Jaime Cullum: He's a Favorite of Mine

Click here to see and hear the British "Jazz Elf."

Death Race 2014

Smell the fresh pretzel bread. Watch the many, many rings of the circus.

“Near Calvin College an imprudent coed found herself too far from cover when the Racer suddenly came streaking down the campus. Frantically she sprinted for safety, but she didn’t have a chance with a driver like Willie behind the wheel. The razor-sharp horn on the right fender sliced through her spine so cleanly that the jar wasn’t even felt inside the car.

“Leaving town the Racer was in luck again. An elderly woman had left the sanctuary of her stone-walled garden to rescue a straying cat. She was so easy to hit that Willie felt a little cheated…”

“…And for some reason he kept remembering the belatedly pleading look in the old woman’s eyes as he struck her. Funny that should stay with him…”

— The Racer (1956) by Ib Melchior

This short story, the inspiration for the 1975 Roger Corman film Death Race 2000, is one of those science fiction works that posits that the bored, amoral dwellers in the future will enjoy murder as a spectator sport. Like Rollerball, or The Tenth Victim, or Hunger Games.

Far-fetched, you say?

Let’s face it. In 1954, William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies shocked the reading public with its story of schoolboys devolving into murderous savages. Now, I suspect it would bore us. Not a high enough body count.

Combine the 21st century American factors of the ubiquitous cult of guns — now used to slaughter children daily in an epidemic to which Americans remain resolutely indifferent — and “reality” TV shows in which callousness and treachery are encouraged and richly rewarded.

Tell me what that equation adds up to.

Steadily worsening economic and environmental conditions make disaster commonplace, and numb the capacity for empathy. Assassins and prostitutes abound as popular culture role models. A man who stalks and guns down an unarmed teenage boy is not only acquitted, he is cheered. The United States blows wedding parties to bloody bits with flying robot bombs.

Look down that road as we race along. Can you see the finish line yet?

Wit and Logical Fallacy

Alexander Woollcott

Writing to a friend in 1942, Alexander Woollcott used the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy to comic effect.

“It may please you to know that one year ago, General Eisenhower was a lieutenant colonel,” he wrote. “When men of ability are needed, the Army has always known how to bring them through the ranks. I, you might recall, was similarly promoted from private to sergeant in the last war, and you know how well that came out.”

“Post hoc ergo propter hoc” is Latin for “After this, therefore because of this.” It’s a propaganda technique used frequently by the confused and the intellectually dishonest — as, for example, when fundamentalist Christians claim that the existence of gay people causes hurricanes and earthquakes.

Raven of Justice

A raven comic book hero? How could I possibly resist?

To quote Atomic Avenue, "Eb’nn the Raven was found wandering in the desert wasteland with no food or water by his friend Jack the Rabbit. Recovering from his dehydrating trauma, Eb’nn decides to dress like the Man With No Name and become a bounty hunter. With nothing but his six-gun, his wits, and a foot-long beak, Eb’nn tracks and captures criminals who flee from the long arm of the law.

“With a western tableau out of a Sergio Leone film and no humans in sight, Eb’nn takes on such villains as Doctor Leo Phylum and Dirty Dingo Dawg, the meanest hombre this side of Doggy Daddy. This is pure anthropomorphic western, distinguished by sparse but effective animal artwork.”

A short-run character from 1985-‘86.

Life Here in the Skinner Box

The hunger for constant, instant digital stimulation has made Skinner Box pigeons of the lot of us. The need for the digital fix turns out to be as compulsive as yanking the levers on a slot machine.

And easily distracted minds are easily gulled minds. 
Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein's book “On Rumors” is a reminder that the job of what's left of professional journalism in the digital age is not merely to inform members of the public about factual, relevant, interesting information they don't know, but also to "de-inform" them about the things they THINK they know, but don't.

The Sum of All Guns

By Peter Clough

America has an actual problem here. 

It is clear that whatever cultural coherence we may have had in the past is rapidly dissolving in the face of widespread existential hysteria.

Our heritage is deeply informed by our historical antecedents — from religious intolerance, treasure hunters, marginalized ethnic groups, and classicist theories (slavery).

Our devotion to the settlement of disputes among these diverse groups by the use of force continuously interrupts our revolutionary ideals of a nation built around rule of law, settlement of differences through negotiation and compromise, and power balancing.

These latter philosophical principles, so recently arrived in modern human history, seem utterly counter-intuitive to an impatient and poorly educated people — a people who have come to find a grudging unity only under circumstances of external threat. Domestic discord is our de facto national obsession.

To deal with this dilemma is the task of liberal people everywhere. Because these important ideals are so obscure and airy to so many people, the work is singularly difficult, frustrating, ridiculed, and visionary.

This is not simple. But the option is not very pleasant.

The Lancet of Language

Caricature by William Auerbach-Levy

“I’m delighted with a story James Hilton told me the other day about a history exam in Oxford,” confided Alexander Woollcott to his intimate friends, those six million people who listened to his 1930s Town Crier broadcasts on CBS radio.

“In answer to the question, ‘What do you know about the Lombard League?’ one of the students correctly wrote down the word, ‘Nothing.’ For that, the examiners were about to give him a zero when they had the grace to realize that the real error lay in the sloppiness of the question. So they gave him full credit.

“I was delighted by that story because in matters of speech, it’s not elegance that interests me but exactness. Precision. Surgical precision.

“I suggest that those of us whose trade is in words, whether put down on paper or tossed into the patient airwaves, and all those whose job it is to teach that trade, might better concentrate on the really grievous injury done to our medium every day by those who so ignore the primal, eldest meaning of a word that eventually it loses its sharp edge as an instrument, its exact value as currency.”

Woollcott went on to illustrate with the meaning of the words “prone” and “supine” — terms that were even then becoming pointlessly indistinguishable, but had originally been usefully sharp and distinct.

Source: “Smart Aleck: The Wit, World and Life of Alexander Woollcott” by Howard Teichmann