Fun and frolic with clerkmanifesto

 

I once embarked on a vast attempted migration of clerkmanifesto to my own fully hosted site called "Life is a fountain". This grandiose venture had something to do with problems with google's blogger (the hosting platform where we are now), and was also because I was struck with a wave of creative ambitions in response. Life is a Fountain was a very explorable site, with lots to look at, read, and even watch, but suffered from two problems that ultimately lead to its demise and to our retreat back here to the homely clerkmanifesto that is in your hands at this moment.

1. Packed to the gills with content, the whole Life is a Fountain site ran too slowly for the whipsnap patience of modern internet users.

2. No one actually reads clerkmanifesto, other than you (hi and thanks for coming by) and even fewer people read Life is a Fountain, which created a weird black hole in which it regularly received less than zero views, a minus number!, which was fascinating, but only for a little while, and started to upset math itself.

Math is more sensitive than one would think.

I can relate.

So back I came here, having kept it live and up to date the whole time of the experiment, much to math's enormous relief.

And here I still am years later, focussing on the main daily postings and leaving all that sidebar, interconnected stuff to itself.

Until now!

Now I decided to clean up these sidebar features and offer a few more gateways into the vast histories and content of clerkmanifesto. It is no great reworking, and I still refuse to change the now antiquated look of clerkmanifesto, but I have gotten rid of outdated elements on the sidebar that long ceased to be relevant. And I have added a few more usable features for the so inclined. Like, as I write we have a tribute to Grape for his birthday up top. I also now have some links to highlighted posts of the past. Even way down below I have a "picture of the day". A picture of the day! I wonder when I'll remember to change that? Because, after all, this is all meant to be changeable, and over the next while I am guessing there will be all sorts of shenanigans over on the sidebar to your right.

Even I can accept that clerkmanifesto isn't always "good". But it definitely is "always" which makes for a ton of it! So much that I have long since despaired of organizing it. But slowly I am leaning more into all that history, and trying to make tunnels and warrens and rooms in this colossal collection of clerkmanifesto content, connecting the past and present and letting it all run together and reemerge in new, hopefully distilled and more curated ways.

"Condeluded."? You say.

Yes, what a wonderful idea! Among the new features is an actual search box. If you aren't exhausted from today's information heavy post, try typing "condeluded" into that search box and see what you get!

Or not. I'll take care of math if this upsets it. I'll fix math a vermouth. Math loves vermouth and that usually calms them down.

 

How we remember Grape's birthday this year

 

On October 23 clerkmanifesto enjoys remembering Grape's birthday in one way or another.

"Why?" You ask.

Oh, because October 23 is Grape's birthday.

I know that's not what you meant. I was just teasing. 

We like to remember Grape's birthday because, well, a lot of reasons... 

hey,

let's do a top ten list!

Top ten reasons why we like to remember Grape's Birthday!

1. Because he is a dear old friend.

2. Because we just did it once 13 years ago and, boom, it felt like it was just kind of a thing we do, which is a bit similar to how there are now over 5,000 daily clerkmanifesto posts; sheer accident.

3. Maybe it will make Grape happy! Don't you want Grape to be happy? It's his birthday!

4. It is a nice way to share a lot of stories about Grape and about growing up.

5. We have a very similar birthday so it becomes a way to talk about myself! And gosh, isn't that a fascinating subject!

6. Not that Grape isn't a very interesting subject too. 

7. The tax write offs on it are spectacular. You should try it just for the tax savings.

8. I'd totally do the same for you if I knew your birthdate! But I respect your sense of privacy.

9. To make amends in case it was me who misplaced our historic genuine friendship rattlesnake rattle that we shared back and forth for decades. But having moved out of an entire life, and gotten rid of everything I owned with meticulous detail, I think maybe Grape has the rattle, but who knows? And if it is my fault the rattle has gone missing, at least I write a notalgic rattlesnake revering post every October 23rd.

10. Because I am always looking for material on clerkmanifesto that I think will appeal to a wider audience. Not that I have ever found any or know what it looks like.

