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Weak XXXIV

20 August 2026

No. 4,597 (cartoon)

Our love is dead.

I get aroused by the stench of decomposition.

A rose by any other name would smell as repulsive.

21 August 2026

The Glow-in-the-dark Rabbits Are Coming!

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

California’s bid to outlaw ‘glow-in-the-dark rabbits’ and ‘unicorn horses’ fails

I think this is an atypically wise decision by the legislators in Sacramento. After all, when glow-in-the-dark rabbits and unicorn horses are outlawed, only outlaws will have glow-in-the-dark rabbits and unicorn horses.

22 August 2026

More Nepo Droppings

I’m about to write about someone I’d never heard of before yesterday, Stella Lefty née Stella Lefkofsky, a twenty-four-year-old “American country-pop and indie-folk singer-songwriter.”

The Guardian didn’t give her first album a bad review; the critic excoriated it: Stella Lefty: Long Way Home review—Boston singer’s debut is bland, boilerplate and beyond banal.

(Interesting concept: what is beyond banal?)

So how did an apparently untalented young woman plumbing the depths of mediocrity get noticed by a serious rag? Might there be some correlation between her “success” and her father’s five billion dollars? Ain’t that another nutty coincidence!

I’m glad I’m not a nepo baby with a zillion dollars in my pocket and a target on my back; I’m pleased and relieved that my early work disappeared into obscurity where it belongs.

23 August 2026

Mothers Know Best

The tabloid press is having a feeding frenzy over a grisly murder trial. One of the periodicals covering the lengthy court case came up with this angle: Lindsay Clancy killed her children. Why do many women support her?

I’m going to go out on a sturdy oak limb and hazard a guess: might it be because they have kids?

24 August 2026

Americans Love Toilet Paper

I usually ignore improbable statistics, but I ran across one this morning that I can’t unremember: Americans comprise four percent of the planet’s population, but we account for over twenty percent of the world’s toilet paper consumption. Was the toilet paper measured by surface area? Weight? Number of rolls? And how is the other seventy-some percent distributed among the other ninety-six percent of us? Is there a country without toilet paper?

I may look into them the next time I get bored playing Scrabble while in my studio’s room of rest enjoying my good fortune.

25 August 2026

Home Sweet Home, Flint, Michigan

Why is it that I always end up photographing dog shit whenever I’m in Flint, Michigan? Why did I even ask the question when I’m not interested in an answer, even if there is one? Home Sweet Home, Flint, Michigan may be a clue.

26 August 2026

An Aspen Clapping

When an aspen tree over twenty-five kilometers from the nearest human fell in the middle of the night in wilderness south of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, it made the sound of one hand clapping. I know this to be true because I just said so.

27 August 2026

Remembering Bill Crispien

Unless you have an interest in colorful, obscure characters like the legendary photographic repairperson Bill Crispien, this might be a good time to leave and feed your short attention span elsewhere.

A month ago I wrote about never having anything repaired; how could I have forgotten that he patched the shutter curtain on my Leica way back in the seventies, when shutters still had curtains?

I could only find one reference to him on the Internet, and it was almost impossible to access. It wasn’t copyrighted, so I’m reproducing it here in case someone else wants to know about a lovely guy who could repair almost anything.

# # #

Bill Crispien: A Portland photographer and camera repairman had no peer

Published: April 05, 2009

By Joan Harvey

There was no other camera repairman like Bill Crispien.

For more than four decades, he took care of the fine cameras of the best Oregon photographers. He was the master and could be trusted with the most expensive and intricate Hasselblads and Leicas.

Bill worked on almost anything, including large-format and view cameras. He cleaned, lubed, and adjusted. If a part wasn’t available, he either found something in the thousands of cameras he had on hand or made the part on his workshop lathe. The painstaking work required total focus and expertise. He could tell by holding a camera to his ear whether the shutter was working.

