Grandpa Weed's One Hit Wonders redux

The best evidence suggests the local universe is 13.8 billion years old and at least 192 billion light years in diameter (based on furthest objects seen with telescopes). This immense volume contains some billion trillion stars, a sextillion of stars and octillions of planets. And all that so that Christ could die for your sins.

Always wondered why the Almighty made Its only son an ape, but at least a great ape.

Anyway, evolution of pipe technology continues

I had a happy accident with a breaking glaze on a cone 5 fire. The glaze broke at the edges and pooled in the facets of the original 3D print surface. 

This is a cone 5 purple glaze that goes red at cone 6. I took it to cone 5 but maybe I should refire in the kiln. I've already people suggest I do a underglaze wash and then apply this glaze. I've also yet to explore underglaze paintings. Make them psychedelic because pipes anit just for smoking weed anymore. Toad. Shrooms. Mescalin.  At any rate, this form wins. The turtle wins. Jellybean second, golf ball third.

For some reason, the thinner casts smoke better. Thinner walled slip castings. My suspicion is it feels lighter and you expect less of a draw from it. The bigmouth carboretur is the way to go.

Perhaps some instructions are in order. The volume of the pipe is the average human mouth, for maximum suck. So you suck in a mouthful of smoke, pull away a fraction and sip it. 

Suck and sip. Suck and sip. 

Fragile Kurman Syndrome

What's wrong with us Kurmans, brainwise?

What do you got? What fucked up part of the mind do you want? We got it. Just in equal amounts.Schizophrenic? Bipolar? OCD? ADHD? Autistic? etc? Yeah, got it all. It's more a mole on the face than a hunch in the back, but we are weird, or even wyrd, and suicidal.

I think we got the suicide gene from my dad's mom. Her family is brilliant and suicidal, bred with the brilliant German Florida Men, the Kurmans, what could go wrong? Kurmans always a little shady up until the GI Bill anyway. Criminal masterminds they weren't.

My grandfather got run out of town in Illinois, went to Indianapolis. Every picture of him, he's with a bunch of guys and he is the boss. So, criminal.

Anyway, flower pipes. The Turtle, or Frog, or Beef Tongue pipe has been sample by me, and many prototypes have been parceled out with good feedback.

Item: Stoned people can't handle the Golf Ball and Jellybean pipes. The pipes roll over too easily and fall and break. I can make the base larger to solve that. 

Everyone loves the ellipsoid. I'm not suffering from creator's bias that this is the best pipe ever. I am in the foothills of the smooth flower smoke mountains. 

Nah, bullshit, I just slipcast the bowls and bodies, and throw them together. I can crank out a dozen a day, kind of like knitting. Don't think I would do it for a living, like sell my soul to the corporate world. It's all open source. These clay flower pipes have digital masters, which I am more than happy to throw out into Open Source .stl files

I think cast iron versions would do well and also not break like fragile clay

Grandpa Weed's One Hit Wonders

I had a chance to test my prototypes and all did well. I didn't get to try the ellipsoid because I gave it to my ceramics professor. I didn't test to destruction, or at least not in the physical, perhaps in my brain.

POSTMORTEM: Jelly Bean Pipe

This isn't a one hit.  It's bigger on the inside than out. This is a party whale.

I'll add a carburetor hole a half inch down and to the left of the bowl. If this ever goes into production, 9 out of ten on the left, and 1 out of ten on the right, since most people are right-handed. There is something to be said about laminar flow through the jelly bean/hot dog form. I have ass backward engineered a mitochondrian for weed. This is a allesuzammenbindenkugel. A hologram. A really nice clean pipe that smokes like a bong. Yum.

POSTMORTEM: Golf Ball Pipe 

They say form follows function, and boy does this baby function. Again, just making something look good usually means it will fly. This is one sweet fighter jet. It may be an orbital weapon, like a death star but for getting high. The smoke is so light you think you didn't get a hit, but oh boy did you! I love Grandpa Weed's One Hit Wonder Golf Ball Pipe!

Probably around Saturday I will have the Ellipsoid in hand, and it could be this might be the last post you ever see.

Everybody Loves The Ellipsoid

My eldest brother's best friend once wrote five essays in one night in college on speed. The beginning words of the fifth essay were IT ALL BULLSHIT.

It true. This is the age of bullshit and our only saving virtue is improvisation.

Welded these two 1/12th scale figures that had been sitting in a plastic bucket for over a year.  

These figures are following my biomimetic mechanoid style I've played with since the aughts. They could easily be incorporated into the Grandpa's Funeral Project (sometimes great-grandpa). Ongoing since maybe 2017,  I've tried to add new mourners every year. Anyone who buys the whole thing, I would set money aside so that figures could be added each year. 

Prototypes of One Hit Wonders are bisqued, wet sanded, glazed and firing as I type these very words. They are astoundingly awesome flower pipes and now I need to find a ceramic place that can make them for me. Everybody loves the ellipsoid.

Side Quest

I'm running out of my little ceramic pipes that I call One Hit Wonders - The One Hitter That Smokes Like a Bong, says one of my daughters.

I keep breaking them, fragile clay things. I'm wondering if I make metal pipes they would overheat? In any case I am making more of them as my stockpile is down to four,

The ceramic pipes I slipcast with a porcelain mix, which means I make two part plaster molds to pour the slip in. I could have, as I originally did, fashion the originals out of clay, but I decided to go New School, and 3D print the mold halves. Why not 3D print the plaster mold or clay pipe itself? I don't have anything that does that.

(One partition mold with embedded pipe half and its other half , 3D print).

The traditional one-hitter was a sphere with a bowl and a big mouth as the carburetor. I fashioned carbs and downstems on some, but the big mouth carb worked best. 

Another great shape is the jelly bean or kidney pipe which goes back to the days of my kidney troubles, when my subconscious latched onto the kidney form and I made several art pieces prior to losing the kidney. By my estimation, one hundred years ago, 1914 at the time, I would have been dead, dead of the stone as they used to say.

The kidney form is a smokable form. 

Ellipsoids are also fun and they will be included in the mix of the new One Hit Wonders Collection.

Scale and Complexity

Abundance and organism mass is complexity scaled to a linear thing? I think not. Complexity looks more like scale invariant. You'd think it woud be simple, linear, and we can choose things that do that, but this chart does not measure complexity. It measures scale.

Abundance and mass is not complexity. If  anything, the protist stage, the mechanics of archaeon or bacteria, are far more complex than a human society consisting of a few billion people, a few quadrillions of cells, a few septillion molecules.

True, our human biofilm is getting big, our infrastructure trillions of pounds to one pound of flesh, but there are structures far vaster on Earth (made even vaster if scaled up to our size). Protists and fungi enjoy global connectivity. There is evidence that life goes right on down to the mantle, and could outnumber surface life to be the majority of species on Earth. There could be a plate tectonic network for all we know. Point being, complexity is scale invariant. Complexity is a dimensionless constant.

Looking at the chart, what I get is maybe we are too small for aliens to notice.

Other things.

No mosquitoes this summer. True, we are in drought. But the alarming number of murder/death/kill lawn companies, with little yard signs showing mosquitoes in anguish or death, has reduced insect populations. That's alarming. 

I had one lone mosquito appear out of nowhere while I'm on the couch. She was a her and bit me. I let her feed. I took her outside on my arm and waited until she was done eating and flew away.

(I am a shoo bug instead of a kill bug, escorting bugs out rather than smoosh them. I don't think its a moral or philosophical choice. It's a respect of life that life shows life. Naturally. Therefore, I only kill when classified vermin).

When I was a kid, the planets of the solar system were smudges on photographs taken by telescopes. People didn't know what it looked like, so they made shit up. I do know a lot of people beleieved other people lived on those other planets. I drew pictures of what the people looked like. The people of the Sun were always fire and lightning bolts. Mercury a clown face sarguaro cactus. Venus obviously a blonde. Mars little green man. Jupiter and on were tough to do and varied on who looked like what.

It helped a lot that we explored space with robots and found out what's really going on. 

Tooth Pull and a Trip to the Big Lake

There are three stages of dental problems. 

1) Cavities: youth and adolescence

2) Gum disease: adults and elderly

3) Tooth loss: mostly elderly

I enjoy the night time bruxism, and without wearing my guard one night I must have cracked the lower left back molar. Or started a crack and the bruxism kept on worrying it until cracked to the bone.

I experienced a lot of needless suffering before going to the dentist, but mainly because it quit hurting as much, I waited for my regular dental appointment. The dentist looked at it and said you that's coming out and you are an idiot for not coming in when it hurt. People can still die of tooth abcesses and, do die.

I also have a massive tori, a bone spur, on my left jaw which had to be addressed. The tori are there acting like flying buttresses holding the teeth in place while I try to grind their enamel into chalk.

The oral surgeon was great. I already told him it would be a local, as I had been under twice this year and didn't need another IQ drop. He was cutting my jaw up like he was going to eat it. He showed me the tori bits of bone and they were the most perfect white and smooth as plastic. I asked about the tooth and he brushed that off. After they were done I snuck a peak the surgeon's tray and there is the tooth.

Hm. Took a bit of jaw out with it but I'm healing fine. Follow up today and he said wow beautifully healed.

Happy Labor Day! My niece and great niece, I think she's 8 or 9, came in for a family reunion on my sister-in-law's side. We had time before they went to the shindig, so my brother - papa - and I took the youngster up to Lake Michigan. She is from Kansas and has never seen a large body of water.

Papa says keep youreye out for a big blue horizon, and as we top the last dune to see the lake-

"It's an Ocean!" she exclaimed. It's the Big Lake. All other lakes in nowrthwest Indiana have names to clarify but if you say we were at the lake, most would ask The Big Lake? 

Parking is a premium but we finally found a spot when someone pulled out. We made our way down from the road to the beach over boulders and rocks and then orcks and pebbles. My poor feet have hardly been barefoot this summer so there were lots of ooches and ouches out of Uncle John. Made it down to sand and water. The water temperature is 70-72F which is about as warm as it gets. The child complained when dipping toe and  wave washed foot but we said she would get used to it. She did.

I went in with her and after a little bit of a heart attack I was fine too. Papa took pictures from the shore.

I grew up here, ten mles south of Lake Michigan. Every chance I could get I would head to the Dunes. Summers in high school I practically lived there. When I hitch-hiked through Europe in 1976, I had on my itinerary great beaches. I almost didn't leave Denmark. I'm told the north coast of Germany (the Florida of Germany, where my dad's family is from) is even better. I could have gone to East Germany in'76, but it wasn't worth the hassle. 

I had flirted with the idea of hiking the Pacific coast of Baja California, until I read a book by guy who tried to do it. It was a nightmare and he almost died. Finally rescued by fisherman. All the towns on his map were ruins.

The kid was right. It's an ocean, and I am a son of that ocean.