I’m sorry you had to absorb that all in one massive dose but as a person interested in design, and more importantly as a proud owner of both a cornea and an optic nerve, I felt it was my duty to drive home this point: Television weather-infographics are pitifully, horribly, inexcusably bad. These are pieces of design which we seek out every single day for their intended functionality, often first thing in the morning, when we are half asleep and most vulnerable, but which hammer at our eyeballs like Schuster conundrums made of broken neon tubes and melted crayon shavings. I ask this, here and now, of all the television weather-infograpic makers– Why?! Why must it be this way?

Television infographics in general are pretty much out of control so far as I can see. Their scrolling, swirling, swooping gloss has at this point far overpowered the meager amounts of information they are meant to shuttle efficiently into our brains. They do not, if I had to put a totally fabricated number on it, contribute in any way to that purpose 75% of the time. They are the gaudy prefabricated ornament on the facade of pure televised information. Howard Roark would dynamite your satellites! Well, were he a real person… who was able to fly… into space… carrying one of those old-timey plunger boxes… Anyway what I’m saying is from sports broadcasts to news broadcasts the infographics are poorly thought out, overused, detrimental to effective transference of data, and did I mention spectacularly ugly?

As for weather graphics in particular I just can’t help but wonder, where did networks get the idea all that crap was necessary? It seems like presenting the weather forecast ought to be quite a simple operation. Temperature and precipitation projections for 5 days. Why all the confused hubbub? Best as I can surmise there are only two possibilities– meteorological hubris or graphical incompetency. Perhaps a combination of both.

If there are any young people out there reading this who are enamored by the glitzy and glamourous life of a television weather graphics professional and are planning on making a career of it, let me offer these few tips:

1) Nothing needs to move. Not raindrops, not snowflakes, not wind marks, not sun-rays. We already know how rain and that other stuff works.

2) Remember there are other colors besides ultramarine blue, pure red, and neon yellow. Use them, but please not all at once.

3) Don’t try to get to clever and “nuanced” with your atmospheric icons. All we need to know is whether it’s sunny and dry or cloudy and wet, the numbers fill in the rest. Having one icon with a single cloud, another with two slightly more wispy clouds, and a third with a darker more rounded cloud does not help us at all. If you want to interpret weather conditions in sensitive and unique ways paint landscapes.

4) Go to design school, take a few courses at the local community college, or at very least have lunch with your highschool art teacher a couple of times. Please?

5) One word: Standardization!

This last would go a long way in cutting down on the eye contusions. If we could just agree on a few simple symbols which would hereafter represent important weather conditions things would be a lot easier. If weather icons were standardized a symbol and two numbers would deftly tell us all we needed to know. No need for interpretation.

Well, hope you feel gratified, my having finally voiced this displeasure which I know was secretely eating away at all of you. Sometimes there is such a thing as too polite you know? That’s how you get ulcers.

Next time: Shampoo bottles!

I give you:

GET OUT OF IRAQ A public service handout, in which the example of a small group of seemingly pinned-down soldiers is used to illustrate the complex machinations of the administration’s war policies on the whole.

Click each Image for a larger and easier to read version.

See? Simple as that. Makes you wonder what we’ve all been so worked up about doesn’t it? Can you believe some of us actually thought these guys didn’t have a plan? That they were incompetent and dangerous?! Shows us. And just let me say, though the adorable Rummy spokes-head may say it isn’t magic it certainly is magical.

For those of you wishing to use this as a teaching tool, who would like to run through these brilliant machinations yourself, or who simply want to extend this knowledge to their neighbors and disseminate it further, I am making a downloadable pdf available which will print on a single letter-sized sheet of paper. All you need do is fold it in the middle and tape or glue the two sides together. Good luck and happy learning.

Download the pdf here.

I assume that The Times, being, like the rest of the mainstream press in recent memory, a sorry, weakling shell of a what might properly be called “a paper,” wishes to save itself in these choppy waters. Well I have taken it upon myself to create a mock-up of a format which, if adopted, would not only ingratiate The Times to the Administration, but which might even conceivably prove readable for a barely literate nincompoop of a President.

See below for 15 clippings from The Administration Times.

See? Now wouldn’t that make the boo-boo all better?

All images were taken from the New York Times’ own Sunday pictorial suppliments, specifically from the online exhibit: Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures from 1913-1919 offered by The Library of Congress.

After a discussion I had this morning here are a few points to consider and kick around, in no particular order:

American culture, meaning the culture, not the government, of the United States of America, was nurtured under puritanical principles, which we have yet, in our 230 years of existence, to shake off. Today’s so called “culture wars” are just another in the long line of skirmishes in which one group of people, lets call them “those who wish to move forward and evolve” attempts to throw off the suffocating and muscle numbing yoke of the old guard, let’s call them “those that wish to take globs of warm amber into their lungs and become fossilized forever in the continually outmoded past of human experience.”

American culture is one fed on repression. Our notions and experiences of sex, the most universal and natural of human experiences, are warped, from our puritanical upbringing, in ways no other culture (save perhaps the Japanese) could even begin to comprehend. For us everything must be hidden and secret. For us everything must be dirty and guilty. For us pleasures of the flesh can never be trusted and so never completely enjoyed. We are a land of philosophical eunuchs, even the best of us, when it comes to human sexuality. We skulk around feeling guilty, averting our eyes when we are supposed to, masturbating in secret places with the memories of what we’ve seen. The worst of us would have vagina’s sewn up with consecrated threads, only to be cut on a wedding night, with saintly scissors; penises lopped off, only to be attached again for the purpose of overpopulation. Every man, woman, and yes- child, knows the deceitful unworkability of this. But we are cowed by those with the loudest mouths. We nod and pretend. We must deny everything and sublimate our yearnings into lies and violence.

