Vancouver, BC
I’m out on the west coast of Canada today, enjoying the family and fellowship of designer colleagues attending the Design Currency event… couldn’t be more timely, given that today is also World Graphics Day.
Cheers, mates!
Kabul, Afghanistan (from today’s online New York Times)
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan. (more here)
While I have my doubts that PowerPoint can actually make you stupid, I’d agree that it’s a great tool—in an arsenal of many others—that can readily help portray your stupidity… although in the case of the USA and the coerced “Coalition” still fighting in Afghanistan, that seems to be a foregone conclusion.
Thanks to friend Marie-Aline Oliver for the link.
Redding, Connecticut
Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhome Clemens, passed on one hundred years ago today. The popular American author and humorist is noted (among a great number of other achievements) for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). A friend to presidents, European royalty, artists, and industrialists, and he was also very popular with the common man, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death, he was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature.”
I read many of Twain’s novels when I was young, and I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Twain’s former home in Hartford, Connecticut (where he lived from 1874 to 1891 while writing some of his greatest works) when I was teaching at the Hartford School of Art a few years back—the classic old home has been turned into a museum well worth visiting.
Here are a few of the many bon mots and eloquent lines of advice, wit, and profundity the great Mark Twain left us to ponder:
+ + +
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak out and remove all doubt.
A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living.
The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Noise proves nothing.
Often a hen who has merely laid an egg
cackles as if she laid an asteroid.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive;
but it is lightning that does the work.
Be careful about reading health books.
You may die of a misprint.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds
on the heel that has crushed it.
The most interesting information comes from children,
for they tell all they know and then stop.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Winnipeg, Canada
Dad—you were born on this day in 1920 into the tough conditions of the Russian Civil War,—then happily escaped that conflicted land with your nuclear family to the new frontier of Western Canada a few years later. As I understand it, you’ve been smiling pretty much ever since… at least that’s the most pervasive and enduring trait that comes to my mind and memory (photos don’t lie either :-) I remember a line from a magazine article (back about 40 years ago) that described you as “the genial jut-jawed John Jacob Peters”—still as apt and appropriate a descriptor as anyone could possibly pen, methinks.
Thanks for the faith and positive energy you’ve imbued in my brothers and me (along with the thousands of others whom you have given the better part of your life to)… may the next ten years be your best yet—and may your smile continue to warm the hearts and souls of everyone you meet!
I love you Dad. Happy, happy birthday…
(Thanks to brother Jim for the image scans, from last summer’s momentous family get-together in Pinawa.)
Whatever. (via my writer/philosopher/statistician-friend Filip Spagnoli’s excellent Human Rights blog… not the original image source, as he notes).
