Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXVII

2 July 2024

No. 3,025 (cartoon)

Do I look like some sort of idiot?

No, let me rephrase that question ...

3 July 2024

2024 Passport Photo

I made the mistake of telling Isabella that I just renewed my passport. She asked to see my new government-approved identification photo, so what to do?

I was reticent to show it to her because it was a very bad headshot, the kind a mortician might make for a report. (Conversely, a good one shows me in the best light, figuratively, and doesn’t look very much like me.) I couldn’t say no to Isabella, so I told her I’d pass it along after I’d “cleaned it up a little bit.”

What to do?

I remembered a self-portrait I made in 1996 that captured the real me, with a lot left to the imagination. I can’t tell whether I was wearing a balaclava at the time; that’s what a good photographer I was over half a photographic lifetime ago.

I pulled up the regrettable passport image on my computer, pushed the “silhouette” button, and I was done. Isabella’s not going to like it, but she doesn’t like most of my other photographs either.

I think I’ve made it through another day unscathed, mostly.

4 July 2024

MLE and IFOCE News

I occasionally post a helpful recipe, and today is such an occasion.

Homemade hot dogs are an easy way for even the most inexperienced homemaker to impress guests on the cheap. Just go to your local slaughterhouse where you’ll be welcomed warmly if you haul away buckets of bovine waste clogging the drains and scrape all the cow detritus off the butchering room floor. Sterilize the wretched spoils, add generous dollops of industrial-strength preservatives and artificial flavorings, press into tubes, and enjoy!

Except for the modern chemicals, that’s pretty much the formula Nathan Handwerker—his real name!—used in 1916 when he sold hot dogs at his Coney Island stand for a nickel. (Costco, the giant warehouse retailer, sells ’em at a loss for a dollar and a half, the same price adjusted for inflation.)

For almost a century, Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest has been held on Independence Day at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Brooklyn, but it hasn’t been much of a contest in modern times. Joey “Jaws” Chestnut has won the men’s championship every year since 1916, taking home the prize—and a belly full of beef byproducts—sixteen times.

Why would anyone put their innards through such masochistic excesses? Chestnut has four million reasons, all of them dollars. That’s how much he made last year stuffing his face at Major League Eating events. (As everyone knows, the MLE is accredited by IFOCE, the International Federation of Competitive Eating.)

Chestnut didn’t participate today because of a sponsorship dispute; that’s what money does to a sport. Patrick Bertoletti triumphed at Nathan’s with a mere fifty-eight hot dogs, not even within vomiting* distance of Chestnut’s 2021 record of seventy-six.

That concludes my insightful MLE and IFOCE reportage.

*The pros call that a “reversal of fortune.”

5 July 2024

YLLEVAD

If I ever had to curate a visual art exhibition, I’d go to Ikea and buy as many framed prints as I’d need to fill the gallery. Readyframed readymades!

The international conglomerate offers a variety of pleasing stock photographs of kittens and landscapes, but I prefer the conceptual end of the spectrum. I’m talking about my most recent discovery, YLLEVAD, a readytitled readymade.

Monika Mulder designed the picture frame; nice rectangle, Monika! The real visual joy comes from the printing, some on the white piece of framed paper with two groups of indecipherable symbols overprinted on the plastic wrap.

Now get this: this Work of Fine Art sells for less than five dollars. It costs me more than that to make a print that big. Or, more accurately, it would have had I made one in the last twenty years.

6 July 2024

Hawk Tuah Girl

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” I wonder where William Shakespeare would put Hailey Welch on that spectrum.

For the last several days I’ve seen her name in the headlines in most of the newspapers I read. She’s rarely mentioned by name; she’s almost always called, “Hawk Tuah Girl.”

I finally gave up trying to ignore her and discovered the twenty-two-year-old woman’s remarkable accomplishment was to coin the phrase “hawk tuah” as a euphemism for fellatio. I don’t think Welch has broken any new ground in litterature or semantics, but she has allowed editors to publish titillating stories about oral sex without explicitly mentioning oral sex.

Clever. Maybe that makes her the Dorothy Parker (with a thick Southern drawl) of Belfast, Tennessee; maybe it doesn’t.

Good work if you can get it, I suppose. One of the many reasons I admire Stephan Pastis is that he’s never revealed the scandalously debauched definition of, “The Floot Floot Did a Boom Boom on the Jim Jam.”

That’s all, folks!

7 July 2024

Cubist Waters

Bernie gave Alison a small carton of water a few weeks ago. From what I can figure, a box of water is like a fruitcake: it’s something that’s perpetually regifted but never consumed. In any case, Alison gave it to me in appreciation of taking care of her cats for a long weekend. (If you think that’s a miserly gift, you thunk wrong since I’d pay for Leo and Poppy’s kitty company.)

I’m all too familiar with stupid ideas, and the product, Boxed Water, is among the best or worst of them depending on your perspective. Like fruitcake, I have no idea why it exists. It’s expensive; it costs fifty percent more than pretty good beer. It has no environmental benefits since four plastic spouts and screwtops end up in the landfill for every liter consumed. And it’s anything but exotic: what pretentious twit is going to brag about quaffing bottled water from a nondescript town in Michigan?

The product was clearly not designed to be consumed, so I photographed it in its liquid and solid states to make Cubist Waters.

8 July 2024

Behind Cubist Waters

Dahlia told me she was surprised at how easy it was to make good photographs after I gave her an informal tutorial over a few drinks while I was making Cubist Waters. She suggested I tell everyone how simple photography can be. I can’t think of anything else to say at the moment, so I will.

Get a high-resolution camera with a very large sensor then attach an astoundingly superior lens; make sure both have embedded vibration reduction technologies. Mount it on an extraordinarily sturdy tripod and activate the wireless shutter release. At this point, you might think you have vibration under control, but that’s a classic mistake.

You may have assembled the optimum photographic equipment, but in reality you’ve only buttered one side of the pancake when it comes to vibration, an excellent photograph’s natural enemy.

Think about the subject. Consider subatomic particle tsunamis, Van Allen wave distortion, infrared earthquakes with Fibonacci oscillations, and other subtleties a spectrograph would miss. Those were some of the basic vibration factors I carefully assessed when I made Cubist Waters.

I froze and removed the contents of the box of water and inserted a jar of honey into the empty carton. Honey has a higher specific gravity and a lower center of gravity than purified water; that’s why the resulting photograph is so astoundingly sharp that you could use it to slice an armadillo if you had sadistic feelings about placental mammals.

I have no technical secrets, so now you too can appreciate that great photography is figuratively and literally a snap.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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