DefenseLINK News has pdfs of that intruiginug playing-card deck of most-wanted Ba’ath mooks here (27k) and here (704k).

I want more of these – what a great idea. How about Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and Linux personality identification cards? GOP personality identification playing cards. Et cetry.

Of course, the big question of the day is what did they give MSS? Apparently, he didn’t make the, er, cut. Or I’m blind.

In The Post-Modern, Deconstructed, Gritty-but-Sensitive Bear, Anne recalls what was my favorite issue of Bears on Text, number two. Of course, a cover drawn by me helps, but the real star of the show is Ed Emmer’s no-holds-barred pay-per-view all-singing, all-dancing clothesline-and-piledriver takedown wetjob on Tom Wolfe.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be online. It’s a shame, because Ed takes one look at that white suit and recognizes it as an invitation to sling the mud, blood, pee, puke, piss, and poo.

Actually, he is perfectly well-mannered in the essay, but O My Lord.

By the end of the essay every little nagging doubt you ever experienced while reading a Tom Wolfe essay, book, or novel (“hm, that’s kind of self serving. Oh well, it’s pretty witty.” or “heh, nice phrase. But wait, isn’t that a lie?”) has been outed, drafted, put through basic training, and rushed to the front.

Of course, it’s not as though Mr. Wolfe ever saw the thing, or that more than a couple of hundred other people ever did. But believe me, those of us who read it don’t see Wolfe as the court jester of the avant-garde, or even a standardbearer of the New Journalism. Nope, he’s a bootlickin’ toady, working with great vim to establish his title at a different court.

Ed’s a highly conceptual creator and part of his deal was that the piece be framed as an answer to a ballyhooed essay that Wolfe published around the time of “Bonfire of the Vanities” original publication, in which he laid out a “Painted Word” style assault on pomo writing in general, criticism and theory or otherwise (this part of the essay is well viewed as a companion to “The Painted Word”) and followed it up with a prescriptive towards The Great American Novel, in which he says, observe the world and write what you see, as Zola did.

Which is fine, even deep advice.

Well, I’m going on and on about something you’ll never get to read, that execrable old-school rock-critics trick, so I should shut up now.

However, Anne asked my to scan and post some material from BOT 1, and I also have the prep-work for the cover.

First, Gus (The old perfesser, I think) cribbed a sketch by his brilliant collaborator Tim Hittle and captioned it as you see at the top of this entery: “Bears on Text, the magazine with GUTS,” atop a cheerfully smiling view of viscera.

The cover to BOT 2 was by yours truly. It began life as marginalia in my notes on Hellenistic art theory (you see, “Plotinus rejects symmetria” – he does, too, arguing in favor of emanation, a doctrine, as it happened, that fit the rhetorical needs of early Church fathers such as Constantine, which is why I know now who Plotinus is, see).

Little rats, and a bear eating a burger and a shake.

When he made it to the cover, he got a dunce cap, for who knows what reason (perhaps he’s played the fool?) and as Anne notes, I inscribed the words “Glasnost for all but US and Panama” along the interior border. I don’t know why. I suspect it was a comment on the US invasion of Panama under Poppy (in hindsight some kind of dry run for the events of the past two weeks – are there other odious men the Bush family seated once and shall now redress? Not for eighteen months or so, I bet) and the desire for change here at home I felt, watching the reforms begin in the East. But it was really just some toss off, a casual, contextless remark that I can’t accurately situate.

There is also an arrow on the cover pointing to a blank spot labeled “tape.” For no particular reason, I was really into visually-evident paste-up as a design element at the time.

(If you don’t know what paste-up is, you may have had trouble following my remark about Panama, above. Panama was a famous song by Van Halen in the eighties.)

For this cover, I used masking tape to put the pieces in place on the board – something that did not reproduce in the final edition, to my disappointment.

I had fun with a real wowser of a copier located near the fine-art library, though – all-digital, this baby could halftone, invert, and zoom up to several hundred percent, most of which I did in getting the image large enough to use and clear enough to reproduce via conventional photocopier.

Bears Explained (sort of) is part two of Anne’s examination of a three-ish zine she helped instantiate circa 1990-91.

I contributed variously, and am enjoying the rummage. I’ve dug out my copies and will scan this and that from them.

