Now, I don’t have anything in particular against Kafka. I highly recommend you read Kafka, just as you should be open to checking out some of Bergman’s flicks. But why would I want to read Kafka when I could read Nabokov? And why would I want to watch a Bergman movie when I could watch a Robert Bresson film instead? It’s the same basic idea: a bunch of people standing around, being really quiet. But for me, Bresson’s quiet is so much more interesting than Bergman’s quiet.

I suppose part of Bergman’s reputation could be due to the fact that he seemed to be a fairly decent interview. Just read through the New York Times article, it’s filled with suitably artistic quotes like, “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon,” “I was very much in love with my mother,” or “sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was.” Really, you can remember things? Fantastic! That truly is a quality unique to introspective artists like yourself.

But I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of Ingmar. He is, after all, quite dead, which make it all the more likely that he now wants to eat my brains. I had always suspected that Ingmar wanted to eat my brains. But now that he’s dead, there’s no doubt in my mind that Zombie Ingmar would like nothing more than to crack open my skull and scoop out the tasty innards into one of those silly waffle cones the Swedes are always using. Looks like I’ll have to sleep facing the door tonight.

There’s been a lot written already about Vonnegut’s passing, much of it of the “OMG!!!” and “Vonnegut changed my life” variety. You won’t find any of that here. Nor will I be poorly photoshopping Kurt Vonnegut into some semi-but-not-really wacky location. He deserves better than that. Instead I’m going express my thoughts on his death in a simple and efficient fashion that even dullest of you idiots can comprehend.

Vonnegut > Pynchon

Now I worship at the altar of all things Pynchon. Had I not read The Crying of Lot 49, I never would have become an English major, which means I never would have started down the path that has allowed to me leading such an exciting, literary life, filled with jobs and activities that totally relate to everything that interests me intellectually. But there is something to be said for accessibility. Pynchon is rough. Not Finnegan’s Wake rough, but Gravity’s Rainbow is not the kind of novel you read aloud to sexy ladies in your James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub. Well, I would, but I’m a pretentious jackass.

Vonnegut wrote novels that were smart, funny and relevant. He wrote them in a way that was a joy to read, complete with silly drawings. And for that, I thank him. Or, I would thank him, but he’s dead, so I guess I’ll just wait until the rapture, when he comes back as a zombie. I’ll be sure to thank him then.

When I read the little blurb in the newspaper about the iPhone and its lone button, the first thing that popped into my mind was, “Boy, Apple sure does hate buttons.” I made the mistake of assuming that this whole one-button philosophy was of Apple’s creation. But it’s not. Apple just stole the idea from the classic Super Nintendo game Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. All that Apple does to make their devices streamlined, stylish and easy to use is clearly a direct result of the success of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, here’s the game description:

When Bill Laimbeer played in the NBA, he wasn’t exactly known for his sportsmanlike conduct. Now he’s brought his rough-and-tumble style of basketball action to the SNES with BILL LAIMBEER’S COMBAT BASKETBALL. It’s the year 2030, and Laimbeer is the commissioner of the pro basketball league. Seeing as he’s in charge, he fires all the refs and throws the rulebook out the window basketball the way he likes it.

Now the players wear armor as weapons and mines are thrown from the stands, adding a whole new element to the game of hoops. You can create your own league of combat basketball by buying and selling players with up to seven other people in the league. Forget everything you know about the modern game of basketball, and get ready for a futuristic look at the game with BILL LAIMBEER’S COMBAT BASKETBALL.

Also, the game is played entirely using the B button.

That’s right, idiots, 15 years ago, when Apple was floundering in failure and mediocrity, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball was revolutionizing the simple usability that would eventually turn Apple into a household brand. While other Super Nintendo games made use of all six Super Nintendo buttons–including games like Street Fighter II that encouraged all sorts of complex multi-button sequences–the makers of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball prophetically realized that one button is really all you need. It’s all a matter of context. If you’re moving, then B passes or tackles. If you’re standing still, B shoots or jumps. You can’t get much simpler than that.

So in a few month or a year or whenever you get your filthy hands on a shiny new iPhone, just remember: you owe it all to Bill Laimbeer’s Combat basketball. Without the ease-of-use guidelines set down by the visionaries at Hudson Soft, Apple would still be cranking out boxy little computers and useless PDAs. 100 years from now, when the people of the future look back upon the iPod generation, they won’t call it “The iPod Generation.” Oh no. In the future, it will be called “The Bill Laimbeer Combat Basketball-Influence Music Player Generation.”

Like I mentioned before, there has been a lot of writing, blogging and semaphoring about the problems at polling stations, but no one wants to mention the real problem: the people who run the polling stations are flat-out morons. Bloggers and talk-show pundits can blather on and on about the confusing inefficiency of electronic voting machines or claim that every long line is clearly the result of partisan redistricting, but they fail to notice the abject incompetence of the people responsible for collecting the accurate votes of million of people. For instance, around noon one of the election people told me that the room being used for voting was very, very hot. I went into the room and looked at the thermostat. It was set at 80. I said, “the thermostat is set at 80, that is why it is so damn hot.” The election dummies responded that in the morning it was very cold, so they turned the thermostat up. Apparently, the people responsible for ensuring the efficient working of the democratic process are smart enough to know to turn a thermostat up when it gets cold, but not yet smart enough to turn a thermostat down when it gets hot.

At another point in the day I noticed one of the election volunteers brought her son with her. The boy had splints on the index finger of each hand. In a moment of strikingly social behaviour, I remarked, “What happened to him, Chinese finger trap?” The woman replied, “No, he broke his fingers.” Were a violent misogynist, rather than a passive-aggressive misogynist, I would have punched her in the mouth. Really, he broke his fingers? How the fuck could I have ever figured that out? It’s not like he has splints on both his fingers. Oh wait, yes he does. All I wanted to know is how this little putz could break the same finger on each hand, but suffer no damage to any of his other eight digits. But instead of satiating my curiosity, I was once again reminded of why I should never talk to people who have not passed my rigorous screening process.

Anyways, what I’m trying to get at is this: don’t believe all the partisan finger-pointing and conspiracy theories you may read over the next few days. Yes, some long lines might be the result of deliberate attempts to inconvenience certain voters, but more than likely it’s probably just because a bunch of jackasses yapping on their cell phones didn’t bother to read all the signs posted and hold up the line fumbling around for proper identification. And buggy software might contribute to some of the problems with electronic voting, but any such problems are minor compared with the fact that the bible salesmen and suburban housewives responsible for assisting voters in the use of such machines couldn’t even figure out how to set up the damn table where the machine was supposed to sit, much less be able to provided technical support to bewildered old lady voters. Trust me, if any of these reporters and bloggers actually spent all day at a polling station and watched what was going on, they’d realize that the number one problem with the electoral process is good ol’ fashioned American nincompoopery.