or Potato Two, or second laminated wooden potato.

This genre – I am thinking of patenting, or, should I discover that there is a patent holder I’d be willing to buy, or if that holder is unwilling to part with it I don’t know, I’m lost, or, if I discover that such laminated wooden potatoes are an indispensable part of human history and archaeologists encounter them all the time, then I just have to re-think everything.

I don’t know why.  It is as if there is all this beauty sitting around, in the form of wood, and the act of specific representation would only detract – why a duck, why a leaping antelope (and one so poorly executed, at that), why even an egg, because an egg has algorithmic requirements – violate them and it’s not an egg.  But a potato?  It is hard for a simple man to violate the idea of a potato.

Behold that perfectly irregular yet vaguely oblong shadow.  Does it not have the potato je ne se qua?  Another wrinkle I wondered about, along the lines of whether the laminated wooden potato was already a thing of historical significance, was whether perhaps the National Academy of France perhaps had elevated the ‘stratifié bois de pomme de terre’ already to a place where my experience and remarks could never have any significance.  I’m just too afraid to research this point.

This particular potato, the second of my works in the genre after the now progenitor (Potato One), is made of a red gum eucalyptus, a spalted maple, some orange osage, and perhaps cherry but more likely butternut as the fourth wood.  I focused specifically on the irregularity on this one.

and I think that part came out pretty well.  I’m sorry the photography here is only marginal.  If you click on an image I think you’ll find rewarding detail, but the composition is certainly inferior.

Why are wooden potatoes made?  What made the crater near the Yucatan peninsula?  Is there any connection?  How does the fate of the world as we know it depend on fundamental things that we do not understand?