Rorschach Test
This Chris Ware work for the cover for the May issue of Fortune was rejected. The various messages contained therein would probably make a great political Rorschach test. (Click on the graphic to zoom in on details.)
(Via Transatlantic.)
2nd and 3rd-Generation Friends
It’s so cool when that happens.
Ralph’s father Warren operated on Jacques in 1975, and we became fast friends with the family. Ralph was Ben’s age then.
Robyn built and Ralph hosts Jacques’ website, donbas.com.
Robyn is Vampandora on Twitter. Ralph works for a company that tries not to be evil. They are serious foodies (don’t just make their own beer but grow their own hops) and have a website called foodporn.com that is to drool for.
We were at their wedding on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in 1999. Jacques doesn’t like heights, and was wobbly from his second knee replacement and probably the beginnings of his present troubles, but by God he got out there.
Ralph’s mother Margie visited us here 3 years ago, and when I get to Chicago in the summer I always visit them. But the last time we saw Ralph and Robyn was in New York in late 2003. Ben became a twinkle in someone’s eye about a month later. We met him today for the first time: our 3rd-generation friend.
How Valuable is Intelligence?
Ann Althouse (on a roll this morning) quotes P.J. O’Rourke in a (highly intelligent, ironically) expansion on William F. Buckley’s remark that
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement?…
The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews. The input-worshipping universe of the New York Times is like New York itself—thousands of restaurant reviews and no place we can afford to eat.
Let us allow that some intelligence is involved in screwing up Wall Street, Washington, and the world. A students and Type-A politicians do discover an occasional new element—Obscurantium—or pass an occasional piece of landmark legislation (of which the health care reform bill is not one). Smart people have their uses, but our country doesn’t belong to them. As the not-too-smart Woody Guthrie said, “This land was made for you and me.” The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn’t need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.
That’s wonderfully said, but it is, of course, not a condemnation of intelligence but an argument for multiple intelligences. O’Rourke is talking about a particular, narrow kind of neck-up intellect, based on a very top-heavy books-to-real-life-experiences ratio. Brains in jars, disconnected from hands and guts. Would you even call that “intelligence”?
Ambiance 