From the Lone Star Looney bin

The great state of Texas that gave us the honorable President George Bush and a renewed focus on teaching creationism to schoolchildren is insisting on staying in the news with their latest idea:

Texas Considers Allowing Guns on Campuses

Considering their recent offerings, I could see this fitting into their grand strategic policy planning roadmap!

Julian Schnabel, 'St Francis in Ecstasy', 96" X 84", oil, plates, wood and puttywood, 1980. Photograph from a recent visit to the Mary Boone Gallery showing 'Image Matter', an exhibition curated by Klaus Kertess.

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Interesting characterization of the protagonist in a new play starting on Broadway this week.

He's a cocky but bumbling fellow, trapped forever in puberty, always eager to play and eternally armored in the self-assurance that often goes with a lack of self-knowledge. He is given to jaw-dropping malapropisms and misinterpretations, and he has a raunchy exhibitionist streak. He is, in other words, a typical leading man from a Will Ferrell comedy. The character being portrayed is exactly the right leader for his time: a man who translated the most enduringly popular movie archetype of the last two decades — the clueless doofus — into the most powerful political position in the world.

While on the subject of lampooning political figures, they have another play starting in Chicago about an equally clueless, bumbling person who also seemed to be smugly stuck with the self-assurance that sometimes tags along with a head full of h(air). It starts next week. The teaser video is hilarious. Jon Stewart called him ScumDog MillionHair just the other day.

Stuff Happens...

Not to ruin the Oscar weekend, but Opinion Research Business (ORB) group, a market research company based in England has confirmed their earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.

Methodology: Over the 2,160 respondents who answered the questionnaire, 20% said that there had been at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. Within these households the average number of deaths was 1.26 people. The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 indicated a total of 4,050,597 households. Based on this our data suggests a total of 1,033,239 deaths since March 2003.

Revised Casualty data here (word document).

Maybe these numbers are way off, like sampling errors inherent in most statistical interpolations. Even assuming that they are off by 50% (a very high error rate), the numbers are still staggeringly high - half a million human beings slaughtered.

Meanwhile, the war rages on...

Every day the New York Times produces the tally of dead US soldiers that day. Every once in a while the list gets to me and I really don't know what to do...
Scanned below is the 'tally' for yesterday. Mind you, this does not take into account the deaths of non-military personnel, Iraqi citizens or nationals of other countries embroiled in Iraq currently.

Seen at the Venice Biennale:

Emily Prince "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis) 2004 to the present". Pencil on color coated vellum. Project comprised of approximately 3,800 drawings to be added to daily. Each image: 4 x 3 in. / 10.2 x 7.6 cm. Overall: 300 x 540 in. / 762 x 1371.6 cm. (Photo ripped from New York magazine)