Volapukblog.com

…is slowly turning into a squawking mega-flock.

(picture © by Kevin Bell)

We’re gonna need a bigger boat…

I have to think about this one first before I write something… but I thought I’d share it already. It’s a shoestore near my place in Molenbeek, which consists of a rich mix of minorities, but predominantly Arabic.

Ah well…

A few months ago, a Congolese student living in Brussels filed a complaint against the comic strip ‘Tintin in the Congo’ (1931) on the basis that it is a racist publication and an insult towards the Congolese people. Is his opinion correct? Yes. Is his action the right one? Hell no. Striving to have a book banned and removed from shelves 75 years after it appeared, is putting your hands over your eyes and saying I’m not here!.

The reason why I bring this up now is because I recently discovered a wonderful publication in a comic book store: ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’ by Winsor McCay, an American pioneer of the 9th art who published in the early decades of the 20th century. It not only contains the stunningly beautiful stories of Little Nemo, but also the Tales of the Jungle Imps, short parables about how roguish tricks by pygmy-like creatures gave animals discerning characteristics like a trunk or a tail. The back cover of the book runs this disclaimer:

It says it all; intellectual honesty, historical context, standards… it is food for thought, this is great learning material - even for kids (although I did not like Tintin as a kid, I prefered Spike and Suzy, the Red Knight and Jommeke) …and racists may chuckle when they read the stories, it will in no way serve their purpose. Comic strips like these are just way too smart and timeless for that.

I read a blog post on an interesting topic: e-mail signatures and people’s tendencies to play around with these.
Let me put my e-mail signature to the test and see how it stands against Mr. Wagner’s theses.

Here is my current signature (slightly reduced font)…

And the statements…
1. Important people don’t bother with e-mail sigs.

Yeah. So? I am unimportant and I am proud. Leaving my signature out will not make me any more important, nor give people the impression that I am. People who think they are so important that they consciously leave out their signature in order to avoid unsolicited correspondence are probably not that important. The really important people have personnel to handle all their e-mail, so they wouldn’t bother with the whole situation at all. I have never e-mailed a person that important. I have e-mailed people who don’t bother with e-mail sigs. I tend to perceive them as two different categories.

2. The longer your e-mail signature, the lower down the food chain you are.

Agreed, some people have looong signatures, but these are often company policy. And people who enjoy adding lengthy film quotes, all their community avatars, chat nicknames and ecologically correct messaging are probably happy people, with a frivolous touch maybe, who are not bothered by their position in the food chain.

3. Marketing people have company slogans in their e-mail.

Like I do. That’s either harmless tribal behaviour or company policy. It’s what marketing people do: not just the slogan, but the whole e-mail will probably be dedicated to convincing the addressee that there’s something good about the company or the product they represent. Marketing people who don’t have company slogans in their e-mail are either cynical or forgetful.

4. Some people include sign-offs like “Cheers!” and “Thanks!” and “Best!”; others don’t bother.

Some men wear ‘m on the left, others on the right. Does Wagner want to point out that there is a lack of common courtesy in e-mails? I do not have a sign-off in my e-mail sig, but that is not because I don’t bother. It is because I want to customize according to the type of e-mail that I send. Formal messages get a ‘Best Regards’, informal ones get a ‘Cheers’, quick and dirty e-mails get nothing, otherwise they wouldn’t be quick and dirty.

5. Some people’s signatures are way too long.

Like I said in 3., that hardly ever seems to be their fault. I do however choose to put all my information on a minimum number of lines, separating the bits by a bullet or a vertical dash. That way, I don’t have to scroll my finger off when I need to read an early entry of a long e-mail thread. Signatures often take up more than half of the space in a thread. I want my e-mail client to autmatically hide all but one of the same signatures in an e-mail. My Outlook does not do that right now and I must admit that I don’t know where to tweak that setting :-).

Best regards,

D.

(More on this here)

Dear Kurt,

Some time ago I wondered how you were doing. It had been a while since I’d read one of your superb, unique novels. Yesterday was your last day and I wish it wasn’t. I don’t mind that the dead don’t speak (would be quite a macabre symphony, no thanks), nor that they aren’t moving around (it would take the gist out of a whole movie genre, now would it), but they should be able to keep writing. In the comfort of your coffin, with the appropriate amount of substances of your choice, writing letters, short stories, essays and novels to the world of the living. I could live with that.

You were the one who taught me how to see, appreciate and cherish an art form called abstract expressionism, and as an extension to that, modern and contemporary art in general. As a 19-year-old I read your novel Bluebeard - one of the lesser of your works, according to some unimportant folks - and in it you managed to make me see how an artist like Mark Rothko turned psychological turmoil into superior artistic tranquility. After that, other novels followed, but the good thing is that you have written so much else.
You truly are a giant. Flipping through what bloggers have posted about you today, it seems there were, are and always will be thousands standing on your shoulders.

So it goes. Write in peace, my friend.

Totally uncontrolled surfing across the internet makes me end up in strange places… and want to kill everyone! I have not just gone psychopatically berserk during the writing of this post, no, I have signed up for the Kill Everyone Project. Before you click on this hyperlink, you may want to put your expectations about this project into perspective.

It is basicaly a game that consists of people signing up and clicking a button. I have probably lost all of you by now, but as part of this post is about perseverance, that simply will not stop me. For each click, a person is killed. The game keeps track through some detailed statistics how many people have been killed and how many are left to kill.
You may ask yourself what the goal is of this project. Doing so proves that you are perfectly human, but it also marks the point where you may have taken a wrong turn. There seems to be no specific goal to this project, and this is where it gets interesting: next to being a geeky, gimmicky, violent but non-bloody, mass web culture initiative, there seems to be no meaning. This alone could exasperate many of us in the blink of an eye. Over the years, I have kind of grown attached to this form of expression and even enjoy it. I am consciously avoiding the term post-modern here, because it is a conversation killer and more importantly, I am unsure whether it applies to the Kill Everyone Project. It is namely still uncertain whether or not there is any meaning: at this moment, 6 471 149 838 people have been killed, which means that only 50 698 078 people are left. So in a relatively short amount of time, the electronic extinction of mankind will be a fact. What happens then, is totally unsure. Excellent.

I have clicked 6 799 times today, virtually killing an equal amount of people. Waste of time? So it seems, but nevertheless, I feel a sense of accomplishment… Reason for this is that while clicking away, I thought about the futility of acts like these and remembered a visit to the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe park in Holland, somewhere in 2001. I spent some time alone in one of the large museum halls which was filled with nothing but small stacks of paper on little beds of earth. The papers on these hundreds of stacks all had the same sign on it, in some Eastern iconography.

Just outside the windows on one side of the hall, looking out towards the magnificent sculpture garden, stood a Japanese man, drawing these signs on ricepaper. I went out to him and he addressed me in a friendly way, asking where I came from and what I did in life. Exactly what I wanted to ask him His name was Takahiro Suzuki and he had been writing that sign constantly since 1996. The sign stands for the Japanese term ikiro, which can be translated as ‘to live’. This zen-like exercise fascinated me enormously, as it was very hard to grasp for someone with a short attention span. (Suzuki is still working on his Ikiro-project and still writing) Weirdly enough though, I did not have to question the sense of this project for very long. Both the project and the artist breathed a meditational tranquility that in itself already seemed to justify the logic… or the lack of it. For 10 Dutch guilders I got to take home one of the pages. I still have it hanging in my bedroom and I will probably never remove it. If I would ever get killed, I will dedicate it to and in loving memory of the pointlessness of humanity.