I know that today's honoring of Grape's birthday doesn't include any new stories or really anything all that much about Grape, but we try to honor his birthday in different ways each year and this is how we are rolling in 2026. Meanwhile, as I am taking on more ambitions about creating a more lively and up to date sidebar to clerkmanifesto (to the right here, and probably more about it tomorrow), I would like to direct your attention to the very top of our sidebar features where you will find a series of opportunities to wander through a bit of highlighted history of Grape on and in clerkmanifesto. This is a time constrained feature though, so if you are reading this a bit past publication date it likely won't be there, though hitting the "grape" tab should get you a less curated collection of the same sort of thing.

Oh, and one last thing. Just in case he's reading:

Happy Birthday, Grape.

Sushi in France

 

I have had some grand plans for writing about food in France, but I keep shying away from it. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. And French food is both everything you would think and dream it would be, and yet it is as incredibly stupid and disappointing as everywhere else in the world too, both of them at the same time! Which makes for a mightier subject than I ever feel entirely ready to take on.

 So what if I start off small?

What if I start of with just a wee bit of sushi?

Who doesn't love sushi?

The French love sushi!

Oh my god the French love sushi so much! They love it almost as much as boulangeries, more than fromageries, and about equal with pizzerias.

Or, at least, one could conclude that by how very many many places sell sushi here. The cheap neighborhood grocery chains sell sushi here. And so do the big supermarkets. Small neighborhood sushi shops sell sushi here, and so do slightly bigger and nicer ones. There is a massive sushi chain devoted to only selling sushi here, with so many representative stores I couldn't begin to count them. And then there's the other sushi chain, equally big, exactly like the first one so that I can never remember which is which, equally devoted to selling sushi. And then there are equally as many poke bowl type restaurants on top of that, which are just a clever way to sell unassembled sushi in a bowl for the same price.

There is sushi everywhere here!

And every single place has the exact same sushi. 

And all of the sushi, grocery store and nice restaurant, is for pretty close to the same price. 

Tuna, Salmon, Dourade (a kind of sea bream), and maybe cooked shrimp, and then all of them in rolls with avocado maybe, or cream cheese (?). Maybe a cucumber makes an appearance. If there's a big menu a fifth seafood might appear, like scallop or fake crab.

It's a little disappointing. But honestly, I didn't have the easiest time finding good sushi in variety in Japan either. Though eventually I sussed it out. And at least their grocery store sushi was cheap and good.

I know this possibly makes me sound like a malcontent.

But that happens sometimes because I am a malcontent.

And I find myself constantly waxing nostalgic about the appearance of sushi in the U.S. in the nineteen eighties. What a revalation that was! If only they had a branch of L.A.'s "Somethings Fishy" here now (no, was that really the name?!). That typical early eighties sushi bar had no 20 dollar rolls of tuna, salmon and avocado smothered in various mayonaisses and fruits. No, it had 30 different kinds of fish! It was wild. I could get an oyster with a quail egg! They used crab! Unagi, hamachi, spanish mackeral, uni, oh lord, the uni!

Sorry. I got hungry and I have wandered off point.

Eh?

What was my point?

Of course I have a point!

Oh. Yes. It's a big one.

Are you sure you're ready for it? Can you handle it?

Okay.

The French are very, very, very good at their food.

But they're not so good at anyone elses.

And I'm not even mentioning the tacos.

Does Minnesota still exist

What a funny thing to be running through my color shake up pictures so excitedly. Today we are returning to Minnesota and grabbing from a vast catalog of seen and useen photographs mainly of the Mississippi Riverlands, and then changing them. And while this sort of color randomizing effect has captured my attention for now, it isn't the first time. 

Indeed, my first experiments of image witchery were along these same lines.

Long before AI and maybe even before photoshop existed, I started to have some access to color copiers. I took old photographs of mine, or new ones if I had any, and hand tinted black and white copies of my pictures. I then made color copies of them as overdialed and saturated as I could. The pictures you are seeing now are much the effect I was going for back then, but of a nature I was not technically capable enough to achieve.

Back then I think pictures like these would have amazed you, but you likely never would have had a chance to see them even if I could have created them. Now maybe, amid all the noise and magic of imagery that is created and tossed around the world like it is nothing, these are perhaps not so amazing as they would have been. But here they come, with ridiculous ease before your eyes on your magic device.

Minnesota. Saint Minneapolis?

Of course I miss it! I have a few delicate connections to the people I love most there. I am still made of a life there. And the river still runs through me and always will. I like this style of picture so much because this dreaminess and reality, fading and overclear, wrong and right, tells the story better than...

