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Weak XXVII

2 July 2021

No. 8,347 (cartoon)

You told me you’d give me everything you had.

Just look at the sores and discharge and you’ll know I did.

3 July 2021

A More Idiotic, Harmful Idea

The Ukrainians are getting ready to celebrate thirty years of independence next month. With a big parade. With lots of soldiers. Wearing high-heeled shoes. Well, only the women.

“It is hard to imagine a more idiotic, harmful idea,” claimed Inna Sovsun, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament.

I’m sure the politician is an intelligent woman, but if female soldiers in high-heel shoes are the limit of her imagination then she’s not very creative or well-versed in contemporary fatuousness and ludicrousness. The sexist, misogynistic old men in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry might also have ordered the fifty-seven thousand women in the country’s armed forces under their command to wear camouflaged bikinis or see-through uniforms, carry pink weapons, and wear stilettos.

I was reticent to mention these examples of more idiotic ideas in case military leaders there implemented them, but then I remembered that my Internet site is blocked in Ukraine. That may in part explain why Sovsun isn’t more familiar with idiotic ideas; I gots some good ones.

4 July 2021

Lovesick

Alicia lamented that she’s lovesick. I know she’s telling me the truth, but I find it strange that someone can be lovesick when there’s no love involved. Or perhaps it’s the logical outcome of ending a love-hate relationship that never included the love part.

5 July 2021

Solar System Update

Six months ago I mentioned the perihelion, the day that the earth is closest to the sun. And so, in the interest of the objective and unbiased reporting for which I am renowned from here to Walla Walla and back, I am duly reporting, in a fifty-seven-word run-on sentence—my literary signature such as it is—that today is the aphelion, the day that ... you guessed it! ... the earth is farthest from the sun.

That concludes my two- or three-sentence update on news from our(?) favorite solar system.

. . .

Here’s a bonus semantic query to ponder: why is “run-on” hyphenated and “runoff” ain’t?

6 July 2021

Deceptive Photographic Film Titles

Julian persuaded me to watch a new movie, F9. What a scam! It had nothing to do with any lens aperture, including f9!

I should have known better than to fall into such an obvious trap; cinema moguls always use misleading photographic references in movie titles. For example, Two Seconds had nothing to do with one of my favorite shutter speeds. And then there was Phuket Gerbils XXX, which didn’t even make a passing reference to the legendary Tri-X film I used in one of my previous lifetimes.

Everyone’s talking about the new Hollywood release, Dear Dorff, but I’m not going to take the bait. Just like the other frauds, there probably won’t be a mention—let alone a cameo appearance—of one of the legendary Deardorff view cameras.

7 July 2021

Miss Mexican Covid 2021

You’ve seen the photograph before, even if you haven’t seen this one. The contestants for Miss Mexico 2021 are posing on stage in their tiny bathing suits even though they have no intentions of bathing anytime soon. The lithe, young, beautiful women are proudly showing their ability to be, well, young, lithe, and beautiful. But that’s not their only skill; they’re also good actresses. Half of them are suffering from Covidity but no one can tell which ones; they’re all wearing exactly the same vacuous smile.

The organizers weren’t concerned, and didn’t let an invisible virus get in the way of all of those pesos. They sent some of the competitors to visit impoverished schoolchildren, bringing their bright styrofoam smiles, a gaggle of photographers, and a deadly virus. They all managed to stifle coughs, overcome aching bodies and high temperatures during the broadcast, and thus demonstrate that they could put on a convincing act while simultaneously posing in bikinis. Now that’s talent!

If Miss Mexican Covid 2021 has a good agent, she’ll have a lucrative contract endorsing respirators in no time!

8 July 2021

Ephemeral Weld

I generally dislike artists who choose to market themselves by using only one name. Their work is usually mediocre at best, and using a single name is way beyond pretentious; it’s obviously tentious. Show me an artist who calls himself Studd and I’ll show you a guy whose real name is Percy Winthrop Wigglesworth III.

And then there’s Grid. If he has a surname, he didn’t volunteer it and I didn’t ask. He does excellent creative work, which may or may not be related to the fact that he doesn’t consider himself to be an artist, even though he clearly is. I take credit for my photograph, Ephemeral Weld, but the work in the image is entirely his.

The welded patch on a barge in dry dock won’t look like that for long. Soon, it will be submerged again and covered in marine life until the next time it’s hauled out of the water to be repaired or scrapped.

I’d describe him as the perfect conceptual artist I imaged a few months ago except for this: Grid’s ephemeral pieces are the opposite of conceptual; they’re on the other end of the aesthetic rainbow, the retinal.

I’m glad I saw and documented the work when I did; I can’t remember where my dive mask is, and I sold my underwater camera years ago.

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart