Friday, January 14, 2022

Accidental pun

 






My carefully constructed puns are not terribly funny, and my accidental puns aren't funny at all, but I still really like them both. And one of the latter happened to me today while I was working on content for clerkmanifesto, so I am going to tell you all about it!

I was combining photographic elements from the architecture of small French villages with the occasionally humble houses of the Saint Minneapolis neighborhoods I regularly walk through. I guess maybe I was trying to suggest improvements for my neighborhood in my dreamworld mind. And I had gotten three pretty simple, yet satisfying images I'll show you some other time. But the fourth picture I was working on was causing me problems. The house I started with wasn't very nice, so I kept adding more and more elements to it, windows, arches, roof, and so on. It was taking a lot of time, and maybe getting a bit silly, but it was starting to come together. The last thing I added was a cartoon car that a frog was driving, and that I wanted to put in the driveway.

Here's the final product:






Well, it is what it is. To be honest there's not much of the original house left.


But the pun part came when I was cutting out the car to put into the photo. On the photo editor I use one chooses the image and then with an assortment of tools meticulously marks out all of the parts one wants to keep. In this case, for me, it was the blue car, with the frog driving. But instead of doing it meticulously, one can tell the program to take its best shot at choosing the part of the image you might want, usually a person, or central object. This rarely works perfectly, but sometimes it kind of works. To try doing this, you  start by choosing the option...

"Auto"

Ha ha ha! It almost worked too! 

I just had to cut out between the tires mostly.





2 comments:

  1. That's the best! It's one thing to deliberate and create a pun that works, which is great, but to have one suggest itself to *you* through the mechanism of photography and choice! Yes! I like the way the car is looking askance, like it really doesn't want to go out today. Or is it the salamander on the wall?

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  2. I am impressed by your close reading of this photo. How can you even see that salamander!!!?? Funny thing is that the salamander is actually part of the original photo. It's a clay sculpture on the wall of their house.

    Don't you think most puns are crimes of opportunity? Like pennies on the ground, lying around for the sort of people who keep an eye out? Though this does preclude the grand and ridiculous labored puns like "Kelvin Bacon" or "Taco Bell's cannon indeed!".

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