Other cultures, with the good fortune to have existed for thousands of years, in one place, look at us and shake their heads. “How can they be so childish?” they must wonder. “How can they be so full of shit?!” And I wonder as well. How?

How, in the year 2006, can so many of us still be so ignorant of the obvious? Heads can be cut off on 80 foot screens, bowels torn from bellies to slap against thighs, bullets can enter bodies from 10 different angles, but the word “fuck” can not be permitted on the airwaves. A breast can never be glimpsed. A fully nude body must be accompanied with a warning which tells us: “This is very naughty and bad for you!” The peoples who descend from ancient Romans, who walk the same avenues as their ruined forefathers, look at us and laugh as they slap one another on the asses without benefit of a lawyer’s council.

We despise the old. We cringe at their wrinkles and bellow behind their slow motions. We put them in cheap rooms to die while doing every ineffective thing we can to fend off age in ourselves. Knives slip between our skin and bones to artificially tighten, firm-up, enlarge, and slim down. We inject poison into our faces to remove our hard-won wrinkles. We dress in children’s clothes and pretend at child-like freedom. We buy a never ending succession of “toys” we don’t need. In short we make vulgar monsters of ourselves. Everyone sees this but no one admits to the ugliness of it all.

We see the fake breasts creasing and bulging on the sides, we see the faces pulled back into masks, we see the wigs shift, we watch the artificially plumped lips move, we see the huge heads, like baubles, of those who had the fat vacuumed from them, we watch the starving women making excuses and we pretend this is beauty. We pretend we are fooled and celebrate it on every magazine cover and television screen. We pretend the glow of youth dwells on a knife edge, in a needle, in a cream, in a wish.

We blame and repent and pass judgement, never for a second doing the only thing required of adults: taking responsibility. We sue, and we go on talk shows, and we tell all, and we accuse, and we weep, and we “self-help,” and we take our medicine, and stuff our fat faces, and stuff our pockets, and we congratulate ourselves, and we pamper ourselves, and we turn our culture into a infantile embarrassment fit not for men and women but for children whose development is forever arrested.

“We must do it for the children!” What better sentiment for a culture that endlessly caresses and fondles and probes the tight anus of youth!  Our culture, from our music to our “literature” to our entertainments is all unsophisticated and childlike. Every market salivates over the youth dollar and every decision must take the children into account. Nothing legal seems to exist anymore for the benefit of adults. We idolize vapid celebrities. We make millionaires of game playing man-children. We elect intellectually stunted buffoons because they remind us of ourselves, because they are “average” and visibly flawed, as though that were a selling point. The stories of our leaders are always coming of age stories in which mistakes must be made in order to be learned from, but each leader is temporary, and each lesson must be learned anew.

We worship youth both in our rhetoric and in our degradation. But not for the actual youth of our population, to them we are happy to leave cesspit of waste and debt and ecological ruin. “The children” we so adore are ourselves. Our young country is full adolescents, awkward and uncertain, always looking to their invisible father figure in the sky for approval, always fueled by a bottomless undercurrent of fear at facing any reality.

Some of us defer to our invisible father figure in the sky whenever we are made uncomfortable, whenever we are unsure, whenever we would rather not be responsible. We honor him in public, always, saying the things that must be said, but in private we are compelled to push the boundaries and see just what we can get away with. We are rebellious in all matters where his “law” does not serve our purpose, but relent when caught. After all the power to invoke daddy’s name is the greatest power of the weakling child.

These among our number will always stand at daddy’s pant leg. It is only his perceived power that allows them to cover their ears and shake their head chanting “la la la la I can’t hear you la la la…” when things like science and facts and logic threaten. It is the weakling child’s last defense when those among us who want change and progress and betterment attempt to speak up.

It is my feeling that American culture, as it stands today, is very nearly a kink in the evolution of human culture on the whole. (We are by no means the only kink, but a kink in the smooth flow none the less.) It’s dominance is troublesome when elsewhere in the world there are more mature cultures who by turns seem willing to celebrate life, to enjoy themselves, to love, and most of all to learn. If those among us who want further enlightenment here on earth do not eventually shake loose of the yoke which keeps America backward and fearful, if we don’t grow up and punch the schoolyard bully square in the mouth as it were, then we are part of the problem and not at all the shining light which we’ve always assumed ourselves to be.

In any event we have some serious fucking issues.

Discuss.

Now with the original test you send it back via mail and it is reviewed, scored, and evaluated by their staff of art professionals, who point out your strength as well as areas for improvement, and offer an otherwise honest assessment of your potential as an artist. I assure you that is not the case here. Honest assessments are sooo 20th century! After you’ve taken the Nonist Instruction School Art Test you can ball it up, shred it, and toss it in the dumpster. Today there are no objective standards and Art is subjective to the calcium-deficient osteopathic bone.

So there you have it! You passed. You’re well on your way! Congratulations.

“In the event my good name becomes somehow inextricably entangled with all manner of buffoon, including but not limited to, doltish actors, thieving hack writers, slavering media dimwits, confused religious fanatics, and idiotic pea-brained people who simply can not make a mental distinction between fiction and non-fiction, this device will sense the besmirchment of my name and begin, through the complex interaction of gears and pulley systems, to rotate my coffin within my final resting place, allowing me to literally “turn over in my grave” for the rest of eternity, or until such time as I am searched on google for my actual accomplishments.”

A fucking genius that guy! Wow.