 by Flemming Funch
Its my birthday today. Not that it suits me very well. I'm usually sort of depressed on my birthday, or things go wrong. Like, today my driver's license expires, and some old forgotten court citation suddenly popped up that I'll have to go pay before I can renew the license. And its all in different parts of town, and its rush hour. And I can't do it anyway, because I have no money to pay it with right this second, and tomorrow I'll have no driver's license. Pfptth! Nothing that can't be solved, but not the kind of fun I'd really like to have on my birthday.
The picture of the cigar-smoking "capitalist" from my 9/23 post was actually of Che Guevara, the infamous and legendary South American revolutionary guerrilla leader, known for his intransigence towards both the capitalist and communist establishments. Quote: "Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity".
The MacArthur Fellows Program announced 24 new winners of their genius grant. Each one receives $500K, no strings attached. Some cool stuff there: reconfigurable robots, bacterial communication, evolution of ideas during the Renaissance.
British composer Mike Batt was sued for copyright infringement and plagiarism for his composition "A Minute's Silence" on the "Classical Graffiti" CD. Apparently it was thought to infringe on John Cage's equally silent composition "4'33". The case was apparently settled out of court by Batt paying an "adequate sum" for his shameless plagiarism. Batt has since been busy copyrighting chunks of silence of various lengths other than the four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence owned by Cage. Story here. Batt sounds like a cool character. He apparently orchestrated Vannessa Mae's career amongst other things.
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