Paul Ruebens was one of the few celebs I had sort-of hoped to meet because I had a personal story I thought they would enjoy.
I vividly remember watching the first episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. I was a teenaged nerd, too old for it, but was curious.
The air of chaos built with meticulous craft awed me.
I was particularly struck by the genius of the Secret Word Of The Day. On Playhouse, Pee-Wee announced that for the rest of the day, if someone spoke the Word — that first one was “fun” — everyone should yell and wave their hands. They did it several times that episode, to the perplexity of the characters who had not gotten the Word.
I pictured adults across the country baffled by kids bursting into mysteriously synchronized pandemonium. Kids delighted by their shared secret. A perfect gently transgressive kid delight.
After watching Playhouse, Teen Nerd Me ate breakfast, hopped onto a bus, and attended a series of talks at UCLA by local science fiction writers, because of course I did. Dr. Greg Bear’s talk, informed by the research he had done for his then-new novel Blood Music, was the first time I heard about nanotechnology.
During that talk, Dr. Bear said, “XYZ would have applications which would be a lot of fun.”
And hearing the Word Of The Day, the Playhouse did its work and before I realized what I was doing, I reflexively waved my hands and exclaimed “aaaaaah!”
😧
But I was not the only one. Almost half of the audience of a couple of hundred nerds also yelled and waved their arms at hearing Pee-Wee’s Word Of The Day!
Bear looked out at us in astonishment.
I will never forget the look on his face, or what he said.
“All of you watched Pee-Wee’s Playhouse this morning, too?”
I've spent a fair bit of time studying and thinking about the fate of the modern Levant, the question to which Sharon devoted his life, and it’s really fucking complicated. When talk turns to Israel, I typically wind up arguing with whoever's in the room. In loopy lefty circles, that typically means defending Israel by patiently explaining the history of the region — trying to stick to those precious few things that are clearly agreed upon as fact — to people who really don’t know anything about it. In staunchly Zionist circles, it typically means criticizing Israel by painstakingly distinguishing Arab Palestians from Syria or Egypt or Jordan, pre-’67 from post-’67. In more daring circles, it may mean talking about how Zionism fits into the history of nationalism and European imperialism, asking why Israel was even a good idea in the first place, or reflecting on whether Brooklyn isn't the New Jerusalem.
So my second thought about Sharon is complicated.
On the first day after a person’s death, I try to honor the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead. I gritted my teeth and did it for Reagan. But I cannot do it for Sharon. I have no tears to cry for him.
Yes, Sharon has been at war with a real injustice, fighting for a people wronged by history. But he has made his war against the wrong enemy, the Arab Palestinian people, by despicable means, awash in the blood of innocents. He has failed as a leader of his own people, robbing them of their honor, their opportunities for peace, and the truth. He is one of the principal midwives of our era of terrorism, leaving a curse for all humanity. We are all well rid of him — even, and perhaps especially, the Jews of Israel.
Israeli Jews sometimes reference Exodus in calling themselves (mixing self-deprecation and pride) עַם-קְשֵׁה-עֹרֶף: “a stiff-necked people”. This is, of course, both true and false — and vividly so of Sharon. I hold distant hope than now, without him, that will change.
That’s a picture taken by Matt Harris of the spontaneous memorial to Steve Jobs in front of the Apple San Francisco store tonight.
I am moved by this. I am kin to the people who did this.
And yet earlier today, I invested hours and a big chunk of money into procuring and ferrying supplies for the Occupy San Francisco folks. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest of the unjust wealth — and more importantly, of the unjust power — of the wealthiest people in America. And make no mistake, Steve Jobs was one of those guys.
Let me underline that. I hesitated to say this today, not wanting to speak ill of the dead (and I did my little unalloyed appreciation in that spirit earlier), but it’s important to understand that an important but mostly-unhearalded part of Steve Jobs’ business mojo was his understanding of manufacturing. It was the main focus of his attentions during the last few years before he was forced out of Apple in the mid-80s, and his attention to manufacturing is integral to Apple’s current ability to field devices that deliver more for the money than competitors. So when it came out that conditions in Chinese iPhone factories were so horrific that workers were driven to suicide, there was no doubt in my mind that while he likely didn't know the specifics of the story before they came out in public, he did know fundamentally the kind of work situation at his suppliers. When the story came to light, Jobs didn't rush to change what Apple was doing but rather actively defended what Apple had done. I am very clear on that. I am very clear that though this may be the most horrifying skulduggery Apple has perpetrated at Jobs’ direction, it’s not the only example by a long shot.
How can I reconcile this with the urge to be among those building an altar to a fallen CEO?
Let me offer something I have said about Apple under Steve Jobs for years. Apple is a vast machine for making exactly the tools that Steve Jobs wants for himself, and in order to pay for the exorbitant cost of making them it sells copies of Steve's toys to all the rest of us.
People in the industry chuckle when I say that because it describes an important part of how Apple works, but I say it now in order to confess that there’s an important way in which my quip gets it exactly wrong. Just yesterday I pointed to an article by blind blogger Austin Seraphin saying that the iPhone is “the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever.” Apple has aggressively worked on accessibility for users who are blind or deaf or have other limitations, an effort that makes no “business sense” but surely makes human sense if you read that or any of the countless other articles about what a boon the iPhone has been to the blind. Today I see Susie Bright saying that her pioneering magazine of lesbian liberation, On Our Backs, was not just the first magazine created on the Mac. It was only possible to publish it because of the Mac. Both of these stories, and countless others that people are telling today, tell how Apple products empowered and delighted them in ways that are impossible to imagine without Steve Jobs. Speaking for myself, the profession which I practice and love could not exist in the form I enjoy today without the Macintosh and its success and the influence it has had, so in an important way I owe the life I love to Steve Jobs.
That is what Apple is for. Yes, Apple makes money, but that is instrumental to its true purpose. That was what Jobs’ life was about. Yes, Jobs made a mountain of money himself and had his legendary ego gratified, but those are byproducts of his mission of making beautiful things that deliver power and pleasure to people. There are more important things, yes, but that's pretty darned good. It's why people are laying flowers at the door to his store, and why I am with them in spirit.
Bringing it back to Occupy Wall Street, consider:
Is such a memorial to any other CEO even conceivable?
Is it all that hard to see why it isn’t?
I’d leave it at that but there's just one more thing.
I dig this picture of the original Macintosh development team blogged in a fascinating remembrance by John Siracusa.
Notice that there are a lot of women in that picture? That it’s mostly White people, but not entirely? Both in an era when tech skewed even more White and male than it does now. And notice that there's a fella holding his baby right in front there?
This sure looks to me like a shaggy bunch of goddamned hippies who have cleaned up for Picture Day. Which is no surprise: Jobs himself was a goddamned hippie who once lived on an ashram and dropped acid and did his major corporate announcements dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers and referenced Gandhi and Bucky Fuller in advertisements and thought that finally adding the Beatles to iTunes was an announcement on a par with launching a whole new product line. Jobs was a hippie who built a hippie organization.
I submit that it’s no coïncidence that this hippie organization is now arguably the most successful company in the world. Because while we shouldn’t pretend that Apple isn’t ruthless, isn’t exploitive of its workers, isn’t deeply concerned with bean counting, and all that, just doing those things doesn’t explain Apple’s success, either in making money or in inspiring love. Making great products and services that serve people is what did it. And that, I submit, comes of taking a bunch of smart oddballs and giving them a mandate to do something great. That comes out of a culture, not just in the sense of “corporate culture” but in the sense of culture at large.
Update: To honor the 10th anniversary of us losing him, Apple made a lovely little propaganda film of him saying, basically, swing for the fences to make something worthwhile. Whatever ambivalences I still have about him, that is the right project for anyone, especially someone graced by Fortune to hold the resources he did.
