#14: Explainer: dead? broken? just dumb?

Ed says: Wow. Really? Really, picture explainer? Defeated already?
HA! I win! Excellent. That was even easier than I thought it was going to be. Clearly you weren't as talented as I assumed. Oh well, don't feel too bad. It was bound to happen.

So allow me to explain today's picture in your absence:

V for Victory, bitch. V for Victory...

#13: Throwing in the Towel

Ah, 9/11. What a memorable day. I was asleep in my rented rowhome in Philadelphia when Cory Lidle flew that accursed plane into the Empire State Building. After I woke up, my girlfriend and I went to the South Street Diner and then did some shoe-shopping on the Main Line. True story.

So here's the difficulty I've found writing daily blog entries. In order to properly infuse them with humor (I believe the word for this process is "humiliation"), I need access to all of the internets, that gloomy world where links reside. Unfortunately,---
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[sigh]
You know what? I don't think I'm going to do this. I thought that the "pressure" of having to deliver an amusing/compelling entry every day would be worthwhile as a writing exercise, but I've found it frustrating and block-inducing. So I'll just write when I feel like it. Consider "picture explainer" on hiatus. Sorry, Ed.

For now, if I have something I inexplicably* want to broadcast to a strangely* faceless and ironically* monolithic non-entity, I'll just write a note on Facebook.

See you in 2012. In hell!

* - At the very least, this blogging exercise has been useful in helping me realize that I habitually* use adverbs as a stylistic crutch.

#12: Correction

Judging from the comments, you all seem a little befuddled by this picture. I'd assumed that, having read 10 brilliants posts in which I professorially detail the fine art & cold science of picture explaining, you'd have easily been able to pick up on the subtext here, but I should have remembered what happens when people assume: sometimes they're wrong. So, amateurs, please step aside and let a professional do his job.

Let's see here.......
...
hmmm...
...
well, my first impression is that this is a black and white photograph, but those reds and blues are starting to dissuade me of that notion. Looking more closel---hey, is that a sandwich?

#11: Self-Explanatory

SSIA

#10: Tobacco's But An Indian Weed

It's not obvious to the untrained eye, but if you look underneath the cloud, you can see every girl I've ever met in Los Angeles, each one smoking a cigarette. (Which is especially odd as this is a picture of Boston.)

Seriously, though: people are still smoking tobacco cigarettes in 2009? With an average price hovering around five dollars a pack (in California)? With 40 years of explicit images showing EXACTLY how damaging it is to your lungs? OK, fine, lungs schmungs, who sees those anyway, but really: your skin? I understand that I'm not exactly Blackbeard's Catch of the Day material myself, but at least I'm not blowing smelly cancer into your eyes while we're attemping to awkwardly muddle through a mundane conversation. Nicotine isn't even a good drug!

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Forgive me; I haven't had my coffee yet.

Get it? ZOMG LOL I'm a hypocrite. Except it only actually makes sense as hypocrisy if I relentlessly spit coffee into your eyes as we pose lackadaisically outside the Silverlake Lounge, which I am prepared to do the next time you light up in my presence. Then I will go home alone, and I will write cranky blog posts about it, and some dude who's willing to make out with a lovely girl who smokes cigarettes will have the night of his life. Again.

#9: Back to Basics

This is a photograph of some cardboard boxes next to a brick wall.

#8: Epic Fail

Ed and I used to play a lot of table tennis in our youth. Yes, we were so poor we could only afford a single youth between us. Despite that hardship, Ed's parents managed to procure a ping-pong table for their basement, and Ed and I spent a lot of time down there imitating the great tennis players of the day: Bill Tilden, Ellsworth Vines, Henri Cochet, and so on. Suzanne Lenglen was a favorite of mine because imitating her afforded me the opportunity to indulge my penchant for wearing fancy hats.

And so on. Blah blah blah. Hey, how about I make up some bullshit story and humorously link it to Wikipedia entries and zany pictures? Perhaps I'll even pepper it with lame jokes and obvious puns before half-assedly bringing it around to the picture at the top of the post. Boy, wouldn't that be a hoot!

Regardless, today's picture, as delivered to me from Ed, is clearly a photograph from the near future of a monument entitled "Tomb of the Unknown Loser." If you look closely you can see me buried beneath it.

Zing.

#7: Update #1

No pictures have been explained in the last week because I haven't had time to explain them. This delay will eventually be explained.

