Artisanal firewood spoof - video

[Jon]

Artisanal firewood spoof video. They nailed it - pitch perfect!

Could this ever be real? I think it could, for high-end Manhattan real estate. Maybe not $1,200 single logs, but I could certainly see $2,500 hand-picked cords of unusual and beautiful wood species. The best apartments have multi-million dollar interior design, and of course, fireplaces, next to which is often just some neatly-stacked pine or birch. The BTU value of wood species is not of prime importance in such an application, whereas the aesthetics are.

[mklotz]

The really sad thing is that I've met millennials who could not possibly understand that that was satire.

[olderdan]

I really enjoyed that one, laughed the whole way through.

[Frank S]

It was kind of disappointing that he didn't also hold up a carafe of Paul Masson when he said he will sell no wood before its time.

[Jon]

It was challenging selecting the best screenshot to promote this thread with. Finally decided on this beauty:

[mklotz]

And if you're a true millennial you'll want to advertise how you're saving the planet's wildlife, so you'll shell out ~$500 for a painting by an elephant to hang over your artisanal firewood...

https://www.elephantartgallery.com/p...h-joy-by-jojo/

[Jon]

Whoa, good find! I had never heard about that. A quick search shows that the "paintings" are generally from two sources. One, people noticed that elephants like to put sticks in their trunks and scratch the ground. Replace a stick with a paintbrush, replace the ground with a canvas, and voila: art.

Or, someone just uses the elephant's head as a giant paintbrush:

Of course, like many social virtual-signaling attempts, this one involves a dark practice. In this case, the elephants are trained for displays like this via a very controversial domestication method called: Elephant crushing.

This reminds me of Clever Hans, the horse that could seemingly perform arithmetic by tapping out numerical answers with his hoof.



NYT even "reported" on this equine prodigy in 1904: https://query.nytimes.com/mem/archiv...6F9C946597D6CF:



The horse actually was clever, but of course he couldn't do math. He was picking up on very subtle social signals from the people asking him questions; for example, people tended to subconsciously jerk their heads when Hans was approaching the correct final hoof tap. This was called the Clever Hans Effect, or more broadly refers to Observer-expectancy effect, which is of course one of the reasons that double blinding is considered so important.

[Frank S]

My youngest daughter, I guess she could actually be classed as a gen "X"er being that she is in her early 40's has a lot of the boomer traits in that things made of quality are more important than things made to huck in the rubbish bin but that is not to say that she may not have been an instigator of the faux collections movement. back when she was 13 she gathered up a gunny sack of cukule (cockle) burs then painted and shelacked a bunch of them she went with me on an Install to New Jersey and sold them as porcupine eggs the un painted ones went for 25c each while the fancier painted ones she got as much as $5.00 for. She included instructions on care incubation and even planting should anyone want to raise their own pet porcupines. It took me 3 or 4 days to do the install and by that time she was ready to go home for another sack full of the things.

[mklotz]

For some reason, paintings by an animal that isn't even aware it's painting reminds me of Jackson Pollock in his drip period. If you're unfamiliar with drip painting, this so-called art lesson...

https://www.khanacademy.org/humaniti...hnique-pollock

will teach you more than you probably want to know.

To put this all in perspective, a recently discovered painting suspected to be an original Pollock drip, is expected to sell in the $10-15 million range if it's proved to be authentic. It would be worth a lot less if painted by an animal although then it might be more artistic, whatever that means.

[Frank S]

an animal painted painting could absolutely be more artistic than one done by Pollock. Dogs are supposed to have a very limited color recognition some breeds may have a little better than others but I once saw a Huge great Pyrenees at a carnival wearing painting booties walk on 3 legs holding up 1 paw then go over to a canvas it was painting? sit on it's haunches then smear some paint in 1 direction then another then place its paw in another color smear that then keep selecting other colors. eventually it had painted could be loosely called a the dog and the tree although it required a stretch of one imagination.
TRAINED to do this? if so how? Plus how could it tell which colors as it appeared to randomly selecting them returning to places it had missed to add more of the same color it had previously applied. A neighbor owns a Pyre he has had it for several years and says as a pup while he was trying to train it that it was the most stubborn animal he has ever owned but one of the best heard dogs he has. his kids used to ride it when they were very young
I think that a Chimpanzee might actually be aware of what it were painting if one was trained to do so.
But some humans having the awareness of what they are doing while splashing, dripping, smearing, or dumping paint on a canvas may be questionable