Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXIV

11 June 2024

No. 8,199 (cartoon)

Are you serious?

As serious as the discharge from your infected draining sores.

Stop whining about our sex life.

12 June 2024

Death in Europe

I received quite a shock this morning when I read the alarming headline.

Tobacco, alcohol, processed foods, and fossil fuels kill 2.7m a year in Europe

Scary stuff! Wakeup call? Game changer? Eye-opener? New paradigm? All of the above?

Nope; it was a false alarm. I don’t use tobacco and I haven’t lived in Europe in over twenty years, so I’ll be just fine!

I relearned a lesson I “relearn” with alarming frequency: don’t do anything that requires the least bit of thought until fully caffeinated. I’m afraid it’s one of those catch sixty-nine things: how can I remember that before I’ve polished off half a liter of forty-weight coffee?

13 June 2024

Winning by Losing

Last year Boris Eldagsen won a Sony World Photography award and was later DQed when he cheerfully said that a computer did most of the heavy lifting with the imagery. Miles Astray won the 1839 Awards Color Photography Contest for a computer-generated photograph and was later DQed when he cheerfully said that FLAMINGONE was a straight, unmanipulated image fresh out of the camera.

I’m cheerful seeing other cheerful artists who, like, me, appreciate that the only way to win the game is not to play the game.

I’ll let Bela Bartok have the last laugh: “Competitions are for horses, not artists.”

14 June 2024

As Stupid as a Computer

Elizabeth Wolfe, Robert Shackelford, and Mary Gilbert are credited with writing this tedious paragraph in the form of a run-on sentence: “The robust moisture fueling this week’s storms typically pools over parts of the Caribbean Sea and the southern Gulf of Mexico at this point in the season into the Central American gyre: A large, disorganized area of showers and thunderstorms that rotates over Central America and its surrounding waters.”

I smells me a computer, I does.

I know there are billions of foolish people out there, but even I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to describe moisture as “robust.” Every public relations flak in Silicon Valley uses “robust” in every single press release, but robust moisture?!

I smells me a computer editor, I does. Or perhaps I just might be wrong and there is a human as stupid as a computer; there’s a first time for everything. I’m thinking of Garry Winogrand, who said, “I try to be as dumb as the camera. It’s an immense discipline.”

15 June 2024

Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day

This is the fifteenth day of June, time to again observe Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day. It’s a joyous celebration of his profound and timeless insight, “Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”

I didn’t have to work very hard—no surprises there—to come up with this year’s winners; censorship is in the headlines these days.

In Texas, a judge with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit wrote, “Government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree.” He was referring to seven banned “butt and fart” titles, but then that’s what a guy named Jacques Wiener Junior would say, wouldn’t he?

Meanwhile, in Florida, Indian River County School District administraitors took the bait and banned Alan Gratz’s Ban This Book claiming that it promoted “teaching rebellion of school-board authority.”

All this would be sad if it wasn’t so hilarious and hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

16 June 2024

Kosher Salt Ain’t

You coulda knocked me over with a horsefeather after I read this, but kosher salt ain’t kosher. That’s almost like saying Pope Frankie the Uno faked his own bat mitzvah!

The salt gets its name from kashering, or rubbing salt on bloody meat to make it kosher, or something like that. I’m relieved to get the semantic news; now kosher salt seems more at home in an agnostic, bloodless kitchen.

17 June 2024

Ten Unapproved Photographs from Over Twenty Years Ago

Ten Unapproved Photographs from Over Twenty Years Ago is just that. The idea was gestating, or possibly hibernating, for a very long time since I was too lazy to make or take the photographs I’d need. I finally realized after years that I didn’t even need to pick up a camera to complete the piece; I could instead recycle my images from the turn of the millennium or so.

So I did.

I never showed two of the shots before, and there’s only one I’d approve. I might actually get around to doing that someday.

Mañana ...

Coming next weak: more of the same.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2024 David Glenn Rinehart