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Weak XXI

21 May 2025

No. 3,385 (cartoon)

You have no humility.

I have nothing to be humble about.

You are as gifted and talented as you are humble.

22 May 2025

Tidewater Dreams

You might like to read Isabel Allende’s Tidewater Dreams, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism,” but you can’t. It doesn’t exist.

That was one of the many nonexistent books on the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list an “artificially intelligent” computer hallucinated. (“Hallucinating” is indeed a computing term for these sorts of cybershenanigans.) The rag published the feature without the added expense and bother of any editorial oversight. (I’m sure that embarrassment had nothing to do with the mass layoffs at the august daily. After all, if you can’t trust a computer who can you trust?)

I think this is an exciting new frontier for journalism. For too long we could only read reports from a relatively small number of reporters working for big newspapers and wire services like Reuters, Associated Press, et cetera. Way back then, a paranoid idiot pedaling conspiracies needed a mimeograph machine to print fliers for John Birch Society meetings. But now, everyone including technically proficient Kremlin propagandists, has a megaphone on the Internet.

And just when the chorus of conspiratorial voices was getting boring, we have conniving computers solemnly declaring their silicon fantasies to be part of the warp and weave of the imagined metaverse, not unlike the magical realism in Tidewater Dreams.

23 May 2025

Forty-Six-Day Chess Standoff

Experts say chess is a game of millimeters, but I think in milliliters. That explains why I ain’t no grandmaster, or even a mediocre master. I was reminded of my shortcomings as a chess player when I read that Magnus Carlsen’s recent forty-six-day game against a number of opponents ended in a draw.

When I say “a number” that’s not because I’m too lazy to copy a list of challengers, I don’t have enough digital ink today because there were over a hundred and forty thousand of ’em dba Team World.

The gang, many armed with computer programs, voted on what moves to make. (Each opponent moved a piece every other day.) Fighting by committee didn’t result in a bold, creative game, but the conservative defensive strategy kept the Norwegian at bay.

The game wasn’t great chess, but I liked it as an art piece. Just when I thought chess couldn’t get more boring than the seven-hour tournament game, along comes a game that lasts a month and a half. Whether you use millimeters or milliliters, I agree with Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno: “The tedium is the message.”

24 May 2025

A Library Without Books

I’ll begin by citing everything I know about Compton, California, which ain’t much. It’s a city (or maybe a suburb?) somewhere way south of San Francisco. I’ve heard, despite my attempts at audio avoidance, that it’s frequently mentioned in (c)rap music. That was it until I saw a headline yesterday: Compton has some of the poorest families in the region; it now has the newest, fanciest public high school.

The government spent almost a quarter billion dollars on the sprawling campus, and yet, for all that money, the library has no walls. I suppose that makes sense: librarians are quite accomplished at shushing patrons; I bet their powerful stinkeye even works on surly teenagers.

The library also has no books. As a would-be curmudgeon, I was exasperated: they spent hundreds of millions of dollars yet the library has no books?!

My indignation lasted almost five seconds until I remembered that I gave away all all of my recorded disks and discs as well as all but a handful of my books years ago.

Now that I think about it, I suppose a high school library without paper books makes sense in 2025. Dang; now I have to find something else about which to harumph with righteous moral outrage.

25 May 2025

Mortuusequusphilia in Chagrin Falls

I suppose I may embellish or perhaps even fabricate on occasion, but I swear on a stack of Satanic Bibles that there really is an American village called Chagrin Falls. It’s in Ohio on the Chagrin River where the water cascades over a steep precipice that’s also called Chagrin Falls.

Having established with a reasonable doubt that I can tell the truth, I’ll add that mortuusequusphobia is also a Real Thing. It’s the reason Joey says that he will never return to Chagrin Falls after leaving (or, in his words, escaping) when he was a teenager.

Mortuusequusphobia is one of those highfalutin’ egghead words that, translated into English, means “fear of ketchup.” Joey says he still has nightmares about Chagrin Falls being submerged in ketchup. Sugar comprises one-third of the ubiquitous condiment, which is added to almost every food in Chagrin Falls from applesauce to zucchini and back again. There’s not a single restaurant, diner, cafe, coffee house, or bar that doesn’t have a bottle of ketchup on every table, even the sushi joint.

To finish on a semantic note, mortuusequusphilia appears nowhere on the Internet. Perhaps there are no cunning linguists in Chagrin Falls? (And if there are, I bet they use lots of ketchup too.)

26 May 2025

The Harvard Boot

This is one of those rare days where everything isn’t happening, so I’m revisiting something I wrote on 24 June 2023.

Harvard University just gave Francesca Gino the old heave-ho. The professor who researched honesty and taught ethics classes was booted for “research misconduct” because she allegedly falsified research data. This is the first time in eighty years that Harvard canned a tenured instructor.

I doubt this would have happened had she followed the advice I gave her a couple years ago when I told her to advise her colleagues at the business school, “The most important thing is honesty. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

27 May 2025

Harry’s Camera Shop

Nicéphore Niépce discovered photography in 1826, and I discovered photography almost a century and a half later. I had a Nikkormat, a perfectly fine camera, but the one I coveted was the Nikon F Photomic FTn. (With the black paint, please.)

When I was a teenager, I used to go to Harry’s Camera Shop in Flint, Michigan, where I admired that perfect camera and sparkling lenses, and fantasized that someday I’d be using the best Nikon camera and lenses. Someday was half a century later.

Don’t ask me why, but I was cycling down Saginaw Street when I spotted the sheet of plywood where Harry’s used to be. (Harry retired in 1982 and made his final exposure decades ago.) I pulled out my six-grand camera and made a snapshot as a personal trophy: I finally did have the best Nikon, just as I knew I would in 1973.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart