A contemporary gesture haiku

Kiss your own palm 
ecstatically while LOL
and jumping up and down

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

Notes
Gestural cloning is an essential part of (aspiring to) social media popularity. The above poem is based on one such gesture observed today. Do it, post it on tiktok (or wherever) immediately and get popularity!

For anyone unfamiliar with messaging abbreviations: LOL does not mean “lots of love” but “laughing out loud”. Seems to happen all the time in messages.

For purists: No, I did not quite follow the syllable count and don’t really GAFF.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Mother Mother (1990)

I've had this song in my head for days without knowing why. Usually there's some association that triggers the memory of a song. Nothing like it in this case. Didn't even wake up with it playing in my head as it sometimes happens.

I've been listening to Kate and Anna McGarrigle since 1977, when I picked up Dancer with Bruised Knees at the record store at the University of Regensburg in Germany on a whim because I loved the cover.

A moocher haiku

 

A haiku and I
were having coffee at Star-
Bux. You pay! it said.

– Leonard Blumfeld

Painting by J. B. with a little help from Artifice. As can be clearly seen, the haiku is only present in spirit.

Balzac, Balzac

“Balzac, Balzac ... that rings a bell. Wait – wasn’t he the gasman? Or the notary? Not sure which.”

An English-language take on Léo Ferré’s lyrics from La vie moderne (click on the video above to hear the chanson).

From the original French lyrics:

Quant à Balzac il s’y demande si

C’est un gazier ou un notaire

Seamstresses bent over sewing machines

 

AI art is a hot item in the crypto art collection scene and currently creates an enormous amount of hype. To investigate this hoopla a little bit myself, I went to one of the online generators that can be used to create such art.

You enter a text description, press the GENERATE button and wait for the piece of art to emerge on the screen in front of you.

The prompt I entered for the masterpiece above was “Portrait of a seamstress bent over a sewing machine”.

What I got from the machine was – lo and behold! – not only one but two seamstresses and two sewing machines.

While this idyll looks quite realistic in its 19th-century charm, you will notice some interesting anomalies when you take a closer look. Three of the hands, for example, are disfigured and/or have missing or superfluous fingers, and there are two fingers to the left of the front sewing machine that do not originate from any hand.

Did the artificial intelligence decide to play a trick on me because I did not pay for its services? 

We shall never know.

– Yours artificially, Leonardo Blumfeld

Las palabras y los días

También
hay unos días
sin palabras

– Leonardo Blumfeld (© 2023)

Nota
Hoy me he metido en vena castellana, inspirada por el libro de Octavio Paz con el título arriba.

Bullet Train (American Action Comedy, 2022)

Bullet Train

A solid bore
of blood and gore

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

The two lines tell it all in a nutshell. This 2022 Brad Pitt starrer and Kill Bill derivative is to be recommended if you like to spend 127 minutes of your time listening to incessant claptrap about fate and karma, including shrink advice about good and bad luck from the voice of Sandra Bullock (who fortunately remains mostly unseen), yawning at endless twists and turns cropping up at every bend of the railroad track towards Kyoto and watching lots and lots and lots of blood and gore inflicted in the most various ways. Hallelujah! Another masterpiece delivered by stars desperately trying to hang on to past glory.

Photo above (still picture from the movie): Brian Tyree Henry as Lemon (one of the highlights, has some truly funny moments)

A dad joke

Two peas are rolling along on the floor.

Says one to the other: Watch out! There is a step

                                                                                ep 

                                                                                       ep 

                                                                                               ep 

Ala goes on a walk with grandpa

 

“Got to keep your eyes
on the ground, Ala!” – “Why? Are
there snakes?” – “No, dog shit.”

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)

Note
This year's first haiku published here, and on such a pertinent subject no less. It might not hurt, though, to occasionally remind a child that glides on wings (“Ala” means wing) of what's on the earth.

How I got cheated by a machine

 

A true story from the AI age

On the machine, it said in big writing and with many illustrations, “Print photos from your Instagram.” There were no instructions, so I thought maybe the thing wanted cash first, and threw two 50 cent coins in the slot. It readily showed that now I had a credit of 1 €. No instructions on how to proceed, though.

Eventually, I got tired of waiting for nothing and pressed the red button to at least get my money back. No such luck! 

I looked around for someone who looked like a competent contact person. No such luck, of course. There are no contact persons in the machine age. 

Then I thought I heard some click and turned my attention back to the machine. There was, lo and behold, something in the output slot! I pulled it out and saw, much to my amazement, the two photos shown above. 

I have no idea who these people are. 

It’s like the machine communicated, after all, saying something like “Gotcha! I’ll keep your money – would never dream of giving anything back! – but you get something in return. Now don’t you complain!” 

Lesson learned: Never trust vending machines pretending to be Instagram!

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)