No. 135. Call me Cordless. He was working diligently yesterday afternoon when his least favourite person, art critic Donald Bracelet, barged into his studio unannounced and clearly overexcited: he had brought his newly acquired 1937 Cord automobile to show him. This was surprising in at least two ways. First, he hadn't talked to Bracelet for more than a year, having had little respect for the kind of guff he wrote. Second, art critics couldn't afford classic automobiles. Most of them couldn't afford dinner. So what was this visit about? The wondrous aesthetics of the venerable Cord? Probably not. It was more likely just to show off. "How can you afford a 1937 Cord?" I asked the hitherto impecunious art critic. He looked momentarily abashed--but only momentarily. "Grandfather Bracelet died," he told me. "The Cord had belonged to him." I tried to fight down my envy which was rising volcanically in my gorge. "With great cars comes great responsibility," I said, as solemnly as I could. He scowled at me--as only an art critic can scowl..

No. 134: Plumbob Down. At first he reveled in the infallible vertical truth of his big cast iron plumbob. But it wasn't long before its unfailing rectitude began to make him restless ("mankind cannot bear too much reality," as T.S. Eliot had once reminded us). Sometimes, it's correctness began to seem almost smug. He knew mere objects couldn't express superiority, but he felt this quietly self-sufficient plumbob somehow did. So he took it down. As it lay now on his studio floor, he began to feel that while the ballistic plumbob itself was a bit oppressive, he really loved its hanger and the way it had been so carefully wrapped with hemp rope. The thing was no longer a plumbob now, but a freestanding two-part sculpture, with one heavy, dense part and one evanescent part. The wrapped hanger reminded him of the work of sculptor Kai Chan, and so, in his mind, he dedicated that part of the piece to him.

#133: Flowerbob. His cast iron plumbob did an admirable job of showing him what was vertical, what was really on the up and up, and he appreciated it. But there were times when the huge, hulking thing struck him as a little severe. He still wanted a reliable, unfailing truth device, but he fancied it in more lyrical terms. To that end, he laboriously carved a big, wooden tulip-plumbob, which, when it swung to and fro in his studio, seemed to scatter benediction as well as the gravity news.

No. 132. A Moral Machine He had asked a friend to forge him a big iron pendulum. As extravagant as this sounds, it seemed a matter of some urgency to him. He had become so suffused with half-truths, media evasion, bureau-speak, cultural waste and cruelty in high places that it was all making him ill. He had more than his fill lately of what playwright Tennessee Williams used to refer to (as often as he could) as "the powerful smell of mendacity." The pendulum was a glorious corrective to all that. It always told the truth. It always showed you what was truly vertical--and, in an age of poisonous ambiguity like ours, that was a lot to know.