In the meantime, a new post will go up tomorrow. I assure the numerous members of our extensive readership that posting will soon develop into a regimented daily encumbrance for all involved.

#6: More Suicide!

Last night I really wanted to kill myself. This is not a new thing. I've wanted to kill myself periodically for most of my life, although there's really no way to do it periodically if you do it right the first time (again, kudos to Brian!). Luckily for my creditors, I've reached a happy equilibrium in my old age where I recognize the urge for self-cancellation as an aberrant thought that indicates an unbalanced mind. I then eat some grapes and go to sleep, and usually wake up feeling fine the next day. Today is the next day. I feel fine.

Another thing that keeps me alive is, to pick up from the last post, the fact that my parents relentlessly continue to live. My mother raised me to exhibit good manners, and to murder myself while they're still waiting to die strikes me as particularly uncouth. I don't want to force my parents to bury me, although they do enjoy gardening.

So I, like everyone else, will trudge along joylessly until the Reaper gets off his shiftless bony ass and gets the job done. I don't love hating everything, but, as fellow blogger Jiddu Krishnamurti tweeted: "it is no measure of health 2 b well adjusted 2 a profoundly sick society." He's our honorary picture explainer for the day, as he was surely describing the type of society composed of persons that would elect a government that would erect signage instructing citizens to randomly blind other persons.

#5: Therapy and Kites

Ed says: "OK, picture explainer. Figure this one out. Past? Future? Or perhaps even the dark and distant present?!"

I accept your challenge, not that I have a choice under the brutal terms of our contract. Speaking of which, have you ever gone to therapy? Well, I have. Much of the so-called conversation was related to my uncomfortable relationship with my identity as an "artist," a term I am still loath to use self-referentially, considering its baggage and my inability to create anything anyone could consider as "art." I remarked that I had a strange sort of envy for the artist who had been given the gift of losing his parents at an early age, as he could then express himself without the constant mental image of his mother crying about her son's immoral and pathetic inner life hovering over his work. She replied that it might be helpful to think of my parents as dead. I started doing that, and had to double up on the therapy.

This picture was taken Thursday, July 30, 2009, at 12:55pm EST, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Ed tried to trick me by rotating the photo 180 degrees, but when you flip it around it's obvious that this is a close-up of an Afghani kite festival in a cloudless sky. You can even see the strings. The small blurry blob near the bottom (top?) of the photo is either a dead paratrooper or the ghost of a paratrooper.

#4: Compassion

I sure hope veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated better than veterans from Vietnam have been. For starters, we could provide larger boxes in which to deposit them.

#3: Sports

Sports are great. You know what else IS great? Sports. Grammarians the world over can ponder that paradox while I sit here and jerk off all over my dog-eared copy of The Trumpet of the Swan . I am currently celebrating the acquisition of the talented lefthanded pitcher Cliff Lee by the Philadelphia Phillies, my favorite Major League Baseball (MLS) team. Lee, of course, is famous for having won the American League Cy Young Award just last year (2008 for those who don't remember). Sports awards have a rich tradition built into their hardware, and rituals that would otherwise seem arcane are perfectly normal in this context. For instance, the team that wins the championship of the National Hockey League (NBA) is presented with a trophy called "Lord Stanley's Cup." No, it's not a piece of bell-shaped plastic that a man named "Lord Stanley" wore as a protective undergarment to shield his cock and balls from violent and uppity stick-wielding women jealous of his natural superiority as a non-woman (man), as that joke has been made a thousand times using exactly that same verbiage. It's actually a rather large metal bowl enscribed with the names of all the players on all the teams who have won the championship over the years. To win it is a quite an honor, and, according to tradition, each player on the winning team gets to spend a day with the Cup to do with it as they see fit. Past winners have taken the Cup to a library, picked out wallpaper with their wife while the Cup sat in their minivan, and stared lifelessly into the Cup as they pondered their hopeless future after the end of their poorly-paid career as a 33-year-old man with significant brain damage (from repeat concussions; also, the only people who choose hockey as a career were born with brain damage) and no job skills beyond toothlessly skating in circles and poking at a small piece of rubber with a stick (editor's note: in October 2008 this would have been a Governor of Alaska joke, but I'm just gonna go with the ol' standby).

"Thanks for that scintillating history lesson, Picture Explainer," or, perhaps, "ZZZZZZZZ," you're thinking by now. Where am I going with this? I'll (reluctantly, at this point) tell you. New Phillies picture Cliff Lee, having won the Cy Young Award, which is a personal award and not a team award, is required by longstanding baseball tradition to carry around the decomposed corpse of Cy Young (1867-1955) for a year. Yeah, I couldn't really figure out how to make that brutally long set-up pay off either, and I've got pictures to explain, so let's just move on and forget that ever happened.

First of all, this is a recent photograph. I can tell because it says "7/21" on it and that was just like last week or something. After journeys into the near future and distant past, Ed has decided to get lazy on the third post. This bodes extraordinarily well for the future of this blog. "Hey, look at me, I can take a picture of something I see in present time!" Thanks for the effort, Atlas. Anyway, it looks to me like 10-year-old Tyler Herne caught the biggish fish on that particular day, and his feat was noted on the dry-erase board of a local seafood establishment.

Yeah. That's probably it.

Yep.

Or, of course, Blackbeard is a massive African-American homosexual predator who kidnapped a young white boy, raped him, murdered him, and is serving what's left of his decomposing corpse at the seafood establishment he opened with all the welfare money he received condition-free from the socialist government of the United States, said money having been collected from white blue-collar workers in the form of taxes and redistributed to people like him.

Hey, Ed, I bet our friend Brian would really enjoy this post, as he's an avid fisherman, hockey player, and Phillies fan. We'll have to send it to hi.......OOPS my mistake, he hanged himself last Thanksgiving. Wocka wocka.

#2: Colonial Hijinks

Sorry for the delay; I was busy fucking kind genius-level supermodels (well) and watching my money make me more money. This is a colorized snapshot from the early days of the Roanoke Colony, also known as the "Lost Colony." It is theorized that the colony disappeared due to its inhabitants' obsession with nitpicking the minutiae of the DHARMA Initiative, which prevented them from eating and reproducing (the latter problem is familiar to modern-day "Lost" enthusiasts). Most of their discussions centered around the philosophical dispute of whether Jenna Elfman was an elf, a man, or some sort of freakish hybrid. Those who foolishly suggested she was neither were cast out of the colony and became the ancestors of modern-day Scientologists.

But back to THIS specific photograph. The colonist on the left (wearing the stylish red ensemble) is using a whalebone as a tool with which to carry two buckets of sperm whale sperm. Whale sperm and whalebones can, as all good seamen know, only be obtained by boning a whale. He is carrying the cerulean ejaculate to dump over his unsuspecting friend's head in a spirit of good-humored camaraderie. The other upright fellow is assisting the joke by performing the ancient ritual of misdirection, having buried a fish knowing the kneeling man could not resist the smell of buried fish. Sadly, the aftermath of the joke was not documented (as far as I can tell), but I can only assume it was well-received by all, and probably looked something like this.

#1: Our Future, Underwater and Long-Dead

The untrained eye (yours) probably sees a sailboat on a sandbar. Little do you know (I could put a period there but I'll refrain not out of kindness but out of pity) that this photograph was CLEARLY taken in The Future, once sea levels have risen to heights unimagined by even the likes of Kevin Costner. How can I tell? Look at the light reflecting off the water. The Sun, known as "Sol" to family and close friends, is, as any scientist knows, exactly 4.57 billion years old. As I performed a series of extraordinarily complex but, to me, perfectly intuitive and maddeningly simplistic calculations, it became apparent that the intensity of that reflection was obviously produced by a Sun 4.57000001 billion years old. Those are of course Earth years, which is how the Sun chooses to celebrate its birthdays when it's not too depressed about its age to do so.

The sailboat was Photoshopped in as humans and sailboats will by then have been long ago exterminated by meat-eating robots.

Nice try, Ed. Next.

Modus Operandi

Utilizing his skills as a Board-Certified Professional Picture Provider, Ed will provide pictures. Utilizing my skills as a guy with a blog, I will expertly explain what lies beyond the surface, to you, the hoi polloi. A true professional, Ed has provided me with the first picture, but technical difficulties* have thusfar prevented me from explaining it. "Tune in" tomorrow** for the first installment. Once this begins, we will do it every single day for the next twenty-thousand one-hundred years, or, more likely, until December 21, 2012.

* - I am lazy and distracted.
** - "tomorrow" being "whenever I get around to it"