Sunday, June 30th, 2013
Thursday, June 27th, 2013
2 cartoons by David Shrigley from the October 2012 issue of ARTnews (because I’m in my null zone again):
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Sunday, July 14th, 2013
I have not done much cartooning during the past twenty years, and I was never too ept at it, hence the cartoonic poorness of the following:
The text is from my first cryptographic poem. It was about a boy writing a coded message.
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Sunday, June 30th, 2013
Saturday, June 29th, 2013
I’m trying to get an essay done, so want this entry out of the way as fast as possible. Ergo, I’m just posting the following link. I probably shouldn’t, because I’m sure it will make this entry my most popular one ever, but . . . I’m no big fan of the New Yorker, either. Nonetheless, here’s the link: the New Yorker. If you have any kind of sense of humor, you’ll be glad you did.
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Thursday, June 27th, 2013
2 cartoons by David Shrigley from the October 2012 issue of ARTnews (because I’m in my null zone again):
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Wednesday, May 29th, 2013
Oops, I suddenly seem to be succumbing to the politicodementia I suffer fiercely from from time to time but do my best to conceal, so please excuse the long, large ellipsis I’ll need to recover
(The above was deleted from the entry to my Scientific American blog I just finished. I was afraid the ellipsis would be too difficult to reproduce the way I wanted it–and proved to be here. It was supposed to be right next to “recover”–with this to its immediate right: 1 Consequently, I had to delete the following footnotes, as well.)2
1 Thanks to Marton Koppany, my ellipsis-trainer, for the success of the above: it gave me all the time I needed to recover.2
2 I just remembered that footnotes also indicate exponents. Result: I’m suddenly taken with the question of what “)” cubed would equal. Would it take one to the apeiron?3
3 See Irving’s “Where?”4
4 Warning: I’m now seriously considering an entry consisting of nothing but footnotes. They are too much fun! (Blame Knit Witted, whose Very Funny footnotes are an important influence on me.)5
5 This footnote was not among them. I’m adding it to explain that my lapse into politicodementia had to do with a joke about “gerontophobia: that’s still in the entry, although as dumb as the jokes above–which I nonetheless think funny enough to put here.
As for the apeiron, you can read about that in my Scientific American blog.
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Friday, April 26th, 2013
Friday, July 15th, 2011
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Noteless Asemic Opera
Verbal Asemic Poem for Geof Huth
Standard Asemic Poem
Clearly, if a poem can be asemic, an asemic poem can be verbal. The point remains: to create forward-going art requires only that you seriously misname what you are doing. And that’s it for this lesson in automotive mechanics, folks. Come back tomorrow for something more entertaining by Ed Baker.
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
I’m surprised Geof hasn’t posted this at his blog already, but since he hasn’t, I’ll post it here:
It’s a desecration, hence hilarious. It’s also interesting evidence of the apparent popularity of Basho, although I doubt too many who see this strip will understand it. Although they may still find it amusing.
Meanwhile, I was not feeling too good earlier–tired from running an errand, trying only partly successfully to mow my lawn–because of a malfunctioning mower–and doing my exercises, as well as my usual lack-of-sleep and blahness. Then I noticed an ad I’ve seen before for a poetry contest with a first prize of $5000 in the latest issue of Poetry, which I have a review copy of. I had been disgusted with a poem by David Ferry, winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry prize given by the foundation running Poetry, and featured in this issue of the magazine. Result, I suddenly had a yen to enter the poetry contest–with a poem that could be paraphrased as “mathematics divided into poetry equals genius with a remainder of angrily befuddled Philistines accidentally exposed.”
That only made me briefly happy. What boosted me into a much more durable happiness was my then knocking out good drafts of four new long division poems, three of which I doubt I’ll change but which will need visimages, which will probably be abstract-expressionist. The fourth one won’t need much more, I don’t think. One of the others still voices my hostility toward the morons who will probably be judging this contest with a comparison of superior poetry to “locations miles away from anywhere any certified American Poet has ever visited.”
Rattle, the magazine running the contest, is asking for up to four poems, so it makes sense to enter the maximum. I will probably replace the hostile one with another new one (only new work is allowed), then publish all five when I lose the contest to poets at Ferry’s level (15 of them, each getting $100; one will later get the big prize). One nice thing about the contest is that the finalists will be announced no later than 15 September. I have to get my entries in by 1 August, though.
I have no chance of the big prize but my poems will be quite verbal, so I may, by a fluke, make it into the finals, which would generate some publicity for me.
Saturday, April 16th, 2011
Over at Otherstream Unlimited people are posting opinions and other stuff in short texts they are calling “haiku” simply because they consist of three lines, a seven-syllable one in the middle of two five-syllable ones. There’s a lot more to haiku than that. So I posted the following to the group:
. haiku seem stupid
. only to those dumb enough
. to think this is one
Suchoon Mo then commented:
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. ha ha ha ha ha
. ha ha ho ho ha ha ha
. ho ho ha ha ha!
I may get something of consequence done today, but not here.
Wednesday, December 11th, 2013
To give me another easy day at my blogsite, and take care of Christmas, here’s a cartoon by B. Kliban that nicely represents a lot of what Christmas, or–more accurately–the dead of winter, means to me(i.e., awe, a sense of security, a certain somewhat silly normalcy . . . all due to the Jehovacule I’ve been writing about!):
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Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
It’s interesting that the best cartoonists generally become very popular almost at once, as Randall Munroe seems to have. Is it because one can’t make cartoons that are as advanced for cartoons as my poems, say, are advanced as poems? Not that there aren’t sophisticated cartoonists–but however sophisticated they are (and Munroe is one, it seems to me) they find their audiences comparatively quickly. I do consider the best cartoonists the artistic equal of the best poets. Maybe it’s because a cartoon can’t work if it’s as complex as those superior complex poems that gain an audience of more than a dozen or so. A cartoon has to work in one step, it seems to me; a superior poem can, too, but may need two or many more steps.
Anyway, I visited Munroe’s website to get its URL so I could refer people encountering his cartoon in my previous entry could visit it and found this, which I liked more than enough to post it here:
You can see it and many others of Munroe’s almost-always very funny cartoons here.
This cartoon, by the way, seems to me excellently to illustrate the way scientists always prefer to make things right for machines than for people. I think of the use of “centimeter” in stead of inch by scientists, and their utter expulsion of the best of lengths, the foot, and the fourth best, the mile. The second-best is the inch; the third-best, the yard. Strict logic and speed of use versus organic sensibility–rightness for the symbol center of the brain versus rightness for the rest of the brain–and body. Regarding date, the physically sensible date has to be day, month, year–the part of the month we’re in, then the part of the year, then the year. The smallest area, then the larger area that’s in, then the largest area it’s in. But computer access will be faster going the other way, so it wins. where science rules. But never in my world. (Just as, in my world, the 21st century began on 1 January 2000, not on 1 January 2001–because the twenties, for instance, begin with 20, not 21, even though most people don’t start counting from zero.)
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Friday, March 1st, 2013
Well, well, my blog has been updated. Which means that uploading images into it is twice as hard as it used to be. Somehow, I seem to have gotten the cartoon by Randall Munroe below loaded. It’s from Strange Attractors, anthology of math-related poems JoAnne Growney and Sarah Glaz edited, and that I’m trying to use poems from in my Scientific American blog:
Yikes, no image, then one, then none, then three! No just one, I hope. I’ve been trying to get an e.mail to Randall without success. But his work is “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.” Which means I’m free to use in non-commercially, as here (properly attributed). I might add that I consider all my work similarly free for non-commercial use so long as it’s attributed to me. Note: Randall would also like people stealing his work as I have here to let their readers know that it was taken from his website at http://xkcd.com–which the updated version of my blog won’t let me provide a link to for some reason.
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Sunday, July 14th, 2013
I have not done much cartooning during the past twenty years, and I was never too ept at it, hence the cartoonic poorness of the following:
The text is from my first cryptographic poem. It was about a boy writing a coded message.
.
Sunday, June 30th, 2013
Saturday, June 29th, 2013
I’m trying to get an essay done, so want this entry out of the way as fast as possible. Ergo, I’m just posting the following link. I probably shouldn’t, because I’m sure it will make this entry my most popular one ever, but . . . I’m no big fan of the New Yorker, either. Nonetheless, here’s the link: the New Yorker. If you have any kind of sense of humor, you’ll be glad you did.
.
Thursday, June 27th, 2013
2 cartoons by David Shrigley from the October 2012 issue of ARTnews (because I’m in my null zone again):
.
Wednesday, December 11th, 2013
To give me another easy day at my blogsite, and take care of Christmas, here’s a cartoon by B. Kliban that nicely represents a lot of what Christmas, or–more accurately–the dead of winter, means to me(i.e., awe, a sense of security, a certain somewhat silly normalcy . . . all due to the Jehovacule I’ve been writing about!):
.
Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
It’s interesting that the best cartoonists generally become very popular almost at once, as Randall Munroe seems to have. Is it because one can’t make cartoons that are as advanced for cartoons as my poems, say, are advanced as poems? Not that there aren’t sophisticated cartoonists–but however sophisticated they are (and Munroe is one, it seems to me) they find their audiences comparatively quickly. I do consider the best cartoonists the artistic equal of the best poets. Maybe it’s because a cartoon can’t work if it’s as complex as those superior complex poems that gain an audience of more than a dozen or so. A cartoon has to work in one step, it seems to me; a superior poem can, too, but may need two or many more steps.
Anyway, I visited Munroe’s website to get its URL so I could refer people encountering his cartoon in my previous entry could visit it and found this, which I liked more than enough to post it here:
You can see it and many others of Munroe’s almost-always very funny cartoons here.
This cartoon, by the way, seems to me excellently to illustrate the way scientists always prefer to make things right for machines than for people. I think of the use of “centimeter” in stead of inch by scientists, and their utter expulsion of the best of lengths, the foot, and the fourth best, the mile. The second-best is the inch; the third-best, the yard. Strict logic and speed of use versus organic sensibility–rightness for the symbol center of the brain versus rightness for the rest of the brain–and body. Regarding date, the physically sensible date has to be day, month, year–the part of the month we’re in, then the part of the year, then the year. The smallest area, then the larger area that’s in, then the largest area it’s in. But computer access will be faster going the other way, so it wins. where science rules. But never in my world. (Just as, in my world, the 21st century began on 1 January 2000, not on 1 January 2001–because the twenties, for instance, begin with 20, not 21, even though most people don’t start counting from zero.)
.
Friday, March 1st, 2013
Well, well, my blog has been updated. Which means that uploading images into it is twice as hard as it used to be. Somehow, I seem to have gotten the cartoon by Randall Munroe below loaded. It’s from Strange Attractors, anthology of math-related poems JoAnne Growney and Sarah Glaz edited, and that I’m trying to use poems from in my Scientific American blog:
Yikes, no image, then one, then none, then three! No just one, I hope. I’ve been trying to get an e.mail to Randall without success. But his work is “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.” Which means I’m free to use in non-commercially, as here (properly attributed). I might add that I consider all my work similarly free for non-commercial use so long as it’s attributed to me. Note: Randall would also like people stealing his work as I have here to let their readers know that it was taken from his website at http://xkcd.com–which the updated version of my blog won’t let me provide a link to for some reason.
.
It’s interesting that the best cartoonists generally become very popular almost at once, as Randall Munroe seems to have. Is it because one can’t make cartoons that are as advanced for cartoons as my poems, say, are advanced as poems? Not that there aren’t sophisticated cartoonists–but however sophisticated they are (and Munroe is one, it seems to me) they find their audiences comparatively quickly. I do consider the best cartoonists the artistic equal of the best poets. Maybe it’s because a cartoon can’t work if it’s as complex as those superior complex poems that gain an audience of more than a dozen or so. A cartoon has to work in one step, it seems to me; a superior poem can, too, but may need two or many more steps.
Anyway, I visited Munroe’s website to get its URL so I could refer people encountering his cartoon in my previous entry could visit it and found this, which I liked more than enough to post it here:
You can see it and many others of Munroe’s almost-always very funny cartoons here.
This cartoon, by the way, seems to me excellently to illustrate the way scientists always prefer to make things right for machines than for people. I think of the use of “centimeter” in stead of inch by scientists, and their utter expulsion of the best of lengths, the foot, and the fourth best, the mile. The second-best is the inch; the third-best, the yard. Strict logic and speed of use versus organic sensibility–rightness for the symbol center of the brain versus rightness for the rest of the brain–and body. Regarding date, the physically sensible date has to be day, month, year–the part of the month we’re in, then the part of the year, then the year. The smallest area, then the larger area that’s in, then the largest area it’s in. But computer access will be faster going the other way, so it wins. where science rules. But never in my world. (Just as, in my world, the 21st century began on 1 January 2000, not on 1 January 2001–because the twenties, for instance, begin with 20, not 21, even though most people don’t start counting from zero.)
.
Well, well, my blog has been updated. Which means that uploading images into it is twice as hard as it used to be. Somehow, I seem to have gotten the cartoon by Randall Munroe below loaded. It’s from Strange Attractors, anthology of math-related poems JoAnne Growney and Sarah Glaz edited, and that I’m trying to use poems from in my Scientific American blog:
Yikes, no image, then one, then none, then three! No just one, I hope. I’ve been trying to get an e.mail to Randall without success. But his work is “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.” Which means I’m free to use in non-commercially, as here (properly attributed). I might add that I consider all my work similarly free for non-commercial use so long as it’s attributed to me. Note: Randall would also like people stealing his work as I have here to let their readers know that it was taken from his website at http://xkcd.com–which the updated version of my blog won’t let me provide a link to for some reason.
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