The zine was called Bears on Text and consisted of loose xeroxed sheets in mylar bags. It was somewhat more intellectual than many other zines but just as personal and oriented to the idea of a small, probably personally connected audience.

Hey Eric: Jerry Kindall saith TiVo Desktop for Mac OS X.

Anne, your husband may be occupied for a day or two. Who knows, maybe you, too!

Asterix: Anthea Bell, a translator of the innumerable Asterix books from French into English, explores the process in some detail.

Via Open Brackets, which Jim pointed out t’other day.

Now if someone would only get going on Franquin’s Gaston books.

M’enfin! Mais qu’est-que-c’est? Looks like, maybe, they did!

Alas, the “gag of the day” link returns a bad ODBC call. Foo. But go here anyway and rummage around.

Gaston was the officeboy for Belgian kid’s comics publisher Spirou, and first showed up in anecdotes that Spirou himself, the magazine’s lead character, would write and publish as prose supplements in the magazine (imagine a two-page story written by Peter Parker appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man, telling about an amusing ineraction with JJ, and you’ll be in the neighbrhood). Eventually, he graduated to a full page gag strip drawn by Andre Franquin for years, and in Yurp, the strip is well known as one of the gems of gag cartooning. To my knowledge, with the exception of a very few pages that were published in Fantagraphics omnibus mags years ago, he’s never been translated into English. It’s certainly our loss.

Civil war photos? Nope.

A Civil War Photography re-enactor.

Via the estimable Absolute Piffle, of Richard Gillmann, who somehow did not realize what a perfect April Fool’s Day link this is.

Just imagine the scholar of twenty years hence! Or the third generation descendants of the photographer himself?

The photos are like time-travel bombs, whose effect only becomes apparent after a good generation has passed!

Oh, if he’d only begin introducing the occasional deliberate temporal anomaly.

MovableTypeZeitgeistPlugin, from Jim Flanagan of Everything Burns, is a plugin for Movable Type (duh) to allow one to implement Jim’s astonishing Zeitgeist search-engine referrer report.

It’s purty neat.

In the tin-foil and baling-wire department, I’d like to announce that Athena, an elderly (maunfacture date July 1994!) Macintosh of the 9500 model variety, has undergone successful XPostFacto-assisted OS X installation (yeesh) and will soon be functioning as a backup or mirror or something for poor dear bellerophon. The lovely dowager sports a G3 daughtercard upgrade and a brand-spankin’ new PCI Firewire card, which should help keep me from totally losing my mind as I try to schlep files around.

In the “yorg” department, some part of the 10.2.4 March 24 security update is making my main desktop computer not see bellerophon. Foo.

Happily, it’s wholly limited to said desktop unit. But still.

The New Yorker: Letter from Iraq – The Bombing of Baghdad, by Jon Lee Anderson
(from March 31, 2003 issue)

The second strike came on Thursday evening, and when I looked out my window I noticed that several Iraqis were sitting on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to a small hotel nearby, as if nothing much were happening and they were just enjoying the fresh evening air. There were three big hits quite close to us, but across the river, and we watched the fires from our balcony. We could see a few cars driving around, even over the bridges. Dogs barked, and the river looked as calm as olive oil, with just a shimmer of motion on the surface.

Hallucinatory piece on last week in the Iraqi capitol. I was interested to note that I had a site vistor from condenast.com recently, on a search request for “crispin glover singing.”

Another interesting visitor of late originates at cache.kuwait.army.mil – always to the front page, with no link referrer, probably as a result of the proxy configuration in Kuwait. I wonder – could it be Sgt. Therron Thomas, of the Indiana National Guard?

UPDATE: Nope. Not him.

The World Clock – Time Zones: for you non-Mac people. Browser-based. Looks like you can set up your own customizable version, which is the key to working all this stuff out.

[via The Agonist. And yeah, this is waaay early.]

It’s World Clock Deluxe time.

(*cough* for Mac OS X *cough* Eric and Paul)

The only drawback I can find is that the clocks are numeric rather than analog… See, that would be cool, you know, the old-school newsroom clocks as a part of the desktop, you know…

Paul, I have some vague memory of you posting something like this… no, maybe it was a Risk clone. Get search!