“Ben Franklin lives!”

One morning, comedian Josh Kornbluth looked in the mirror and saw a face that resembled Benjamin Franklin’s, and with Franklin-esque ingenuity he turned that face into a cottage industry. Kornbluth wrote a monologue, but that wasn’t complete without a costume or a theme song. His show puts Franklin in today’s world, and eventually got Kornbluth on television. At the least he plays Franklin in the ads for The History Channel’s new show on the Founding Father, which airs on December 5.

For the record I’ve pitched a similar idea to friends: Franklin, Jefferson and Washington are brought to the present by a controversial future President. This P.o.t.U.S. plans to gain wider popular support by getting their approval of his policies. It backfires when the current state of the world horrifies them. They escape, travel abroad, and organize a grassroots movement to remake America as a true democracy that is an ally to all nations and enemy to none. If any U.S. History buffs out there have time to help me flesh out this kooky idea into a script, shoot me an email.

Fallujah in Pictures

From my friend Nav: Fallujah in Pictures “underlines the fact that this war, like all wars, is a hideous and savage endeavor against mainly poor, oppressed people.”

2005 Ford Mustang

I saw one of these on a dealer’s lot this weekend. Damn that’s a cool car! Ford brought back the muscle-car-style front, replacing the crappy 90’s rounded version with a grill that looks hungry for asphalt. Henry — we gotta go test drive one!

Cartographer Robinson’s life honored

NPR’s All Things Considered just covered the death of the cartographer behind the Robinson projection. Arthur Robinson taught cartography and physical geography at the mother of my soul from 1945 to 1980. Robinson was born in 1915 and died on October 10th. In 1963 he was commissioned by Rand McNally to make a map that would “create [an] intuitively appealing depiction of the entire world”. He succeeded without a doubt, but for my money Goode’s Interrupted Homosoline Projection is where it’s at. (The Buckminster Fuller Institute version is also quite interesting…)

Gilberto Gil: Open Source is cultural cannibalism…and a good thing

Brazil’s Gilberto Gil, the granddaddy of tropicalismo music, is also the godfather of a huge shift in that country’s attitude toward open source everything. While Microsoft and other entrenched factions are putting up a fight, Gil and others realize the concept of intellectual property is only as useful as the benefits we all can reap together. How does it benefit society that a cash register rings at AOL Time Warner every time you hear the Happy Birthday Song in a movie or on TV? They bought the rights fair and square, but shouldn’t a song so tied in to our cultural celebrations be trademark-free yet? Isn’t it counter to the public’s interest to levy a tax on the most commonly sung song in the English language? If the corporations and their lawyers continue to have their way, the public domain will rarely see new additions. Innovation will slow as rights-holders claim that slight modifications of old ideas constitute new ones. Gil thinks it’s time to reverse the legal course of IP, and that Brazil is the place to do it. Not only has he included a song on Wired’s new Creative Commons Project CD, but, as a politician, is a vocal advocate for Brazil’s adoption of Linux (the open source computer operating system) — yes, the whole country.

Iris Chang found dead

Author of “The Rape of Nanking”, Iris Chang was found dead in her car of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound Tuesday about 80 kilometres south of San Francisco. She is credited with singlehandedly bringing pre-WWII Japan’s brutal massacre of thousands of Chinese to the English-speaking consciousness. Too bad one so young is added to the list of recent high profile obituaries.

PS — If you happen to be looking for a Western name to go by, I think “Iris” is nice.

Unfinished Flesh

Frank found this interactive painting of a woman losing her skin on K10K.

US States by IQ

Somebody made a handy chart of red and blue states organized by IQ. I guess laughing is better than crying…

Update: This page calls the above a hoax, and offers an chart based on average SAT scores.

Why Kerry’s loss is Kerry’s fault

Harry Shearer says it pretty damn well:

I know most Kerry supporters are still stunned/sad today, so maybe you might want to set this note aside for reading over the weekend (after checking out the important gig dates at the bottom!!!). Well I remember liberal friends four years ago being upset with my critique of the Gore campaign, saying I was “blaming the victim”. But already today the internet is abloom with Kerryites salving their wounds by noting how ill-informed the electorate was/is. If one takes liberal rhetoric at face value, the public is the victim of the administration’s policies. So who’s blaming what now?

Anyway, somebody with the non-tin variety of ear should have told the Senator that you don’t use the word “class”–as in “I’m fighting for the middle class”–in public, in America, in an election campaign. We believe in a classless society. Some of us are just richer than others, that’s all. Bill Clinton figured this out; he talked about “those folks who work all day and play by the rules”. Somebody with an ear for coherence should have pushed the Senator into the Grand Canyon when he adlibbed that, knowing what he knows now, he’d still vote for the Iraq war resolution. He was then left for three months dangling on the platform of, “It’s a stupid mistaken war, and I can win it better”. Somebody with a scintilla of knowledge of show business should have told the Senator to read the scripts as written. The adlibbing, when it didn’t get him in trouble (see above), just buried fairly well-written speeches under a mountain of verbal styrofoam popcorn.

Oh, yes, and nobody now alive will ever see a sitting Senator run for President again. Especially one who couldn’t be bothered to tell the country what it was he did in the Senate for 20 years–i.e., run valuable investigations into the Iran-Contra affair and BCCI, a bank that financed drug cartels and terrorism. When Bush taunted him for authoring only five laws in his Senate career, I certainly thought he was going to say, “So now the champion of less government wants more laws?”
Enough. I can’t wait to see his beard.

Bums not voted out

Good morning America. How are you? Hungover like me? It’s a shame only half of you are as disappointed as I am. For the rest of you, here’s what you voted for:

1. Seeing the world as America’s vast backyard and waste dump
2. Killing poor, oppressed people for living under an enemy regime
3. Weakening the separation of church and state, a founding principle of our nation, because you mistakenly believe a person can’t be moral if they don’t have faith in some bullshit patriarchal deity (Jesus was a rebel and would laugh at how dumb and fat you are!)
4. Ignoring scientifically proven solutions to worldwide dilemmas because they vaguely conflict with a book of fables written millennia ago
5. Removing the right of women to decide what’s right for their bodies, themselves
6. Denying men and women the right to live the way they want to because it may offend your sensibilities
7. Eroding our public school system, giving poor and minority children sub-par educations
8. Raping the environment by appointing former timber, oil, and mining executives to protect it
9. Supporting a corporation’s right to pass the bulk of the tax burden onto the middle class, while giving us shittier and shittier jobs
10. Replacing government programs that help people with for-profit ventures, punishing those that need help the most
11. And I won’t even get into the Second Amendment (You lost the Civil War! Get over it!!)

See you when I’m 32! Actually, in 2 years we can reclaim Congress and stanch the bleeding a little.