I don't know.

It just seems to tell the story of that world better. Instead of coming upon a picture and thinking "I remember that place" something else happens. I come upon the picture now and it is a dream I had instead, which really is more like it.

Just a cathedral

 

Sitting here in the shade under a cathedral that started out a thousand years ago, but where most of the work was done about 800 to 600 years ago, and where a woman named Eleanor was married to a king, becoming the Queen of France, who later became the Queen of England after getting her marriage annulled and marrying the King of England, I find my usual difficulties in photographing these extraordinary Gothic cathedrals.

Here’s the best of what I have managed so far.

Clerkmanifesto classics: Peer Pressure revisited

 

Trying to buck up clerkmanifesto for while I race off to look for a new apartment somewhere across France, I have been posting my glorious new photographic style.

But because I got excited and posted them at ten or twenty at a time, I am now out!

Which means it's time for a clerkmanifesto classic!

This classic is from, well, I don't know, I didn't look. Let's just say it's from the days of yore.

It is called...

Peer Pressure

Rarely does a day go by here at the library wherein one of my co-workers doesn't come up to me and say "Hey, want to go out to the parking lot and do some meth?"

I have heard meth can be unhealthy for you, so, though I'm glad they asked, I am compelled to say "No, thank you."

If only they would leave it at that. But there's always the "Oh, come on, it's fun and it makes you work faster."

So then I mumble "Sorry, but my body is a temple." Which I immediately regret as i watch them roll their eyes at me and walk away.

I was reading a bit of a nice book of poems here by Baudelaire when a co-worker came up behind me. "Oh, hey." They said. "I love that poem!"

"Me too!" I said, delighted one of my co-workers was also a Baudelaire fan.

"Can I have it?" Asked the co-worker.

"You want the book?"

"No, can I just have that poem?"

So I shrugged and started copying out the poem for this person.

"No, just tear out the page." My co-worker said impatiently.

"Oh." I responded. "I can't. It's a library book."

"Pff." The person said. "Like anyone will notice."

"Sorry, I can't." I mumbled. And my co-worker walked away disgusted with me. Later I saw them whispering with someone and pointing at me.

It's hard to find a friend around here.

Maybe I should have torn the page out. It just didn't seem right somehow.

Later that same day a group of us were at the front desk and one of my managers said in a grand invitiation "Who wants a coffee?"

"Me!" I cried out excitedly.

A couple of other people more reservedly expressed interest, and my boss opened up the cash register and took out a couple of twenties.

"Ka-ching." My boss said.

"Can you just take money from the library like that for coffee?" I asked.

"Oh, c'mon, who's gonna care?"

"No thanks." I mumbled embarassedly. "Don't get me one."

The manager shrugged and said "More for us." But I'm pretty sure one of my other co-workers muttered "killjoy" at me under their breath.

Then I had to jealously watch everyone drinking their super fancy coffee drinks while no one talked to me for the rest of the day.

Finally, at the end of the day, when a big group of us were leaving, someone loudly said "Who wants to go downtown, get drunk, and make fun of immigrants?"

Everyone cheered, but I said "Sorry, I can't." in a low voice. 

And someone said "Like we were even asking you." Then they all left together. 

I got in my car and listened to Keith Jarrett on my stereo and maybe cried a little.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm better, or more moral than anyone. I'm not saying I'm right and they're wrong.



I'm just different.

Revisited despite the h8ers

 

Sometimes I like to go back into the history of clerkmanifesto and share something again, feeling that given five or six years to marinate the right sort of clerkmanifesto essay might really be ripe for the world. I especially like to do this when I am going to be away for a bit and need to set up a lot of posts to play out while I am... busy gathering new material.

I also like it because it seems like it will be an easy way to come up with a really good post!

Ha!

First of all, I always end up involved in writing some elaborate introduction for the old post. Like, look at this. You've been reading for hours already. "I wasn't expecting a novel!" some of you may have already muttered while reading this, and we haven't even gotten to the previously written stuff yet. We are still on the fresh writing! Which I am writing right now! 

I thought it was all gonna be a bunch of copy and paste and gleeful chuckling pride in my rich history!

Not that I don't like fresh writing. It's just that I was thinking I would be onto other things like an hour ago.