His workshop and eccentricities were almost as well-known as his craft. His shop, Custom Camera Craft, was on Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) in a ramshackle building with a small sign he took down every night. On the other side of the door was a mess. Books, tools, equipment and untold stuff—such as a medieval-looking permanent-wave machine and a stuffed coyote whose mouth held a sign reading, “Thank you, we appreciate your business”—littered floors, chairs, shelves, counters and makeshift second levels.

But most of all, there were photographs and cameras. The shop was wallpapered with photographs Bill took on treks into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Death Valley, Yosemite, the Arctic and his beloved Columbia River Gorge, attesting to his talent behind the camera as well as within it.

Bins upon bins held cameras he gathered, as he called it, from everywhere. When he moved his shop across the street, it took 52 large truckloads to shuttle everything. And he was still gathering for 10 more years.

Always, classical music wafted from his radio.

His office manager, Helen Vranizan, worked for him for more than 40 years and kept him in line. They had some memorable blowups. Bill, quiet and mild-mannered, didn’t like confrontations, but there were times Helen could take only so much, and she let him know it. She was devoted to him.

Gathering wasn’t limited to his shop. After he retired in 2003, his daughter hired a contractor to help clean up his property near Stevenson, Wash. They counted seven oceangoing containers full of stuff, plus 112 cars and untold other vehicles, including trucks and 12 bulldozers. He collected old tires, 78 and 33 rpm records and any contraption that looked interesting.

There was the anvil Bill and his cousin Paul Strait found in a burned-out gold mine in 1933. Bill strapped the 129-pound monster to his back and carried it out four or five miles.

He was notoriously scruffy. One customer remembers chatting with him as he took apart a camera, laying each piece on his workbench. He suddenly became agitated because a tiny, essential spring was missing. Stroking his long beard, trying to think what he could have done with it, he felt the part; it had sprung into his beard.

His beard was long for decades but became shorter by degrees before he shaved it all off. The reasons are obscure, but he said during a shorter period, “I couldn’t eat honey.”

With his beard, black-framed glasses and 40-year-old, $7.50 Sears hat, Bill was likened by other photographers to Ansel Adams. But Bill didn’t think much of the famous landscape photographer. “I saw him once in Yosemite. I wasn’t overwhelmed,” he said in a 1995 story in The Oregonian. “He’s a good photographer. It takes a certain type of person to overwhelm me.”

Bill closed the shop in 2003 and moved to his daughter’s home in Crooked River Ranch in 2008. He died March 20.

He was born in Rose Lodge, northeast of Lincoln City, in 1917, and his family moved to their Washington farm — between Cape Horn and Stevenson — in 1919.

He bought his first camera from Sears with money he earned stripping and selling chittum (cascara) bark and moss. He graduated from Washougal High School and worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps felling snags left from the devastating 1902 Yacolt Burn.

During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces as an aerial photographer in North Africa, Italy and France. He filmed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1944. When he wasn’t shooting for the Army, he took thousands of photographs for himself. His brother Arthur was killed in the Bataan Death March, and his brother Otto died after he was swept overboard while serving in the Navy.

After 33 months, Bill was returning home and literally bumped into Jane Cover in North Dakota on a train traveling west. She was headed to Hawaii to make parachutes. They were married in 1947, and their daughter, Maryann, was born in 1956.

Bill went to work for Interstate Camera Service on Sandy Boulevard, commuting from the farm. The family moved to Portland in 1960. As his reputation spread, Bill started his own business in the basement of his Piedmont neighborhood home. He had a shop on Division Street briefly before moving to Union Avenue.

He was happiest exploring and photographing the hills, deserts and forests of the West. Sometimes when he knew the flowers were in bloom on Mount Adams or in Bird Creek Meadows, he would walk away from his workbench and leave Helen to handle the photographers waiting for their cameras. But they’d wait because they knew that when he got around to it, it would be done right.

# # # redux

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart