Seven years ago, I posted this concept of the logical evolution of the smartphone. I called my invention the iHand 5:
Fast forward to a few days ago, when I came across the following New York Times article on the successor to the smartphone, nearly the way I had envisioned it:
Some nerds in Silicon Valley are obviously fans of the blog. Maybe Tim Cook himself?
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§ I would value your input here — please help educate me. In more films than I can count, there is a scene in which a character is wronged or finds him/herself in a no-win situation, and the character responds (after a moment of seething) by trashing the room they are in, throwing objects against mirrors, sweeping figurines and framed photos onto the floor, and otherwise violently unleashing their negative energy onto their surrounds.
Items resting quietly on pianos and fireplace mantles are particularly vulnerable.
My question is: does any real person ever come close to doing this, or are such histrionics just a tired Hollywood trope? Sure there have been times I’ve been frustrated and angry, but never (ever!) on such a destructive binge. It make me think such episodes are over-represented in film, just like pre-meditated murders are, but I don’t have any data. Do you think everyday people really act out their frustrations so forcefully ? (You don’t have to answer personally.)
§ I have a problem with human noses and toes. There are lots of beautiful things about the human body, but noses and toes aren’t among them. Plastered here, pointed there, growing more curved and contorted as we age. Consider noses, whose primary purpose seems to be to interfere with kissing — did noses really need to evolve that way to keep the bugs and rain out? Or do downward-pointing nostrils serve more to hide our nose hairs?
And take toes — please! If toes are so important, why didn’t they take on a more elegant design? What tenet of natural selection could justify their stubby appearance and their constant need of grooming? And why do we need five of them? (I am talking about toes per foot, not noses per face. Thank God for that scant bit of evolutionary economy.)
Sometime soon, I will post a gallery at ART@CHC of my feet-and-toes photos, both real and statuesque, and I must say in advance that sculptors of feet have great imagination.
§ Not that it’s your problem — it never is! — but I can’t count the times I’ve thought of a knock-em-dead idea for a Thoughts@Large item, then opened my laptop to record it for our joint pleasure, only to lose the thought along the way. As Mitch Hedberg said about the jokes that came to him in the middle of the night, “If the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” Yep, same. Except Mitch may have had higher standards.
§ On a more serious note, I would have liked to have been, at the very least, considered for the post of Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. I would have been a natural for the position, given my political savvy and microwave skills. So, when I heard that some Louisiana guy named Mike Johnson was elected, I was crushed. Nearly cried (but didn’t — I’m a man). I wasn’t even given the chance to drop out of the running first.
If this white guy from Louisiana had any cred at all, he should have been known as Wailin’ Mike Johnson or Jukin’ Mike Johnson and he should have his own line of hot sauce and a string of barbecue joints. But just Mike Johnson? C’mon dawg.
It was just last week that a Ohio man named James Daniel Jordan — after the 2oth book of the New Testament, and then after the lion’s den guy, and then after the river Jordan for good measure! — still wasn’t righteous enough for Republicans to elect him Speaker. But then they turn around and pick James Michael Johnson, named after the very same book of the Bible, and then after the row-your-boat-ashore guy, and then after Walter Johnson, the iron-arm pitcher for the Washington Senators (1907-1927) who won the second-most games of anyone in baseball history.
It came as a surprise to me and many others, how the election of Speaker came down to how Congress felt about Johnsons. But I guess it’s all about numbers: 189 of the 222 Republican House members have them.
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Last year, I posted an editorial cartoon about Melania Trump cashing in on the dubious and now quickly-fading NFT fad. To refresh your memory, NFTs are to actual art what cryptocurrency is to real money — a few hundred bits of computer memory, backed by no authority whatsoever, which supposedly denotes ownership of an item of value. You can read about how NFTs are supposed to work, and why they exist, here.
But the point of this post is not that NFTs are exploited by savvy grifters like Melania, which they certainly are; rather, it is that NFTs reveal just how lazy such grifters are, laziness being the essential quality that defines people like the Trumps. Donald J. and Melania and Don and Eric and Ivanka — they all have trained themselves to look for the lowest-hanging, most-readily-dropped fruits to gather into their bottomless ego-baskets. NFTs were practically designed for people like the Trumps. Whom I wish were rarer.
As a point of evidence, here is one of Melania Trump’s NFTs, titled Melania’s Vision and touted thus by the so-called NFT “broker” that offered it:
Melania Trump’s personal journey has been enlightening; from Slovenia through Europe and into the United States of America — including as First Lady. The beauty and hardships of individuals, majestic landscapes and profound architecture have entered her lens and remain in her heart. Marc-Antoine Coulon’s breathtaking watercolor embodies Melania Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire. Melania’s Vision provides the collector with strength and hope.
I’ll give you a moment to catch a fresh breath after that inspirational floe of rotten algae.
[Inhale through your nose, draw the breath into your belly… hold the breath a moment… now exhale slowly through your mouth… it’s okay if you make a soft, cleansing sound.]
According to the NFT trading site OpenSea, this digital rendition of Melania’s eyes is going for 0.o2 Ethereum (the second-most-popular cryptocurrency) or $38.o6.
May I venture that $38.o6 is pretty generous for this piece of flotsam. One needn’t look very closely to see that this image signed by PERSON WHOSE SIGNATURE HAS DENSE VERTICAL STROKES JUST LIKE DONALD’S is less an original watercolor than a Photoshop creation. Melania’s right eye is an obvious digital mirror image of the left, or vice versa. The computer-artist simply did a cut-and-paste-and-flip. Only Melania’s washy eyebrow strokes are non-mirror-image.
Not that time-to-create is the essence of art, but I genuinely doubt that Melania’s Vision took more than 20 minutes to produce. Graphic artists, as I once hoped to be, learn to do things super-quickly because they are paid so little. The majority of the time spent on this work no doubt took place on the upper floors of Trump Tower, discussing the best way the Trump grift family could make a buck off it. They could care less that Melania’s right eye was a mirror-image, down to the smallest eyelash detail, of her left eye.
To them, it’s just another part of the unreality show that the Trumps star in.
Half of Americans want this guy, and his family, to rule this country again. If only I could make an NFT of my head-slap, but it may not matter. Americans vote for people of their class these days: Trump the Grifter, along with his Fagin Family, has somehow convinced a multitude that he’s one of them. This doesn’t speak well of the multitude.
As to the other half of America… well, there’s my market. If I want to make a difference, I had better start perfecting my head-slap and hire a graphic artist who works cheap but markets well.