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Weak IX

26 February 2025

No. 2,303 (cartoon)

You’re destroying yourself.

Sit back and enjoy the show!

27 February 2025

The Museum(s) of Failure

“Failure is nothing to get upset about. It’s a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings.”

Frank Zappa wrote that, including the questionable punctuation, before he left us in 1993. He’s never penned anything quoteworthy since he died.

It’s too bad that he’s not around to visit Sans Frisco these days. Madame Tussauds Wax Attraction at Fisherman’s Wharf has closed—huzzah!—and will be replaced by the Museum of Failure.

Maybe.

There’s a legal fight over who owns the name, “Museum of Failure.” I think that’s perfect! The winner gets to own the museum and the loser will be an exhibit there. Museums don’t get any better than that!

28 February 2025

Maggots

Wanda and Joel were looking at my latest piece involving fivescore peanuts. They said they appreciated seeing the work on my high-resolution monitor, since “the shells looked like maggots” when the image was shrunk to fit on the Internet.

And that got me to thinkin’, oh yes it did. I was reminded of the famous Paris café, The Two Maggots, the place litterary and arty types used to frequent in the largely hallucinated halcyon days of yore.

And that got me to thinkin’ some more, for sure. If two maggots is good then a hundred maggots gotta be fifty times more better, right? That’s right; it’s just gotta be right.

And that got me to lookin’ on the Internet, and that’s where I found the Café littéraire à Paris, Les Deux Magots. And that’s where I found profound disappointment. “Magots” aren’t “maggots”; a magot is, “a stocky figurine from the Far East.”

Feh!

So it goes. My maggot dreams may crushed, but my peanuts aren’t, at least not until Monday, when I’ll be done photographing them.

1 March 2025

Leica’s Centennial

The Leica camera is a century old today, or ninety-four billion six hundred eight million thirtieths of a second, one of my favorite Leica shutter speeds. I wouldn’t go so far as describing Leicas as a century of tradition unhampered by progress, but others have. I’ve been using mine for over fifty years, but now when it’s time to make a serious photograph I reach for serious cameras and lenses.

(Leica also sells twenty-some thousand-dollar watches to go with the twenty-some thousand-dollar Leica necklaces, er, cameras, so it could be argued that Leica is a jewelry company.)

Zeiss is also playing the classics game by introducing “new” lenses for the first time in years. They feature “true craftsmanship and story-focused photography, and vivid, nearly three-dimensional image quality ... capturing the depth and detail that bring characters to life.”

Unfortunately, it looks like the managers spent more money on inane advertising copy than optics. The lenses are more expensive and inferior to the contemporary competition; they only focus manually and suffer from spherochromatism which can’t be corrected in the computer. Or so I’ve heard; I use better lenses so I wouldn’t know. (To be fair, I use Zeiss Lens Wipes. Each one costs three cents, but they’re worth it, especially for the lucrative product placement fees.)

Perhaps I shouldn’t kvetch about Leica and Zeiss. At least those companies are still around, unlike Rolleiflex dba DHW Fototechnik which went out of business a decade ago.

2 March 2025

Scrambled Egg Reasoning

Grocers have quadrupled the price of eggs, and no one is certain why. The poultry magnates who operate the chicken factories claim that it’s because of the avian flu that’s going around, supply and demand and all that. Other people insist that it’s all a sinister plot by the secretive egg cartels, or maybe even a secretive plot by the sinister egg cartels.

Everyone I know is complaining about how much the boneless chickens in their shells cost. Everyone but Stephano, that is. He figures that since the egg that used to cost a quarter now costs a dollar, then it must be four times as good.

His reasoning is so flawed that I’m reticent to call it reasoning, but since reality is what you make it and he’s happy, I’m not going to waste my time critiquing his consumerism. In practice, that means I’ll have to waste my time doing something else, so it’s time to go back to making my own scrambled reality, er, art.

3 March 2025

Licking Off Success

“The art of popular success lies simply in never putting more on any one page than the most ordinary reader can lick off it in his normally rapid, half-attentive skim-over.”

That’s Ezra Pound’s recipe for becoming a marketable writer. Had he continued on with a second sentence, he might have added something about not being a racist anti-Semite. Or he might not have. Beats me; Pound was never popular with me.

4 March 2025

Fivescore James Earl Carter Junior Memorial Peanuts

I should rename my “Works in Progress” folder to something more accurate, such as “Stillborn Ideas” or “Works in Suspended Animation,” since some of them have been in there for decades. Conversely, I clearly recall—although my “trustworthy memory” often ain’t—recently coming up with the idea for Fivescore James Earl Carter Junior Memorial Peanuts on 28 December.

I was drinking beer and eating peanuts when I remembered that Jimmy’s hundredth birthday was months ago and that he was years late for his appointment with Charon to take him across the River Styx. And so, I didn’t feel the least bit telepathic when he died the following day.

I decided to make a simple piece of a hundred peanuts arranged in a ten-by-ten grid. Of course, me being I, I had to do it in the most convoluted way that I could imagine. I photographed each peanut individually, then reduced them to exactly forty-five-hundred pixels wide, and then assembled them in a huge file that weighed in at over six gigabytes.

That’s just ridiculous.

If I printed it at full resolution, I’d need a roll of paper over five meters long. Even ridiculouser, I can’t print it as is, since I cut some corners on quality. I’d have to start all over with a hundred raw images to get the desired images. And ridiculousest, the image I posted on the internet with tiny, pixelated peanuts is probably the only one anyone who’s not a studio visitor will ever see.

I’m not complaining, though; I knew the job was stupid when I took it.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart