Poster image by Josh MacPhee of justseeds.org

Following is an alphabetical list of the countries bombed by the United States since the end of the Second World War (the citizens of these countries represent roughly one-third of the people on earth)…

Afghanistan 1998, 2001-present

Bosnia 1994, 1995

Cambodia 1969-70

China 1945-46, 1950-53

Congo 1964

Cuba 1959-1961

El Salvador 1980s

Grenada 1983

Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69

Indonesia 1958

Iran 1987

Iraq 1991-present

Korea 1950-53

Kuwait 1991

Laos 1964-73

Lebanon 1983, 1984

Libya 1986 (and again in 2011)

Nicaragua 1980s

Pakistan 2003, 2006-08

Panama 1989

Peru 1965

Somalia 1993, 2008

Sudan 1998

Vietnam 1961-73

Yemen 2002

Yugoslavia 1999

Louisville, Kentucky

From the “a picture is worth a thousand words” file… flashback to a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photo from the Great Depression. No further comment necessary…

Winnipeg, Canada

Here’s a cool ‘tool’ that my friend and colleague Adrian discovered recently…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (from the Wordle website)

You can either enter text yourself or submit a blog/RSS feed for the Java applet to draw from. Visit http://wordle.net/ to learn more or to make your own “word cloud.”

Image shown: the “word cloud” image above was created using the Wordle applet and text from Circle’s website. You can view the image larger here on Adrian’s flickr site.

Winnipeg, Canada

If you’ve ever sat through one of my lectures (or read my book), you know that I frequently quote Marshall McLuhan (an ex-Winnipeger). Enjoy these quick quips of his…

+  +  +  +  +

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers.
They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.

Pretty much says it, methinks… (image source unknown).

Winnipeg, Canada

Doing online image research has become so easy… it almost seems wrong. A quick search for “vintage matchbooks” using Compfight (my favorite flickr™ search tool of late) brought up these beauties (among hundreds more, such as here, here, here and here). I love old paper ephemera (such as matchbooks)—methinks the considerable limitations of scale, art creation, and printing techniques in early times simply served to raise the design bar.

Universal truths about war…

“There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
— The Bible, Matthew 26:52

“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: “Mother, what was war?”
— Eve Merriam

“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
— Blaise Pascal

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
— Jeannette Rankin

“Those who prefer victory to peace will have neither.”
— Anonymous

Winnipeg, Canada

I had a pleasant outdoor lunch at the Forks with old friend Gary Ludwig yesterday (Creative Director at Interbrand in Toronto, back in the ‘Peg for the weekend bar mitzvah of a friend’s son) and the inimitable(?) Dieter Rams came up in conversation. A discussion ensued regarding the intrinsic qualites imbued in Rams’ remarkable products designed for Braun in the 1960s and ’70s (I still use my ergonomically-perfect 30+ year-old Braun ET66 calculator daily—not even a change of batteries in three decades!), and Gary mentioned an article he had seen on Gizmodo recently that reveals the uncanny design similarity between Apple’s products today and Braun products from when we were kids.

When Gary returned to Toronto last night he sent me the link—here are Dieter Rams’ ‘10 principles for good design’ as often cited by Jonathan Ive (the “genius” designer behind Apple’s successful products):

• Good design is innovative.

• Good design makes a product useful.

• Good design is aesthetic.

• Good design helps us to understand a product.

• Good design is unobtrusive.

• Good design is honest.

• Good design is durable.

• Good design is consequent to the last detail.

• Good design is concerned with the environment.

• Good design is as little design as possible.

(Thanks, Gary).

Images: Some direct design comparisons between the Braun products by Rams and the Apple products by Ives. The interface of the new iPhone looks remarkably like my old Braun calculator (which I wouldn’t part with even if you offered me an iPhone in exchange). “Homage? Evolution? Rip-off? Decide for yourself…”

Winnipeg Beach, Canada

During the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed collaborating with ceramist Evelin Richter (my girlfriend) in the creation of a series of pieces that combine stoneware vessels (thrown by Ev) with beach findings (bits of coral, pebbles, etc.). A selection of these works—which we’ve called “Zenish” (approaching “zen,” but perhaps more accurately “wabi-sabi”)—is now on exhibit at the Fishfly Gallery in Winnipeg Beach. I’ve always been an intensely visual person, and so am very happy to be experiencing tactility (better late than never, methinks) through the haptic art-form of ceramics.

As Ev puts it, “These pieces were an exercise in contemplation—combining natural findings with man-made form… the tactile end-results were surprisingly rewarding to mind and spirit…” You can see more of Ev’s works on her new website (designed at Circle and which launched this past weekend) here.

Images: Zenish; generous thrown stoneware basins (200mm to 250mm Ø) fused with merged beach findings; some low-fired to Cone 04 with burnished steel glaze, others wood-fired to Cone 12+ (unglazed, but flame-kissed with warm blushes and ash).

Winnipeg, Canada

I’ll be giving a 30-minute keynote presentation (on Thursday, 25 September) as part of the National Digital Media Day celebrations in Manitoba. My topic is “Do the right thing. Do the thing right,” and will allegedly “contain practical advice, and ‘pithy insights’ from around the world” along with “age-old principles applied to current media scenarios.” I’ll use Circle’s “Maxim Dictum” (a sort of in-house manifesto to work and live by) as an outline. The mixer evening starts at 19:00 and my talk is at 20:00, followed by a “stirring of the proverbial new media pot” with sounds from DJ Lil’Phil who will “mix an eclectic melange of house, disco, techno, electro, down tempo, trip/hip hop, 80s, lounge, and acid jazz” until the wee hours. (It sounds like mine is the sage and sober bit that evening… :-)

The host venue is  the Pastry Castle Café on the corner of Arthur and McDermot in Winnipeg’s Exhange District. Cost is $5 and includes two drink tickets and enough cheese to make a Swiss schoolboy blush.