He’s not smiling for the applause. He’s smiling because he got it done.
The loss of him would have been news if had he only created the personal computer industry. Or if he had only committed to turning the Xerox Star into the Macintosh, “the first computer good enough to be worth criticizing”. Or if he had only founded the first major computer animation film studio. Or if he had only rescued Apple from the brink of disintegration. Or if he had only led the Macintosh renaissance of OS X and the iMac et cetera. Or had only rescued the music industry from their own stupidity. Or had only captained the creation of either the iPhone or the iPad.
Having done all of those is hard to conceive, even knowing it to have happened. A life well lived.
Let’s memorialize him by making it unexceptional that a corporation should make beautiful products that empower people and bring them joy, shall we?
I just discovered that Michael Been, songwriter for The Call, died a few months back. I’m saddened, and selfishly disappointed that this means he won’t be gifting me with any more songs.
I am by no stretch of the imagination a Christian — though I’m syncreticist enough to refer to תפארת, अनाहत, Buddha Compassion, or Christ Love as occasion demands — but that surely isn’t Mr Been’s fault.
I have never heard a better love song than “I Still Believe”.
Just as Johnny Cash sang about the severe American Christ the Judge so that even if you didn’t believe in Him you could see how it felt if you did, Been sang about a universal Christ of Glory and Mystery. And like Cash, he didn't do it so it was a chore, taking your medicine — The Call was a rock ’n’ roll band, and they rocked.
I’m badly outvoted on how the cosmos works. If they’re right and I’m wrong, I expect that Been is now standing at God’s right hand now and singing His praises. And someday Peter will ask me in life, did you accept Jesus Christ into your heart? If that does happen, I think I might be able to get away with answering Peter that no, I did not … except during the time I spent listening to Micheal Been sing.
He was as good at being a United States Senator as anyone ever has been. And by my lights, he was not only good at it—smart, skilled, and crafty—but also good: a liberal with a proudly bleeding heart, leading one fight after another for the needs of the disenfranchised. In a long, fascinating 2003 profile in the Boston Globe, Charles P. Pierce quotes Kennedy's former chief of staff Bancroft Littlefield, Jr.
This is a guy who, the first thing he did in the Senate was take on the poll tax
Yeah.
I've read a few profiles like that one over the years, and two things strike me.
First, it's impossible to resist the idea that he worked hard because the shades of the dead were watching, both the brothers he had to measure up to and the woman to whom he owed a debt.
Second, there's a fascination to his tirelessness at the sheer mechanics of playing a role like his: endless little bits of Taking Care of Business, like this moving story:
On the morning of the day before the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Senator Ted Kennedy called the White House to inquire if it was appropriate to bring to the burial some earth from Arlington National Cemetery. The answer was essentially a shrug: Who knows? Unadvised, the senator carried a shopping bag onto the plane, filled with earth he had himself dug the afternoon before from the graves of his two murdered brothers. And at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, after waiting for the crowd and the cameras to disperse, he dropped to his hands and knees, and gently placed that earth on the grave of the murdered prime minister.
In that spirit, how about we set aside our conventional eulogies and instead offer the memorial Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice proposes?
The glee of Senator Kennedy’s enemies and ours will be unbounded over the next few days. I’m sure the birfers, astroturfers, industry shills, talibangelicals, Blue Dog DINOs, glibertarians, neocons, and general malefactors of great wealth will weep crocodile tears as they lament that Teddy’s death should not be used as an opportunity by crass liberals to pass the kind of serious health care reform he spent the last thirty years championing. And that, my friends and President Obama, is why it’s time to come back after Labor Day with a single coherent Senator Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill, and to twist whatever arms, ears, or other parts are necessary to get a good strong comprehensive bill passed and signed, NOW. We owe the memory of a great man no less.
I'm pretty much the exact right age to mourn the passing of Mr Hughes: I was a teenager when he was making movies for teenagers, and I still feel a great affection for his work. (Though sitting down with a friend recently to watch my personal favorite of his films, Some Kind of Wonderful, we agreed that it was a very good thing that we were no longer teenagers and so emotionally raw.)
I remember some critics at the time dismissing Hughes as just telling teenagers what they wanted to hear: you're smart and adults are stupid. Those critics are half-right: Hughes did tell teenagers what they wanted to hear, but he had a much less cynical, and more correct, understanding of what that was. Reviewing Hughes' career, Roger Ebert quotes him:
Kids are smart enough to know that most teenage movies are just exploiting them .... People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again.
Hughes says yeah, parents and schoolteachers and other adults are usually foolish and always uncool, but most of them actually love their teenage charges and are trying to do right by them. Sex is a powerful force, but love is more important. Not everyone you love will return your love, but love is still worth pursuing because if you seek it out you will find it ... most importantly with your friends. And the English language is the greatest toy in the world.
It turns out that these things are not only what I wanted to hear when I was a teenager, they're what I've found to be true as an adult. Nice work.
It seems I'm not alone in being surprised to find myself affected by his passing. The night before last, when the news was fresh, a friendly madman asked me for change and expressed his mourning. The following day, as I walked to work, I passed a dozen boxes offering me the San Francisco Chronicle with an enormous picture of Jackson on the front page: a concert photograph of him in motion, exuberant and gorgeous at the height of his powers, before everything we think of now when we hear his name.
He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
Seeing the picture of the Michael Jackson whom I had forgotten, I had a daydream yesterday morning.
On the night of Elvis' death Michael Jackson is nineteen years old.
The King's shade comes to Michael in a dream. The world is going to need a King of Pop, Elvis tells him. He plays a single note on his guitar and for just the length of a single heartbeat the note hangs in the air and Michael can feel what it will be like, to hold perfect poise in front of an audience of a hundred thousand, their voices raised with his in joy.
The shade of Robert Johnson is there too. The Grandfather offers a secret and a warning.
I can tell you how it can be you. My legend is true, and I can teach you how I did it. But the legend is also right that there's a price. You will be mocked. You will go mad. You will hack at your own flesh. You will commit the worst crime you can imagine. You will burn.
Michael is heedless of the warning. The moment of stardom which Elvis showed him is singing in his heart.
Michael wakes at midnight. He rises, donning shoes, a coat, and gloves against the night air. He steps outside and walks down the street to the crossroads, where the Devil is waiting. The Devil offers his hand, and its grip burns away Michael's glove. Though Michael's flesh remains unharmed, the pain is real and excruciating.
Michael smiles his best on-stage smile and does not let go until the Devil confirms that the deal is done.
George Tiller, one of only a few doctors in the nation who performed abortions late in pregnancy, was shot to death here Sunday in the foyer of his longtime church as he handed out the church bulletin.
In 1973, following the Roe v. Wade decision, Dr Tiller began performing legal abortions. I presume that he did so moved by the knowledge of the horrific consequences suffered by countless women who turned to unsafe black market abortions when they were still illegal. He came to be one of only three doctors in the US with the courage to perform late-term abortions for women carrying fetuses with fatal birth defects threatening the mothers' health.
I say “courage” because for these efforts, his clinic was bombed in 1986, his clinic faced daily protests and frequent vandalism, he commonly received death threats, and he was repeatedly investigated by legal authorities bending to pressure from anti-abortion groups. Plus three other doctors, and four other abortion clinic workers, have been assassinated by anti-abortion terrorists since Roe. Plus he himself had already been shot once before, in 1993.
Now he's gone, murdered in a church. No doubt because he did his duty as a doctor to work to preserve women's lives and health.
I'll say some other things later; you can guess what's on my mind. In this post, I simply mourn the great loss.