Second of all, going on a treasure hunt through the history of clerkmanifesto can be a mixed bag for me.

Sometimes it's like: But I'm so delightful, how do I pick just one of these?

And sometimes it's like: No, no, no, no, no, super fast and uncomfortable no, no, no.

And often it's a weird mix of the two. Which is hard to explain.

And third of all even when I find a nice old gem from the past, and I'm all excited about it, it just doesn't seem relevent to anything recent in my life.

At which point I might be inclined to complain to myself: "By this time I could have written two new clerkmanifesto posts! Or, realistically speaking, watched a man eat a twelve pound hamburger with fries on youtube."

But, fortunately, I persevered, and found a soccer post.

I haven't been able to talk about soccer since we made it through the glorious semi finals of The World Cup. At which point everything that happened at the world cup just kind of depressed me, and I didn't want to talk about it. 

But this?

This is a delightful throwback to The Women's World Cup from seven years ago.

Maybe healing is coming?

It is called: 

Sam Kerr. 

And having read this post from seven years ago I thought I'd like to catch up on her career a bit, but only want to report this one thing I learned: 

Kerr has stated that she eats a pasta sandwich before every game.

Sam Kerr

We are holding a very fancy betting pool at my library to celebrate The Women's World Cup. Because $20 here bought a person a randomly selected team and an also random Golden Boot Player (that's the person who scores the most goals in the tournament), loyalties were widely distributed and the library fanbase was scattered across 24 teams.

That was until Australia's Sam Kerr was briefly interviewed following a dramatic come from behind victory against Brazil in game two. She said something to the effect of:

"We don't listen to the h8ers. Me an' the girls showed them and they can go suck on that one."

Perhaps curiously, we all became Sam Kerr fans.

Then, five days later, Sam Kerr scored four goals against Jamaica to propel Australia into the round of 16. At this point Sam Kerr hysteria seized the library staff. Yellow and green started showing up everywhere. People were drinking Fosters in the break room at all hours. Walking by any conversation between co-workers here, one could catch the tang of fake Australian accents, and it was a matter of course to hear the phrase "The h8ers can suck it."

Why Sam Kerr? What captured our imaginations?

We library employees are pretty civil people, not overly given to coarse language. And also we are in the USA where our team looks far more likely to triumph in this World Cup than a scrappy, mixed blessings Australian team with one great player instead of, let's see, seven, no, eight!

But here's the thing: These American women are great. They are admirable. They all seem like people who are going to do well in life. The look like they'd make good Vice Presidents, heads of marketing divisions, Directors of College Athletics Departments, big time Head Coaches. They seem like young, successful people, jocks, crisp and apple pie and strong and lean and off into the upper middle classes and beyond.

And good for them.

But Sam Kerr is easy to picture working at our library, angrily shelving away the afternoon, irritated beyond reason about misfiled items, muttering "h8ers!" to herself. One can naturally see her kicking our automated check in bins to get them working. It is no stretch to envision her here in our back room, grousing to her co-workers about some unpleasant patron, or the indignities of management, inappropriately uttering "they can suck it" as everyone awkwardly wanders away.

Media reviews are mixed at best about Sam Kerr's intemperate remarks. There were plenty of commentators ready to call her classless or claim she was distracting her team. But you gotta expect that kind of noise from the h8ers. We at the library take no particular stand on Sam's rustic expression. That's not the point. 

We simply recognize her somehow, for good or ill, as one of us.

Customer feedback from back when clerkmanifesto was hilarious

 

Feeling that I can't in good conscience show you Dr. Seuss style pictures of flowers yet again, but also as yet unable to do anything other than take more pictures and convert them obsessively, I thought it might be a good idea to dig into the vast clerkmanifesto archives.

I quickly found something! It is a laugh a minute riot from another era.

You're going to love this. And it has no pictures of flowers whatsoever!

It's from eight years ago which weirdly seems not that long ago and yet insanely long ago. You know how time is, as you're held in its maniacal thrall just like me.

I've lightly edited this post as it was so close to perfection I could taste it.

Now it is almost as close to perfection as it was before I edited it. Enjoy!

It is time for our annual customer feedback review. If you would be so kind as to fill out this year's Customer Feedback Survey Form we can immediately begin to make the changes to this blog that you have been longing for. Unless you think this blog is already perfect, in which case we won't have to do anything. Which would be nice, because we're really very, very tired.

