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Weak XXIII

5 June 2024

No. 5,890 (cartoon)

I want to regain your trust.

Really? Why?

So that I can abuse it again.

6 June 2024

Every Belief Is Wrong

The editors at the Washington Post are making amazing advances in easy-to-write fluff pieces, er, journalism. As I mentioned last month, their headline, Why some corals are better off dead, can easily be used as a template, i.e., Why [fill in the blank] are better off dead. And now they’ve done it again with, Nearly everything Americans believe about the economy is wrong.

Just use the formula Nearly everything [x] believes about [y] is wrong and you can have at least a millennium of daily articles that will literally write themselves with a simple computer program.

Nearly everything Azerbaijanis believe about absinthe is wrong.

See how easy that was? I wonder what the next formulaic piece will be. Maybe something like, Your biggest mistake with [x] is [y].

Stay tuned!

7 June 2024

Dorothy’s Final Advice

Dorothy was a ninety-four-year-old friend of a friend; I only met her once when she was literally on her deathbed. She reported that dying was boring, and advised me to cross the great divide before my ninetieth birthday.

I just learned she finally left us, so I’m taking her good advice and enjoying a big cheese omelet and huge glass of beer for lunch to help hasten my demise. Thanks, Dorothy!

8 June 2024

Positively No Negatives

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, Kids These Days are rejecting contemporary technologies and going back to life a couple of generations ago, such as vinyl records, darkroom photography, and horse-drawn carriages. (I made up the third example, but I won’t be surprised if that comes to pass soon.) I suspect one of the reasons is that they enjoy spending lots of money to enjoy relatively new experiences such as listening to music in twenty-minute blocks.

Apparently a lot got lost when analog photography skipped a generation; Kids These Days are treating prints from the photo lab as unique objects, as if they were Polaroid prints. According to reports from the few photo labs still in business; they’re abandoning or trashing their negatives; they consider them as disposable as the envelope containing the photographs. Why has it not occurred to them that the first print might not be the best possible iteration, or that someday they might want a second photograph from the same negative, possibly in a different size?

(I’ll ignore good litterature advice and answer my rhetorical question: I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I must admit that I do like aspects about making an edition of one, since I hallucinate that the practice suggests more of a concern about art than the mass production of a product.

I wonder if any artist has ever taken that to the logical extreme of creating a piece without telling anyone or documenting it, then abandoning it? If that happened, no one except the invisible artist would know. That’s much too pure for me, so I’ll continue my usual practice even at the risk of getting a rotator cuff injury.

9 June 2024

David Glenn Rinehart, War Correspondent

Koreans are launching aerial assaults from both sides of the de facto border, but the relentless salvos and barrages have yet to injure anyone. If you want to have a war, I think the Koreans are showing us a progressive way forward.

The current battlefield strategy appears to be plagiarized from an unpublished Monty Python sketch. Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s cartoonish dictator, launched the offensive by bombarding South Korea with ...

... wait for it ...

... attack balloons carrying bags of human excrement.

The South Koreans retaliated by sending military balloons north with a payload of aural excrement (recordings of popular music). None of the perfunctory news reports I’ve read have explained why balloons from the north drift south and vice-versa, so I may want to investigate this.

I wanted to be a war photographer when I was a teenager, but later abandoned the stupid idea when I barely evolved into less of an idiot. But now I’m reconsidering that option again, perhaps suggesting that I’ve reverted to being more of an idiot.

I can see it now: there I am, in camo fatigues wearing an oversized helmet with PRESS emblazoned across the front and back in large, red letters, with Leicas and Nikons hanging from my neck. I’m sitting in a comfortable chaise lounge just south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone with a small kimchi buffet and large bottles of maekju and soju waiting to document the next horrific onslaught.

David Glenn Rinehart, war correspondent, that’s me!

10 June 2024

Ten Hundred Hours (Bucatino no. 15 and Butter Sundial Proof of Concept)

While contemplating a slender length of Bucatino no. 15 on the patio, I wondered what I could do with its shadow. Right about then, a popular song from forty-some years ago unfestered itself from the bowels of my memory and I recalled the lyrics.

Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?

That’s the improbable explanation of what led me to create, Ten Hundred Hours (Bucatino no. 15 and Butter Sundial Proof of Concept).

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart