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Weak XIX

7 May 2025

No. 7,139 (cartoon)

You’re looking at me with thinly veiled contempt.

I’m sorry you got the wrong impression ...

... it’s simmering, furious rage.

8 May 2025

Perhaps My Favorite Painting

I visited Julia yesterday while she was cleaning out her late mother’s apartment and spotted an old painting. The artwork was forgettable, but I liked the reflection. I took a photograph with my high-resolution camera, and was almost astonished when I enlarged it on my monitor and saw thousands of minute cracks, crevasses, and fissures in the paint and yellowed varnish.

I’m considering returning with a long macro lens and a tripod, but first I have to consider whether the resulting images would be pretty good photographs or just more examples of how almost anything is visually interesting when examined in minute detail. (That’s why I’ve never used an electron microscope: it’s too easy.) Julia won’t be back from Europe until next month, so I’ll have plenty of time to think about it, and quite possibly forget it.

9 May 2025

Bick Spiderbeck

A couple of months ago, I mentioned Leon Bismark Beiderbecke as one of the artistes who missed joining The Twenty-Seven Club by less than a year. I didn’t give much thought to the unfamiliar name on the roster of dead luminaries I plagiarized until I realized he was a famous hombre whose name I recognized: Bick Spiderbeck.

Yep, ol’ Leon was known as Bix Beiderbecke. I’d never seen his name in print; that’s how I came up with my phonetic spelling, Bick Spiderbeck. I’m disappointed; I like my version better than his. On a positive note, now anyone can use Bick Spiderbeck as a nom-de-aplomb.

10 May 2025

Kolkata?!

Kosmos-482 never quite made it to Venus. The Soviet spacecraft, launched over half a century ago, crashed into the Indian Ocean today south of Kolkata.

Hold it, Kolkata?!

The illustration in today’s news report was the first I’d heard of Kolkata. I’ve mentioned Calcutta here five times in the last thirty years (2000, 2003, 2010, 2022, and 2024), and had no inkling that Calcutta has been Kolkata since 2001.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Mumbai has been Mumbai so long that I had to visit the Internet to remember that it used to be called Bombay before 1996. While doing my seventeen seconds of research, I also learned that Madras became Chennai that same year.

The news gives me hope that someone will rename the local city named after Saint Francis of Assisi to something secular and mo’ better: Sans Frisco.

11 May 2025

Solar Noons

When I check the Internet weather report, all I want to know is how hot and/or cold it is, and whether it will be dry enough to get from here to there on my bike. That leaves meteorologists with a lot of real estate to fill on a computer display, so there’s also the barometric pressure (whatever that is), tide charts, and more, including something I’d never heard of before: solar noon.

Solar noon is the halfway point between sunrise and sunset, a simple concept even I can grasp. I wondered if it was the same time regardless of the earth’s orbit, and here’s what I discovered for my neighborhood:

13:16 Spring equinox
13:10 Summer solstice
13:01 Autumn equinox
12:07 Winter solstice

I shouldn’t have looked at that; now my brain hurts. Scientists have the solar system orbits well documented, and have measured how long it takes our planet to make a revolution to a jillionth of a second, so how can this be?

A few hours later: I’m guessing it probably has something to do with longitude or latitude, but I’m going to file this in my bulging Don’t Know Don’t Care folder, pop a beer, and enjoy a taco or two. That’s timeless.

12 May 2025

End o’ Days Update

Here’s the latest End o’ Days headline: Scientists reveal exact date universe will end: “Sooner than we feared.” The accompanying article was of course utter bollocks.

Dutch scientists at Radboud University have concluded that the last neutron star in the universe will dissipate in a quinvigintillion years. First, even the most inebriated editor—which is most of ’em—should have noticed that an exact date requires a month and a day. Also, almost no one fears anything that’s going to happen after the end of the week; that’s just too hard to imagine.

As for me, I’m going to continue to buy green bananas without worrying that the universe might end before they’re ripe.

13 May 2025

My New Computer’s Travels

I ordered my first new computer in decades a couple days ago, and today I got a note from the friendly monopolists at Apple informing me that they’d built the new machine to my custom specs (in China, of course), and that it would be delivered here on Monday.

Crazy, daddio!

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of my recently minted computer going from Zhengzhou, China to Incheon, Korea to Anchorage to Louisville and then to Portland before being delivered. I’m looking forward to opening the box and getting a good whiff of that exotic zhongguó gongchang de kongqì aroma.

The world of grownups is a scary and amazing place; I’m so glad I retired to my comfortable little bubble decades ago.

14 May 2025

Pepper (after Edward Weston)

If you have any background in a kitchen, the first thing you might think of when you see a green bell pepper is stuffing and baking it. When I saw a pepper by the side of the street on my walk last night, I thought of Edward Weston and one of his most acclaimed photographs, Pepper No. 30.

The pepper was too rotten to stuff and eat, and since no one has made a better sensuous photograph of one since 1930, it never occurred to even try; I even knew that in my teens. (As Salvador Dali noted, “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”)

I couldn’t let the decaying pepper go to waste, so I put it in a shallow pothole on a busy street and returned to my studio for a restorative cocktail. When I retraced my steps in the morning, I discovered that the passing cars had flattened the pepper. Not infrathin, but not too shabby, either.

Thanks to chance, all I had to do was to grab my tripod and serious camera and push the business button to make Pepper (after Edward Weston).

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart