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Weak XLVI

12 November 2025

No. 8,150 (cartoon)

I can’t lie to you.

You just did.

I misunderrated myself; I’m good!

13 November 2025

Rain Day!

I generally ride my bike and walk a few clicks every day. I don’t do it for pleasure, but it’s the least objectionable way I’ve found to delay the inevitable decrapitude until it drags me under. I’m still looking for a doctor who admonishes me not to move around so much and urges me to sit quietly at my computers all day and all night. Maybe s/he’ll even prescribe one of them fancy luxury office chairs with a built-in toilet.

Wouldn’t that be grand!

I got the next best thing today: a rain day. I’ll be inside my studio all day. I’d get soaked if I went past the recycling can on a walk in the driving rain. Paradoxically, I can’t drive in the driving rain since I don’t have any pontoons for my bike. And so, I am enjoying taking a rare day off from exercise and basking in the glow of my computer monitors. It’s not quite as good as a snow day, but I’ll take it.

14 November 2025

Artificial Intelligence Gives the People the AI Slop They Want

Waaay back in 1970, the Kinks released Top of the Pops, a satirical look at the music industry. I’m not sure if the group’s 1981 album Give the People What They Want was a followup release, but I just saw a headline that confirmed my cynical suspicion that things haven’t changed much since then: AI Slop Tops Charts as Synthetic Music Spreads. (AI Slop is a great name for a band; I wonder if it’s taken?)

Apparently, artificial intelligence programs are able to analyze jillions of songs, then use that information to generate popular music. The machines are very good at that. The human-based group Mudhoney released the album Digital Garbage in 2018, but never came close to topping any charts, even though it was well-received by critics.

I live in a world full o’ slop, and don’t object to AI slop in particular. What I don’t understand is why any musician’s highest priority is popularity, not making great music, and why s/he would complain that a computer is better at pandering to the hoi polloi.

I prefer John Cage’s approach to popularity: “Whenever I’ve found that what I’m doing has become pleasing, even to one person, I have redoubled my efforts to find the next step.”

15 November 2025

Weirdo at the Gallery Opening

Sid and I went to an opening at some art gallery in Oakland this afternoon. I admired some great sculpture by an artist whose card I lost. And I also saw something I haven’t seen in years: a guy reading a book in public.

There he was, sitting alone on a couch in a busy hallway with his nose in a book, conceptually speaking. He seemed oblivious to his surroundings and the parade of people walking past him. I wouldn’t have noticed him had he been staring at a glowing electronic gizmo; that’s what half the people I see in public are doing.

I felt like I’d come across a white Iberian lynx, so I pulled out my real camera and made a stealthy snapshot of the weirdo. Or was he a performance artist? Same thing.

16 November 2025

The Writer’s Revenge

Bill Bryson made an interesting admission in a recent interview.

“I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this, but ever since I was a little boy, I have genuinely pretended to be able to vaporize people that I don’t like—like with X-ray vision—and I still do that. And it’s not a worthy way of going through life. But if I hold the door open for somebody, and they go through and they don’t say ‘thank you,’ I look at them and I imagine them just sort of disintegrating.”

Oops, I forgot to mention that Bryson is an author, and a dang good one too. He’s published over twenty books, and I even read one of ’em. (That’s why I said he was a dang good writer.) I can understand why a boy would imagine zapping someone, but as a wordsmith he can do better than that: he can bring the rude person into a little story and get revenge.

After the discourteous cretin failed to express even a modicum of appreciation, I gave him a lesson in proper etiquette by ...

... thrusting my sword so far into his back that it cut off one of the buttons on the front of his shirt, ...

... or ...

... kicking him in the groin so hard that he collapsed to the floor screaming and writhing in pain, ...

... or ...

... splashing boiling hot coffee in his face and pouring the rest of the mug over his head, ...

... and said, “Just a little reminder that good manners are important. You’re welcome.”

Those are just a few clichés I recycled; a real writer like Bryson could easily come up with some much more clever and nastier.

17 November 2025

The Photographer’s Eye

I was about to share a curious clipping, but then I got distracted when I thought about the word “clipping.”

Back when news was distributed on paper, i.e., newspapers and magazines, workers at professional clipping services used scissors, which have been around for millennia, to cut out, or clip, articles to preserve. The “return” key on our computer is another word that’s survived from a previous era, when typewriters featured carriage returns. And then there’s ...

Oops, I got distracted.

And then there’s the clipping I mentioned from a photography site on the Internet.

The documentary Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere has revealed that the famous American photographer was having difficulty keeping his left eye open toward the end of his life because of how many photos he had taken.

?!

The late photographer said that the eye he used with the camera’s viewfinder was fine, but he had trouble keeping the other one open. I didn’t read far enough to find the medical explanation; I assume it just atrophied from lack of stimulation.

I wonder if Gary Winogrand had the same problem; he left behind hundreds of thousands of frames of undeveloped film when he died. When asked how he felt about missing photographs when he put a fresh roll of film in his Leica, he replied, “There are no pictures when I reload.”

18 November 2025

Music or Aide-mémoire?

I started to play a great album I first heard over fifty years ago, then asked myself a question that I had never considered before. Am I just listening to the music, or am I also firing up an aide-mémoire to trigger memories and travel back to another chapter of my life?

I’ve been thinking about that question for a long time, almost five minutes, and I don’t know what to think. And how would I know, anyway? I just work here.

19 November 2025

Four Metal Garage Shelving Units

I was looking for shelves on the Internet and was misdirected to metal garage shelving units. One of the four ads showed empty racks; I suppose that would appeal to someone looking for a blank canvas. The other three were well stocked with all the crap one would expect to see in a prosperous American’s garage. And all of the photographs featured something I’ve never seen in any garage anywhere: a beautiful young woman wearing an evening gown with high-heeled shoes.

What would a woman dressed like that be doing in a garage? Perhaps it’s the owner’s daughter on her way to the prom. It might be the guy’s wife trying to keep their marriage exciting. Perhaps she’s a gold digger with a fetish for auto parts.

Nah, of course not. Even in 2025, sex still sells as it always has since the first two humans made the third one.

I considered making this an Art piece instead of the illustration I used, but decided against it. All the messages in these images have already been said, and said better, by other artists. And anyway, I’m a chromophobe, and these would not work in black, grey, and white.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart