My name is John and I am 66 and a half

Silverback! Starting for me about 60? Six and a half years later, I'm less muscular, getting skinny arms and a fat belly unless I pick up the pace. My goal (and despite my medical problems) is that I am leaner and fitter so I can work when I am old.  Exercises are geared more towards balance and Turkish get ups, etc. along with resistence training. At least walk every day. Cancer free.

So, why fit enough to work? Why not just fit enough to be old? Independence for as long as possible, before the enfeeblement and second infancy.  

The family history is strokes and heart attacks in the mid 60s, perfect for the Social Security Administration plan. Modern medicine is changing that and we Kurmans are heading into uncharted territory, death-wise. 

Speaking of Social Security, I will be on SS at 67, for optimal payout. and hurray to yesterday Johnny for earning through labor and occasional ingenuity, the promise of such that we call "money".

Burnt Weenie Sandwich

I'm feeling sorry for all the lunk-heads in the news: Trump, Biden, Musk, Xi, Putin, fuck me the list is endless. I've too many famous people to worry about! 

Assume that 8 billion and a smidge humans have altered the planet. You say, we're so tiny what could we do? The Ozone hole for one. Smacking an asteroid with a robot for two. The Amazon rain forest for three, human cultivated and a gruesome reminder of just how many millions of people died from filthy disgusting western europeans and their clever savage ways!

If the planet has been altered we face two futures, the Anthropocene, or the Anthropozoic. 

(Do I have to explain? The antrhopocene is short-lived, doomed to short dick thinking. The Anthropozoic is much much longer, certainly not a quarter billion years like the dinosaurs, but longer than a million. Homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically modern humans, lookalikes, have been around a third of a million years. So we got two-thirds of a million years to not fuck it up and survive.

Intelligence has still not shown advantage in long term evolutionary survival.

Anyway, Elon Musk is getting butt hurt. Cars recalled, rockets and websites crashing, a Boring company that has drill 2 and a half miles. Monkeys slaughtered to put chips in brains for his Martian slave army, but . A breakthrough for a wearable device to access the brain is being developed. 

Not surprising, given networks were reverse engineered from neurons because we couldn't figure it out. Neural networks get used to filtering out stuff and call it noise. These thinking caps (like we are stuck in the 1920s Monkey Singularity) successfully interpret thought. Verbs more accurately than nouns, but a promising start. And if this can be done as a wearable, it can be done remotely. 

If a brain can be read remotely, can it also be written?

Anyway pics of the latest iterations of one hit wonder interspersed through the narrative. I have stumbled upon a really nice aerofoil design for smoike delivery in the form of a turtle, or a tongue.

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.