Category Archives: culture

Negative Capability (Two Toys for the War on Terror)

So, John Keats famously coined the term Negative Capability, by which he meant the ability to observe and contemplate the world without succumbing to the impulse to cram that experience into a rational framework. To Keats, this ability to live with mystery, with doubt, with uncertainty, was key to the appreciation and creation of beauty.

In modern usage (in my experience), people often use the term negative capability to refer to the universal human capacity to hold two contradictory perceptions or beliefs at the same time.

That’s sort of how I feel about these items, which invoke their contradictory feelings in very different ways. I want to say that each is simultaneously compelling and disturbing, but somehow that undersells the complexity of the response. In one case, the complex response is clearly deliberate. In the other case, maybe not so much.  See what you think.

The first is this art project called Casualties of War (link), which really conveys all of its own complex resonances without explanation.

Second is this figurine, issued on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and immortalizing the death of Osama bin Laden. In this case, I think the figurine would elicit your negative capability on its own, but the video really heightens the effect.

The green army figures are not for sale, but the Obama figure is.

Rick Perry: The Air-Safety Candidate

So, I had previously linked to the story about how Texans are statistically more likely to be executed than to die in a plane crash. It kept rolling around in my mind, though, so here’s this.

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=54
Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/54.jpg

For the record, I’m not actually personally opposed to the death penalty. What I am opposed to is the unequal treatment people receive under the justice system based on factors like race and wealth. Also, when the government is perfectly willing to execute someone whom they know to have been falsely accused in the name of not looking weak on crime.

The numbers I used were based on the 2009 Texas population and a generic American 1 in 11 million per year plane crash death rate, which I got from here.

Duane Edward Buck (whose guilt in a double homicide is not in question) is scheduled to be executed on September 15. Apparently in Texas, likelihood of committing future crimes is an important factor in applying the death penalty. The dubious part was that Buck’s race was explicitly cited as a factor in his future dangerousness. You can read more here.

The Galileo bit is in reference to Perry’s idiotic statement about Galileo and climate change, about which you should read this.

The Week in Hooters (with video!)

So, this week brought us a veritable twin peaks of news relating to Hooters, the restaurant Americans go to for the articles.

First, on Friday evening, there was the Vampire-at-Florida-Hooters incident, which seems to have gone something like this. Josephine Rebecca Smith, a 22-year-old Pensacola resident, was dropped off at a Shell station, where she was waiting for a ride from a relative. While waiting there, she met 69-year-old Morton Ellis.

Ellis was hanging out on the front porch of a vacant Hooters, as you do.

Ellis invited Smith to join him on the porch, and proceeded to fall asleep. Next thing he knew, Smith was on top of him, telling him that she was a vampire, and biting chunks of his face off. Ellis somehow managed to get away from her in his motorized wheel chair, and call the police from back at the Shell station.

When Smith was later arrested, police reported that she was half naked, covered in blood, and recalled nothing of the incident.

Which sounds a lot more like a werewolf attack, if you ask me.

Second, in a move that is in no way a crass exploitation of human tragedy, Hooters released this video, which seems to be titled “Hooters® Remembers”:

To help cleanse your palette, now, I’d like to take you back to 1985. It was a simpler time, when millions of teenage girls had non-ironic crushes on George Michael, the only thing we had to fear was impending nuclear holocaust, and we danced. How did we dance, you ask? Like a wave on the ocean, that’s how.

USA voted coolest nation

So, you remember back in Junior High School, how there was that kid who seemed really cool because he had all this cool stuff, and he was the first one to get a moustache, and everybody laughed at his jokes?

But then you got to High School, and, looking back on it, you think that maybe he was just sort of a bully who picked fights with people for no reason, and stole people’s lunch money?

And then, after college, you go back to visit your parents, and there’s that same guy, still hanging out talking about how cool he is and flexing his muscles, but now he’s really fat, and he doesn’t even have a job?

Yeah, well, according to a poll by the social networking site Badoo, the United States is the coolest country in the world.

The top ten most coolest nationalities are:

1.    American          
2.    Brazilians          
3.    Spanish          
4.    Italians          
5.    French          
6.    British          
7.    Dutch          
8.    Mexican          
9.    Argentinian          
10.    Russian

The five least cool?

1.    Belgians          
2.    Poles          
2.    Turks          
4.    Canadians          
5.    Germans

Celebrate the USA’s coolness dominance over Belgium with this gem. Available for purchase here.

via Yahoo News

Rachel Uchitel, one of America’s heroes

So, there’s this little item from the New York Post, which really should be read in its one-paragraph entirety, because it’s a little bit unbelievable. In it, Rachel Uchitel, referred to here as “Tiger Woods’ alpha mistress” talks about the blessings of the fact that her fiance died in the 9/11 attack. Among the other good things that came from his death is the fact that she is not now a “fat housewife with three kids.”

There’s still time, though, as she is apparently considering having children with her current boyfriend. If you want to know how good an idea that is, she is quoted as saying, “I never wanted them . . . but I know how much I love my dogs, and I think I’d make a good mother to my own kids.”

Yes, we all think that.

Happy Labor Day from Darwin Eats Cake

So, today is Labor Day here in the US. Todd and Eleonora are celebrating with story-time:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=52
Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/52.jpg

Santa Fe Institute colleague Sam Bowles has pointed out (via Ronda Butler-Villa) that:

“Labor Day” was promulgated (in 1892) to distance America from the worldwide May Day celebrations of workers in all countries. It is a working class holiday that was initiated to commemorate a general strike in Chicago in 1886, and the anarchists who were hanged (after a highly political show trial) shortly thereafter, allegedly for their involvement in the Haymarket affair.

 Another successful instance of the “hey, look at this shiny thing” strategy working perfectly.

Jonny Quest Stop Motion

So, if you’re old enough, you’ll remember the short-lived cartoon Jonny Quest.  Roger D. Evans has recreated the show’s opening sequence in stop-motion animation. It’s just . . . wow.


Jonny Quest Opening Titles from Roger D. Evans on Vimeo.


Now go to his website, where you can see just how much work went in to every one of these shots. Then rewatch the video and be amazed all over again.

via Boing Boing.

Join, or Die

So, apparently, there is an auction going on right now for a 1754 newspaper that was the original publication of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Join, or Die” editorial cartoon. In reading the description for the item, I learned some things. (Reading, who knew?) While this cartoon is primarily associated with the Revolutionary War, and the need to unify against England, it was actually originally a call for the colonies to unify against the French in the run-up to the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War to non-Americans). Shortly after the publication of the cartoon, Franklin attended a meeting of colonial delegates in Albany, where he proposed the creation of a Federal government charged with coordinating defense among the colonies.

Everyone else said no.

Franklin’s editorial cartoon lumped the New England colonies into a single unit, presaging the NFL. The slogan, of course is a long-time favorite of many religious movements.

Despite not forming a Federal government, the colonies came out of that war just fine, and the war’s outcome actually paved the way for the colonies’ westward expansion. Which has to make you wonder if, at the outset of the Revolution, Franklin didn’t seem a bit like the boy who cried wolf.

Kate Beaton, the genius behind the history-themed webcomic Hark, A Vagrant, already knew that Franklin was repurposing the cartoon:

If you want to own this, you can place your bid here. The minimum bid is $50,000, and the auctioneers expect a final price between $100,000 and $200,000. As of now, the number of internet/mail/phone bids that have been places is, um, zero. I guess newspapers really are dead.

via Boing Boing