So tired...

Deeply tired...

Anyway, please do fill out our form:

Clerkmanifesto Customer Feedback Survey, 2026

My number one concern with clerkmanifesto is

A. None. I think it's perfect! Or like, perfect 30 percent of the time.

B. I'm concerned with how tired you are.

C. Ho boy, concern. Plenty of concerns! Pull up a chair. But I mean it in a good way.

D. There must be some mistake. I'm supposed to be here doing the Taco Bell Customer Survey.

E. The narrow and highly particular range of options on your multiple choice surveys.

I read clerkmanifesto

A. Yes.

B. Er, will I still receive a coupon for one of Taco Bell's delicious chimichilangalaquas?

C. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY!!!!!

D. Answer "C" is making me uncomfortable.

E. Sorry I'm late. Has the survey started yet?

My favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A. When you pretend you're joking.

B. "Favorite" is a very strong word in this context.

C. Its profound obscurity.

D. Is this clerkmanifesto? It's kind of cute. Do you have any flower pictures?

E. I'd really rather not be pinned down to a single letter choice answer. Oh, foiled again!

My least favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A.When the hilarity dies down and I am left sadly and wistfully looking at my computer wondering painfully what it's all about.

B. The free kittens. But not so much the crippled ones. I know that doesn't speak well of me but I must answer honestly.

C. When it awkwardly inserts mentions of its corporate sponsor Taco Bell.

D. When it starts going on about how great it is, even if it totally is great, maybe the most amazing thing ever written for the Internet, a work of towering genius and a shining light in a dark world. It is a masterpiece of beauty, vision, and wisdom, and a gift, truly a gift to humanity like no other. I am ever humbled and inspired by it.

E. Yeah. Same as "D" for me. Or maybe "A", although I thought about "B" too for awhile. What was "E" again?

In conclusion I just really want you to know that

A. A customer feedback survey that is functionally impossible to fill out or submit is hardly likely to be a great font of improvement for your little blog.

B. You are undercharging for clerkmanifesto the blog, but overcharging for your wonderful (but expensive) Clerkmanifesto Tea Cosy.

C. Answer "A" is not a nice person, in case you wondered.

D. Your failure to institute any of my suggestions from your last eleven customer feedback surveys only makes me more optimistic that this one is finally gonna be it!

E. All my favorite answers were "E" up until the last one when, oh, curses! Foiled again!

On the problems of developing technology

 

I suppose this sounds like you're in for a real treatise.

You're not in for a real treatise.

Today is just the usual nonsense. But I do want to talk about "the problems" a little. Over the many years of clerkmanifesto since I started playing with video and photography experimentation, I have noticed a couple of things:

1. The really experimental images and technology heavy work I have made is the work that ages the least well of anything out in the history of clerkmanifesto.

2. It's also the thing that I get most obsessed with, so there's plenty of it!

I hope you don't mind. 

I don't mind.

I mean, I don't mind if you don't mind.

But when I can do something entirely "new" in these realms I get very excited about it. 

But also every few months to a year there's usually a new iteration where I can do the exact same thing so much better. So I get excited about it all over again.

These Dr. Seuss pictures I've been showing are a good case in point. I've been taking certain of my images, sometimes because its the best way to make them work, and sometimes because I've become so enchanted with the resuts, and turning them into Dr. Seuss inspired style versions of themselves for probably a few years now. 

Here, this picture is already from awhile ago. Take a look at me with my Seuss Camera from the woods of Minnesota:

Of course, that is already the Seussified version that I showed here a couple years ago. Here's the original never shown photo of me taken with a regular camera:

As you know lately I have been seussifying some recent flower pictures because it turned out to be the best way to make them come alive and have the charm I saw in the flowers to begin with. I had used this technique before, and was happy with it. But this time around the ai image editors I employed had gone through a couple of notable generational improvements since my last experiments. My prompting and my own editing had also gotten better.

So I was a bit dazzled.

In short I had to now go back and look at how all the right kinds of pictures from my history would look through this amazing new lens!

So, I have a lot of pictures from the past few days.

Here are just a few random ones to start you off with. Hopefully we won't find these delightful wonders too painful when we stumble back upon them in 2029 or whenever: