More ART @ CHC: From the Waist Down
Posted on February 9, 2024 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

On the eve of Super Bowl Sunday, I have added another mini-gallery of 12 photos to my ART @ CHC site, titled From the Waist Down (click to visit).  Here is a photo (Raleigh, NC) that did not merit inclusion in the gallery, as it didn’t have enough kick:

While working on this collection, I also made a few updates to the Steps, Windows and Odds & Ends galleries, so please have another look at those if so inspired.

In the meantime, Happy Super Bowl Sunday to my sports-loving friends. To the rest of my friends, Happy Hubble Day.  It was February 11, 1924, one century ago, that Edwin Hubble measured the spectra of distant stars and established the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, thereby seeding sci-fi concepts such as The Foundation, Star Trek, the Laws of Robotics and the Prime Directive.

Thank you, Edwin Hubble.  You know you have reached greatness when both a physical constant and a space telescope have been named after you.  Not even Beyoncé has achieved that distinction.

But wasn’t this post about feet, not feats?

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More ART @ CHC: Signs on the Wall
Posted on February 4, 2024 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

I recently bought myself an early birthday present — AI-based photo-tagging software. Excire Foto lets you type in a certain word, phrase or image characteristic, and the software returns an array of matching images from the ones stored on your computer. Which in my case number in the tens-of-thousands.

I used Excire to help me complete the latest mini-gallery, Signs on the Wall, at my ART @ CHC site.  Below is a teaser image not included in the gallery, because it didn’t meet my exacting standards of slightly-better-than-mediocrity!

Now that the finding-the-right-photos process has become 10x easier, I hope to add more collections soon, maybe as soon as a few days from now.  Thanks for viewing.

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Cartooning 201 vs The New Yorker
Posted on January 26, 2024 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

A couple of years ago, I published this rant about the illogic of various cartoons published in the esteemed New Yorker magazine.  I now have occasion to add insult to injury, thanks to the recent New Yorker cartoon below:

If you haven’t figured it out already, allow me to ask, in what direction does the mat on a treadmill travel?  Once you answer that, you may make one of two inferences:

(A) The cartoonist (in haste) did not consider the direction that treadmills travel before incorporating the treadmill’s motion into the premise of the joke.  If so, we may justifiably disrespect the cartoon and cartoonist, never mind the clothes hanging on the bars.

(B) The cartoonist did in fact realize that treadmill mats do not travel forward, and he/she used the absurdity of the protagonist’s comment as a kind of “comic spice” in the cartoon.  The cartoonist hoped the reader would think: “Obviously, the guy never uses the machine, so no wonder he doesn’t know what direction it goes!”  This (if intentional) would qualify as second-level humor.

It’s my experience that the humor-level of New Yorker cartoons, by some editorial decree, falls somewhere between 0.4 and 1.2, so anything above that level would mean someone hasn’t done his/her job.  Therefore, I’m more inclined to subscribe to Inference A.

Dear Sirs and Madams at the New Yorker: I await your call to be your next cartoon editor.  Under my iron-handed rule, no cartoonist could flout the laws of logic or physics without a decisive humorous payoff.

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