In loving memory of the
Hitchhiking Robot.
It is dead. It remains dead.
“My love for humans will never fade.” (hitchBOT)
“When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.”
(Robert Bresson, Filmmaker)
11-year-old Gavin Dingman was the talk of the hunting community with his impressive takedown of a rare 12-point albino buck, a specimen estimated to be found in only 1 of every 100,000 births.
In further good news, Gavin’s dad says he will hire a taxidermist to take the carcass and create a full body mount: “It’s too rare and too pretty not to spend the extra money and have the whole thing done.”
After 71 years in this place, social critic and chronicler George Carlin has moved on to the next thing. One small example of his fury and vision can be seen is his take on American education and opportunity in this excerpt from his Who Really Controls America.
What if someone made a pain machine, capable of inflicting unbearable torment from a half mile way? Why then, that someone would have an excellent moneymaker.
See the Silent Guardian by our friends at Raytheon. An extremely useful device for dealing with unruly demonstrators and other problems. Brief video anyone?
“What I have actually heard about this, Socrates, my friend, is that it is not necessary for the intending orator to learn what is really just, but only what will seem just to the crowd who will act as judges. Nor again what is really good or noble, but only what will seem so. For that is what persuasion proceeds from, not truth.”
(Phaedrus talking with Socrates)
Or How Will They Know What to Kill?
Amid the siren call to conformity and consumerism, a thing of worth occasionally emerges from the MTV machine. This time a short and brilliant film about children, labor and the world in which we find ourselves.
The music is Radiohead’s “All I Need.” The project comes from MTV’s Exit campaign against human trafficking & exploitation.
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaugherhouse Five considers Tralfamadorians, time travel and the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Germany, which killed tens of thousands of civilians. Vonnegut was there as a POW. He saw the aftermath of the bombing, an episode that might be said to have altered his comic perspective. Hear him read an excerpt from the book below.
“A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions.”
(E.B. White, 1948, This is New York)
Kurt Vonnegut on Sea Pirates and the brave history of America from his Breakfast of Champions.