Ill. Fri. - Remember

Elephants are supposed to have phenomenal memories, but you'd never know it with the recent parade of pachyderms up to testify on Capitol Hill. Is it true that an elephant never forgets? "I don't recall."

Ill Fri: Polar

If global warming continues unabated, I imagine it'll be a much larger inconvenience for our little Happy Footed black and white pals down Antarctica way. What do you mean there isn't actually a big "South" pole there? I know I've seen pictures of it, and I'm pretty sure Bugs and Daffy will coroborate that.
Inspired by the art at such cool sites as http://www.pixeljoint.com/ and http://www.kennethfejer.com/isocity/ and http://www.x-panded.com/pixeldam/indexpixelmoon.html, I thought I'd try my hand at some pixel art. I used to do this back in the early 90's for Super Nintendo games, but haven't thought of it as an art form until seeing the work of artists like EBoy and Ill Fri contributor sosiukwan - http://sosiukwan.blogspot.com/. So here's my own amateurish, humble effort.
BTW: Clicking on the image won't make it all that much bigger, which is good, cuz it's meant to be viewed tiny.

Ill. Fri. - Fortune

Or rather, Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and good fortune. Drifting in the cosmic currents, working her wheel to determine who gets a healthy crop, who gets the plague, and who wins "Project Runway".

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922 – 2007

What sad news that Kurt Vonnegut died this week. He was truly one of the great American writers, often likened to Mark Twain - a brilliant humorist with a dark soul. He was a huge inspiration for me for a number of reasons. His easy-going, conversational style of prose came off as so relaxed, so off-handed, that it made me feel as if I could be a writer as well. Not that I am yet - obviously I’m still working on it - but his work sort of gave me permission to write things the way I felt they should be written.
Reading his novels also helped me make the transition between a steady diet of Science Fiction (almost to the exclusion of all other forms of fiction) into the world of More Serious Literature. I loved Cat’s Cradle for its sci-fi elements, but it also heightened my awareness of the absurdity of religion and the buffoonery of politics. Slapstick only further cemented my awe of his skills as a social satirist and even as a cultural surrealist, with its vivid imagery of a New York City in decay and miniaturized Chinese.
Even though his books had a deep cynicism, even fatalism at their core, they were always leavened with a hilarious absurdity. Breakfast of Champions, a tale of varying levels of failure and madness, was also wonderfully funny – it occurred to me at one point as I was rereading it a few years ago that the audio book would work well if narrated by Eeyore.
It’s a consolation of his passing that the news may spur people who’ve never read any of his great body of work to try one or two. For me, the melancholy is mixed with pleasant memories, causing me to dust off and reread the works of his I love the most, and expand to a few of the works I haven’t yet enjoyed.

Ill. Fri.: GREEN

As long as I've been semi-aware, "green" has always been slang for money. Now I'm admittedly not always the brighest star in the firmament, so it took me awhile to realize that our currency, our money, our "green", is not really green any more. In an effort to foil nefarious counterfitters, (as well, I suspect, as to make sure those pesky Euros don't outshine us in the money design department) our Treasury Dept. has been tarting up our foldin' money for the past few years. As a public service, and just to help familiarize you with the particulars of the new designs, here's a diagram, with helpful callouts, of the new $10 bill. Note that the government is doing their best to keep costs down by selling ad space on the bills, (not unlike the practice of professional sports team owners selling naming rights to their stadiums) such as the trademark web border design commemorating the upcoming release of Spider Man 3. "Green" no more.

Ill. Fri. - Snap

The very last sound you want to make when you're out hunting dragons.