alert

I bought a pair of cheap jeans on the Internet last August, big mistake!

Sure, the denim pants with dark indigo dye looked fine when they left the sweatshop, but after I wore them for only four hundred and twenty days or so the fabric was faded, tattered, and ripped. (Even though my before and after documentary photograph is conclusive evidence, I added the flowers in the background to put a soft edge on a harsh truth.)

The bargain pants are clearly no bargain. There are ancient hippies on Telegraph Avenue who are still wearing the same jeans they bought in 1967. I’d conclude by whinging that they don’t make ’em like they used to, but that’s so obvious that it would be pointless to point that out.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2023 David Glenn Rinehart