Week 14

02.04.02

I'm not claiming you *ought* to set fire to your Garfield cartoon doll, but if you're the kind of guy who feels driven to do that, you're probably also the kind of guy who has to photograph the whole process.

http://www.badmouth.net/garfield/images/
garfield-19.jpg

http://www.badmouth.net/garfield/images/
garfield-20.jpg

http://www.badmouth.net/garfield/images/
garfield-25.jpg

02.05.02

It's funny how much less "satirical" satire gets when you've got a nitpickingly compleatist catalog of every satire website.

http://www.gagpipe.com/

02.06.02

Karel Capek wrote "R.U.R," the play that first premiered the word "robot." Nice to know that the house he shared with his actress wife has become a museum.

http://www.capek-karel-pamatnik.cz/
e_index.htm

Cool Capek postage stamp. Mr Domestic Bliss,by all appearances.

http://home.t-online.de/home/batz.hausen/
dadhof.htm

Karel laboring away for the ages, with a fountain pen and a cig.

http://www.perenn.com/main.shtml

I've never before seen a production shot from Capek's "Insect Play," but that costume design is awesome. "Insect Play" a rather better play than "R.U.R."

http://www.methuen.co.uk/images/
0413771903-large.jpg

Here's the great man enshrined as a wax dummy in Prague, chatting with some dead politician. H G Wells, eat your heart out.

http://www.waxmuseum.cz/capek_a.htm

02.07.02

Had to go to Washington DC on assignment. Here I am hanging out last month with one of Sandy Calder's masterworks.

Somebody once called him "the giant child." That makes sense, for the older I get, the more Calder grows on me.

02.08.02

I'm not the only guy around with a Calder jones. The guy's rep is bulletproof and he's catnip for bidders. Check out those auction prices. Five million bucks for a mobile? Holy toledo.

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/
polsky/polsky2-22-01.asp

Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.