brainrow

Via a comment on Eolake Stobblehouse’s blog, Chris Jordan is doing artwork that provides perspective on American life:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images.

The linked site shows each image in several scales, to hint at the impact of the full-size work. Staggering stuff.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow compares then and now.

Well, we didn’t say it was a perfect analogy.

Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but I’d sure love to see a “Bush Resigns” headline.

Via Eolake Stobblehouse: Not long after 9/11, The Onion reported from a press conference by God: (Warning: Strong language.)

“Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”

…

“I don’t care what faith you are, everybody’s been making this same mistake since the dawn of time,” God said. “The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don’t even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ but you’ve been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades.”

Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.”

It seems the more “religious” they are, the less they listen to God.

Not politics. Just perspective:

Virginia Tech 33, Baghdad 34.

I try to respect all cultures. I can certainly see how much of modern Western culture is vulgar and might seem offensive in other parts of the world. But this is ridiculous:

Actor Richard Gere has sparked protests in India after kissing Celebrity Big Brother winner Shilpa Shetty at an Aids awareness rally in New Delhi. Demonstrators in Mumbai (Bombay) set light to effigies of the Hollywood star, while protesters in other cities shouted “death to Shilpa Shetty”.

The protesters said Gere insulted Indian culture by kissing the hand and face of the Bollywood actress.

Death to Shilpa Shetty?

Holy … crap.

Memo to the whole world: It’s time to grow up.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling brings us the adventures of Li’l George.

With the army stretched the the breaking point, wrecked by the War in Iraq, people are starting to talk once again about reinstating the draft.

I used to be utterly opposed to the military draft. Now I’m not so sure.

In the current war, only a fraction of the American public — the all-volunteer military and their families — have a life-and-death interest in what happens in Iraq. They bear the burden for all of us. George W. Bush tells the rest of America to “go shopping.”

Bush treats the military like a remote control, casually pointing and clicking. Does the all-volunteer military encourage our political leaders to use other people’s lives recklessly? Or is the problem Mr. Bush himself?

Mark Shields, on the PBS NewsHour on Friday:

George Wilson, who’s a wonderful military journalist, did a book called … The Infantryman. It was a landmark book. And he interviews a man in there, Colonel Steve Siegfried, combat veteran of Vietnam. And he made the argument that, in a time of war, extended war — this is four years — that the country had to have a draft.

And Steve Siegfried said this: Armies don’t fight wars. Countries fight wars. And if a country isn’t willing to fight a war, it should never send an army.

It’s a debate worth having.

Via animation fan site Cartoon Brew, here’s a hilarious and, yes, deeply offensive parody of an animation fan site. (Warning: I’m not kidding about “offensive.”)

The words are famous now.

They weren’t famous thirty-seven years ago this evening, when they came down from the spacecraft Odyssey, the Apollo 13 command module. Astronaut Jack Swigert said, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

CAPCOM Jack Lousma radioed back, “This is Houston. Say again, please.”

On the private voice communication loops of the flight controllers, you can hear this:

Astronaut Swigert: Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Unidentified voice #1: What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?

Unidentified voice #2: We’ve got more than a problem.

And “Houston, we have a problem” became a part of American language.

Lead flight director Gene Kranz told the team of flight controllers working to solve the problem that “Failure is not an option,” and that phrase, too, has become a part of the language. It is a phrase that has been mightily misused.

Kranz did not say “Failure is not a possibility.” At that moment, failure seemed highly probable. The astronauts were about 200,000 miles from earth, headed away from home and safety. They had only the supplies and equipment aboard the spacecraft. The flight controllers had to figure out how to make those supplies last long enough to bring the spacecraft all the way back to earth.

Nobody knew whether success was even possible. It might have happened that there was simply not enough air, or water, or electricity. It might have happened that the spacecraft’s heat shield was fatally damaged by the explosion that had rocked the ship. It might have happened that the Apollo 13 astronauts never had a chance.

Kranz’s point was this: if your calculations say there’s not enough water, try again. Did you make a mistake? Did you overlook something? How about the cooling water that circulates through tiny tubes in the moon suits? Is there enough if we come back faster? What can we can do to come back faster? Maybe this task is impossible. But if we lose these astronauts, it won’t be because we stopped thinking.

Advocates of the continuing tragedy in Iraq like to say, “Failure is not an option.” But George W. Bush has made failure the only option. The Iraq Study Group worked the problem and came up with new approaches that might have offered just the ghost of a chance of salvaging the situation. Their recommendations — including diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors — were bipartisan and unanimous. Bush crumpled up those recommendations and ordered up more of the same policies that had utterly failed so far.

If George W. Bush had been lead flight director 37 years ago, he would have insisted that the Apollo 13 moon landing go ahead as scheduled.

We’ve got more than a problem.

In A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

From Cat’s Cradle:

I did not know what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me — that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.

The record was called Cat House Piano. It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.

Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.

“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, “Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed a boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as the ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.'”

I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”

Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone — and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.

Her eyes were closed.

I was flabbergasted.

She was great.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.

My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

You can find audio samples of Meade Lux Lewis here.

In January, Apple Computer, Inc. announced it was changing its name to Apple, Inc. –no “Computer” — and got into the cell-phone business when Steve Jobs demonstrated the iPhone.

The iPhone may look like a scaled-down version of the Macintosh, but Apple says we will not be allowed to write programs or install third-party software on the iPhone. Customers will also be unable to select their cellular carrier — iPhone buyers are locked into a two-year contract with Cingular.

Today, Apple delayed the promised spring release of the next version of Mac OS X until October because of iPhone:

Apple on Thursday released a statement noting that Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” won’t be released until October. The cause of the delay? The iPhone.

“iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is,” reads a statement published by the company.

Getting the iPhone ready for its June launch has had an unintended consequence, however: QA and “some key software engineering” resources allocated to Mac OS X needed to be diverted from their work to finish the iPhone. As a result, Apple won’t release Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, as it had first planned.

Shades of Microsoft’s oft-delayed “Longhorn,” now finally shipping as Windows Vista.

I’m guessing that as October approaches, Leopard will be delayed until 2008.

Atrios has another excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five:

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh boy – they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Amen.

Yesterday, I might have written what I believed — “Kurt Vonnegut is the greatest living American novelist” — and I don’t think I would have faced much of an argument. Oh, there might have been feeble peeps from here or there for Norman Mailer or Philip Roth or Gore Vidal, but nothing resembling a serious challenge.

Today, I don’t have the faintest idea who the greatest living American novelist is. “Kurt is up in heaven now.”

Today, I will write what I believe — “Kurt Vonnegut was the greatest American novelist of the 20th Century” — but that won’t go unchallenged. His books blow the doors off Hemingway’s, I’ll say that. His best work stands toe to toe and nose to nose with Steinbeck’s best, and his weaker stuff is a lot better than Steinbeck’s weaker stuff. But I guess you compare best to best, so I can only say this with complete confidence: “Vonnegut was one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th Century.”

This is silly, you know — comparing and ranking very different writers, trying to pick the one winner and champion, turning everything into a horse race. I feel stupid and pathetic, because what I really want to do is write something with just one percent of the grace and power of a single sentence in a Kurt Vonnegut book.

In the previous blog post, I said, “So it goes.” I look around on other blogs. Lots of people are saying “So it goes.” Those who have read Slaughterhouse-Five understand. To everyone else, it looks like a kind of secret handshake. I can’t explain it to you, either. Every sentence in a Vonnegut novel is part of a carefully woven fabric, gaining power and meaning from every other sentence. Not one word is wasted.

I avoided Vonnegut for years. I had heard that his writing was… well, different. At that time, there were some authors noted for their verbal stunt work and determination to boggle the reader’s mind and leave him feeling stupid. But Kurt Vonnegut wrote to communicate. He had something to say. He said it so well it boggled the mind. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadorians were aliens who lived in the fourth dimension, who could see past, present and future all at once:

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes == “with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

On a trip to distant Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim looks at some Tralfamadorian novels:

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out — in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

“Exactly,” said the voice.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Kurt Vonnegut is gone, and he is still here. The many marvelous moments remain.

Read the books.

Kurt Vonnegut has died.:

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan.

So it goes.

He was the great American novelist.

I will try to say something appropriate later.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Sometimes the only thing you can do is howl:

I’m sitting here trying to find the words I need to describe these emotions that I feel because I know how I feel. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. And I know that the man — the person — the allegedly human being — responsible doesn’t have a single damn clue about what he’s doing to real people.

And I don’t think he’d care if he did.

He’s an active voice decider in the first person, but things only go wrong for him in the third person passive. He’s the one who’s right and anyone who disagrees is wrong, and he knows that’s the way it really is way deep down in his twisted little truthy gut. He’s right, the rest of us are wrong, so it’s fine to sneer at opponents and blame them for the things that he’s doing now.

And that’s why I read this morning that 15000 troops will be extended in Iraq. That’s why I read this morning that 13000 troops in National Guard and Reserve units that have deployed once already are being told that they’re going back into the box. And that’s why I read this morning that President George W. Bush said today that if Congress doesn’t do what he — George Bush — wants Congress to do, “some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines” and other military families “could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated” and that “this is unacceptable.”

Yes, he really said that.

…

And this is where words leave me, and where emotions overwhelm me. People I know, people I love, are caught up in this madness, but this twisted little freak is acting like it’s a game. He’s standing up there, he’s ignoring his mistakes that got us there, he’s demanding that we ignore his mistakes and let him keep doing whatever the hell he wants because he’s the Decider-in-Chief, and real people, real families, are left twisting in the wind because we’re the leverage that he hopes will force Congress to bow to his royal will.

The writer’s wife is serving in Iraq now.