International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

Oxfam Asian Earthquake and Tsunami Fund

UNICEF Tsunami Relief

Give to the American Red Cross with the credit card you already have on file at amazon.com.

“In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

— Susan Sontag

“I keep thinking that in a few years, we’re going to be seeing a lot of used cars with ‘phantom ribbons’ burned into the fender due to paint fading everywhere but under the ribbon.”

— RalphSlate, MetaFilter

Yu-Mex: why the per capita incidence rate of sombrero-wearing in Yugoslavia skyrocketed during the early 1950s. (via memepool)

“Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.”

— David Byrne

Last week’s hip Web technology was the Google Suggest beta, an impressive usage of JavaScript to provide suggestions for your search criteria as you type.

If you’re like me, you wondered how it was done. Here, Chris Justus reformats the JavaScript and provides code commentary on it. (Warning: if you wouldn’t be interested in an article that describes XMLHTTP/XMLHttpRequest objects as “the new black”, don’t click this link.)

“Look at an infantryman’s eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.”

Bill Mauldin, like many of his generation, had the opportunity to experience and achieve much at a young age. He won the Pulitzer Prize at 23 for his work as an editorial cartoonist during World War II. The greatest cartoonist of the war, Mauldin’s images documented the everyday experience from the perspective of the common infantryman in Europe.

Often skewered by his cartoons, General Patton disliked Mauldin and would have censored his work if Eisenhower hadn’t prevented it. Patton felt that Mauldin was disrespectful, that his images bred discontent—he was and they did, and the soldiers loved him for it.

At the end of the war, Mauldin wanted to have his archetypical GIs, Willie and Joe, die in combat like so many average Joes had, but Stars and Stripes, the US military newspaper, prevented it.

Samples of Maudlin’s work from Stars and Stripes.

“Paper Mario is also sweet. How sweet, you ask? Well, I spent 12 hours playing it yesterday. Except for the 2 breakfast sandwhiches I ate when I woke up, I didn't even eat. I had Paper Mario for sustenance, and it was plenty.”

— Bung Ree at chaoslogic

Our family spent this Sunday at The Modern. It was the kids’ first time to go to an art museum, though we’ve gone to our local science and history museum several times. Annette and I had been talking about going this weekend by ourselves but decided there was no reason for the whole family not to go instead.

Art is seen as something that one needs an extensive education—or at least good breeding—to appreciate. The learning curve apparently presented by the self-referential and perceived-to-be-insular nature of so much twentieth-century art is partially to blame; a media-soaked culture that teaches art appreciation primarily as a college class for liberal arts majors doesn’t help.

Recently, I had an epiphany: that modern art’s level of approachability is exactly opposite from how it is popularly perceived. Though it’s thought of by many as the least accessible of artistic movements, modernism is in fact among the most accessible, the most democratic. Duchamp claimed the primacy of the artist by hanging a urinal in a museum and calling it art—art because he, an artist, said it was. By contextualizing the profane into art’s “sacred” world, he forced viewers to look at this everyday object in other-than-everday ways. This is also a claim of the authoritativeness of the viewer: Duchamp didn’t show us a particular aspect of the object or his interpretation and impression of it, he showed us his work in a way that lets us legitimately apply our own perceptions and feelings to it. Yes, it’s art about art—a fantastic starting point to explore art on other themes.

Most people look at abstract expressionism for the first time as teenagers or adults and are frightened by the lack of form, the lack of something recognizable to study and appraise on its literal resemblance to our visual perceptions. Primitivist works which recall humanity at its most artistically unsophisticated seem scary to someone who feels that they immediately need to be getting “something more” from viewing it than their inevitable reaction, borne from the realist nature of the recorded media forms with which they’re most familiar: “that looks like something a child could do.”

I dislike (and distrust) listen-to-the-children-for-they-are-pure-and-true stories at least as much as the next person, but there’s some truth to it this time. Six-year old Julie had as valid opinions about many of the works at The Modern as Annette and I did; there were pieces about which she showed me more than I showed her.

It’s never occurred to her that art is something to be made and enjoyed only by people who are knowledgeable about art. Drawing colors and forms, then considering her emotions about her work and what she sees in it aren’t things a child has to learn, they’re things she would have to unlearn.

Admission to The Modern is free of charge on Wednesdays and the first Sunday of each month.

The guest host on tonight’s “Late Late Show” (formerly of “with Craig Kilborn” fame) looks a lot like Mr. Kilborn. He also dresses like and even moves like Craiggers; but most of all he just has a certain Kilbornian je ne sais quoi about him.

Except that he’s about a decade younger, so it’s like watching Thanksgiving Day football on TV when the teams are wearing throwback uniforms from the 50’s but most of the players are black and there’s a computer-generated yellow virtual first down line — Craig of “Daily Show” fame is talking with guests about movies that just came out… how can this be?!

The guy’s just twenty-three yet seems very confident and has such presence that I should be really impressed but my mind is convinced he’s just acting… acting as if he was Craig Kilborn.

Annette has been vegetarian for four years today.

Congratulations!