I find myself having a hard time describing his work, or how the loss of him makes me feel. Which I suppose is a bit Ballardian. I read and was hugely impressed with his writing, though I never fell personally in love with it. My favourite of his novels was Concrete Island, sort of a retelling of Robinson Crusoe in which a man crashes his car at a highway interchange and finds himself trapped in the forgotten space between ramps.
Who else could inspire film adaptations by both David Cronenberg and Steven Spielberg? The former, Crash, Ballard called a better version of his novel than the novel itself, which may be why at Cannes they had to invent an “Audacity Prize” to accommodate how such a bad film could also be a great film. The latter, Empire of the Sun, is to my mind Spielberg's best film ... and is of course almost forgotten.
You may not recognize her name, but you surely recognize her. The only woman's image whom you could argue has been more reproduced and imitated than Bettie Page's is Marilyn Monroe's.
Maybe.
Like with Marilyn, Bettie worked a strange magic with the American virgin-whore dichotomy, knowingly sexy and innocently pretty at the same time. But Bettie could walk even deeper into the paradox; she did countless pictures that were a lot racier (and fetishier) than Marilyn ever did. Don't let that deter you from looking for them, though, as even the wickedest of her pictures are only wicked by ’50s standards—and more importantly in every one of them she radiates joy. I remember reading somewhere that the photographer best known for working with her, Bunny Yeager, said that she didn't have any unreleased photos, because Bettie had been so uncannily photogenic that she had never managed to take a picture that wasn't good enough to publish.
Life was not nearly so kind to her as the camera had been. How could it have been?
He wrote with brio and heart, and if his stylistic pyrotechnics were occasionally a bit much2 he never indulged in them at the expense of actual content and meaning. Laura Miller at Salon offers a touching remembrance.
He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — because not even the most merciless self-examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely “sincere” and “attentive” and all too willing to leave it at that.
I, for one, will miss his work.
Though he is perhaps more properly remembered as a novelist and occasional writer of short stories, my own love for his work was instead for his essaysa, which obviously consumed so much of his attention that I wonder if the fiction was not, in fact, to some extent an attempt to bolster the literary respectability of his non-fiction writing.
Most famously in his vigorous and whimsical overuse of footnotes.
The first work of his I read, a very long essay in Vanity Fair about the politics within the world of professional tennis which almost frightened me by being so fascinating in spite of being so very far outside my usual sphere of interest.
We have no more old people in this country! No more old people. We shipped them all away, and we brought in these “senior citizens.” Isn't that a typically American 20th century phrase? Bloodless. Lifeless. No pulse in one of them. A “senior citizen.”
But I've accepted that one, I've come to terms with it, I know it's here to stay, we'll never get rid of it, that's what they're going to be called, so I'll relax on that. But the one I do resist—the one I keep resisting—is when they look at an old guy and they say, “Look at him, Dan, he's ninety years young.” Imagine the fear of aging that reveals! To not even be able to use the word “old” to describe someone. To have to use an antonym. And fear of aging is natural, it's universal, isn't it? We all have that. No one wants to get old. No one wants to die. But we do. So we bullshit ourselves.
I started bullshitting myself when I got to my 40s. Soon as I was in my 40s I'd look in the mirror and I'd say, “Well, I ... I guess I'm getting ... older.” “Older” sounds a little better than “old,” doesn't it? Sounds like it might even last a little longer.
Bullshit. I'm getting old. And it's okay. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won't have to die. I'll pass away. Or I'll “expire” like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital, they'll call it a “terminal episode.” The insurance company will refer to it as “negative patient care outcome.” And if it's the result of malpractice they'll say it was a “therapeutic misadventure.”
George Carlin
1937-2008
Comic
When they arrested Lenny Bruce for obscenity, they took Carlin with him because he refused to show the cops ID. He was the first host on Saturday Night Live. The Kennedy Center was going to give him the Mark Twain award later this year.
He once invented “Frisbeetarianism,” saying that when a person dies, their soul lands on a roof somewhere, never to be retrieved.
Getting older — getting old — suited him so well I sort of assumed he'd be around forever. But he, ah, passed away yesterday.
There are some words for how I feel. But you can't say 'em on TV.
He was the best creature and make up effects guy in Hollywood, with an endless bag of tricks using latex, wire, and a hundred different kinds of goop.
He was one of those better-than-everyone-else-put-together guys.
The Terminator, Predator, Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands, and a hundred bad movies where the only good thing was Winston's effects. Plus John Carpenter's The Thing, the yardstick by which creature effects are measured.
They use computers for all of that stuff now, and while he did some of that, he also knew when doing it the old fashioned way was just better. I'm going to miss him.
Ephraim “Frank” Korman
1929-2007
Scientist, teacher, father
Some of my readers know that for the last few years, I've been on “Dad patrol.” My father moved out to San Francisco to get away from the harsh weather of Washington DC and moved into a little apartment right across the street from mine. Sort of like a sitcom.
We have a family story about my g'g'great-grandfather on my father's side: he died in a terrible logging accident, crushed between two great trees he had felled that he was in the process of floating down the Dvina river to the mill. The interesting part: this happened when he was 87. Still working as a lumberjack.
We Kormans are tougher than we look.
But it turns out that we don't last forever. Just before New Years', my father was hit with a sudden high fever that apparently cut off oxygen to his brain for a few long minutes. I got to see him when his body was still breathing but his ruach was already gone. Three hours later, mercifully, his body gave up waiting for his spirit to come back.
Saturday my brother hosted a little memorial for him. Here's what I said:
The idea that I could say a few words to sum up either my father's life or my own relationship with him is absurd, but I find myself thinking of a story that comes as close as you could hope.
My father was drafted to serve in the Korean War. Horrified by the prospect of having to kill another person, he volunteered to be a medic, against the advice of other recruits who dreaded to be on the front lines, unarmed, with a big red cross-shaped target on their heads. He was accepted for medic training, and fortunately for his survival he was assigned to a M*A*S*H outfit.
When I was growing up, my father only told one story from that time in his life. He said that the only time after basic training when he held a rifle was on sentry duty, protecting the camp. He still didn't want to shoot anyone, so he pulled the bullets out of his M1 rifle and put them in his pocket.
My mother would always interject that had they caught him he'd have been court-martialed for sure, sent to prison, and given a dishonorable discharge.
Or, y'know, he could have been killed.
Guarding the camp with the bullets in his pocket. Fearless. Morally grounded. Totally irresponsible. That was my father.
Like a lot of brainy, vaguely disaffected folks, I read a lot of Mr Vonnegut's writing when I was a teenager. As time went on, I got tired of the self-indulgent clowning that consumed much of novels like Breakfast of Champions, and was disappointed by the Cranky Old Guy rôle he took on late in life.
But Vonnegut did write Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle, and either one of those would be more than enough to qualify him as a Great American.
My favourite of his novels was neither of these, but rather his lesser-known little book Mother Night. It's about the moral challenges one faces living in the face of political oppression—which being Vonnegut's work, is a good deal more entertaining than I make it sound. Its lesson is simple, and timely for our current age:“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I'm going to have to track down a copy to reread in honour of his passing.
You might want to check it out, too. It's short, lively, and will make you think, I promise. In the meantime, I just have my father's favourite passage from Slaughterhouse 5:
He came slightly unstuck in
time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie
about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who
flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took
off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German
fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments
from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked
American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join
the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in
flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous
magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel
containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The
containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous
devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck
more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few
wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.
Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and
everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were
taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America,
where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders,
separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly
women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in
remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide
them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school
kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't
in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and
all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two
perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
Cracking good writing, and now we'll never hear any more from him.
Update: Warren Ellis says a few words, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper offers several more, the city of San Francisco remembers, Salon collects some famous folks' remembrances, and Content Love Knowles offers a quote from him appropriate for this moment.
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored.
And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That's my favorite joke.
