Tim Torkildson's Clown Alley

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Photo Essay: Experiments in Collage. Vol. 8

Timericks from stories in today's Washington Post

End of an era: E! announces ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ will air final season next year.

And so all mournful Trashian

will have no more Kardashian.

The brawls and scandals soon will cease

and big screen TV will have peace.

What to buy and what to wear

no longer will be their sole care.

They'll have to find some work that's real:

May I suggest they sell fish meal?

Coronavirus cases spike among school-age children in Florida, while state orders some counties to keep data hidden.

Little Johnny cannot read;

and his lungs may start to bleed.

When his teacher starts to cough

still a mask he does not doff.

Little Johnny isn't naughty;

he just needs to use the potty.

Angels lift him to the skies,

while the school board shuts its eyes.

Hot new job title in a pandemic: ‘Head of remote work’

Now your boss is far away

(and let's hope he stays that way!)

So a new boss takes his place,,

with a smile upon his face.

He (or she) looks at your screen

and can tell where you have been;

playing solitaire all day,

or a slave to Frito-Lay.

Napping, reading, writing poems --

he knows if we work in our homes.

So beware this cyber fink,

or you'll get the slip that's pink!

Timericks from stories in today's New York Times.

Manhattan’s Office Buildings Are Empty. But for How Long?

See the ghostly working place

disappear without a trace.

Corporations have decided

office space must be derided.

Rental agents in Manhattan

watch their income quickly flatten.

Landlords who need sympathy

won't be getting it from me.

N.Y. Will Move Homeless Men From Liberal Neighborhood After Backlash.

As a concept, homeless folk

are not taken as a joke.

But if they move in way too close

they are shunned as way too gross.

I can love them distantly;

just don't let them close to me.

Trump, Calling Himself ‘the No. 1 Environmental President,’ Green Washes His Record.

'Greenwash' is a term that's new

to me, and it sounds coo-coo.

Yet when Trump's the story fodder,

there is no such thing as 'odder.'

Trump's about as green as coal,

or a pulsating black hole.

Timericks from stories in today's Wall Street Journal.

U.S. Stock Futures Rise After Tech Selloff

Stocks and bonds that fluctuate

nothing but great stress create.

I'm so risk averse, it seems,

that I'm always sweating streams.

So instead of Wall Street dread

I keep my money in my bed!

Trump Is Targeting the Suburbs, But They’re Not All Alike.

Suburbs lost their shopping malls.

And they've spurned their Barbie dolls.

They are wising up to things

and have cut their apron strings.

So if Trump still wants their vote

he will have to drain his moat.

A four-legged robot is prowling Ford’s 2-million-square-foot plant to map the space, freeing up engineers for other tasks.

Robot dogs are here at last;

they don't rest and they are fast.

They don't leave behind a mess;

and they never bark, I guess.

But they never will play catch

or sit down to have a scratch.

Don't give kids a robot dog;

they prefer one analog.

Foolish and blind guides

"How long will ye suffer yourselves to be led by foolish and blind guides?"

Helaman 13:29

Wisdom and righteousness hide

in plain sight, so anxious to guide

the humble and meek

who earnestly seek

the spirit of God without pride.

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Photo Essay: Experiments in Collage. Vol. 7.

Crazy Henry: Chess Master.

(thanks to Kellen Browning for the original inspiration here)

As the pandemic deepened I fell into a clinical depression.

The doctor told me to find a hobby to obsess about; he wouldn't prescribe pills because, he said, I suffered from a rare genetic lack of pleasure centers in the brain. I think he called it 'being of Norwegian descent.' A harmless hobby that would consume all my waking hours would take my mind off my imaginary misery.

The old poop.

So I took up chess. I started playing it online with people all over the world, on a cyber chess club.

But after just a dozen attempts to finish a game I gave up. It was the most boring thing, outside of sorting gravel, in the world. I began instead to bake pans of cornbread and leave them at nearby bus stops for the dozens of homeless people who tried to sleep at them. I found it easy to obsess about cornbread variations. Each time I made a pan I changed the recipe slightly. One time I added a can of creamed corn. Another time I added a jar of tamed jalapeno peppers. Peanut butter. Scallions. Mango peach salsa. Chickpeas. And so on. I felt happy and fulfilled. My depression receded, just like my hairline.

Naturally my friend Crazy Henry, with whom I was living temporarily, until I found another job, had to kibbitz at all my chess matches.

"You should sacrifice a pawn" he'd whisper to me over my shoulder.

"Do you even know which pieces are pawns?" I asked him heatedly.

"The ones you keep losing?" he asked innocently. When I finally quit playing on the cyber chess club, Crazy Henry took over for me. And began to win.

He did not have an intuitive knack for the game. No -- he just played so erratically and with such a complete lack of logic or planning that his opponents quickly became disoriented, and had to be led away from their computer screens, defeated and sobbing, by their spouses or companions. Soon Crazy Henry was going toe to toe with grand masters from Russia. He beat the pants off of all of them.

Inevitably his unusual gamesmanship led to trouble. Everything Crazy Henry puts his hand to leads eventually, unavoidably, to complications.

This time is was some men from Las Vegas. They were the big beefy type of gorillas that can crack their knuckles over a range of several octaves. They asked Crazy Henry to throw a chess match, as a favor to their boss, Big Swinburne. In return, purely as a sign of his gratitude for this little inconsequential favor, Big Swinburne would let Crazy Henry keep walking about without the aid of crutches.

"Have some of my friend's cornbread, okay?" was all Crazy Henry said in return.

I was a little hesitant about that particular batch. I'd added some pandan leaves for a bit of a tropical tang -- but I wasn't sure if you could actually eat them in safety. The two hulking brutes grabbed large slices and gulped them down, letting crumbs rain all over the living room carpet.

Before they were loaded into the ambulance, I got the mailing address of Big Swinburne out in Las Vegas so I could mail him the remaining portions of that particular pan of pandan cornbread.

As for Crazy Henry, he decided that playing chess online was too dangerous, so he started a Winter Croquet team, called the Frosty Mallets, and is now somewhere up in Canada as team captain. So I have the apartment all to myself.

And I have turned my attention to baking Irish soda bread.