Graphic design we can believe in

This is by far the finest political poster produced on behalf of an American presidential candidate that I have seen in the 48 years since I first began to pay attention. And then there's...this.

V as Soviet poster girl

I took this picture in April 1973 on the grounds of the University of California at Santa Cruz. It has always been one of my favorites among the (shockingly few) photos of her I possess. Remembering that time, I now think of a passage from Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim:

As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him on the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn't spontaneously intervene to prevent him...

Veronica

She liked this poem, I remember, even though she disdained the George Kline translation:

Once more we're living by the bay,

and clouds of black smoke drift, daily, above us.

Our own Vesuvius has cleared its throat;

volcanic ash is settling in the side streets.

Our windowpanes have rattled to its roaring.

Some day we too will be shrouded with ashes.

And when that happens, at that awful moment,

I'd like to take a streetcar to the outskirts

of town and find your house;

and if, after a thousand years,

a swarm of scientists should come here

to dig our city out, I hope they'll find me,

cloaked with the ashes of our modern epoch,

and everlastingly within your arms.

—Joseph Brodsky

Heavy traffic

I devised The Diebold Variations on a caffeinated whim 46 months ago, and was sufficiently pleased with them that I created a quick-and-dirty web page to share the conceit with a few friends. A couple of months later they came to the attention of Arianna Huffington, who plugged them in her blog, resulting in a surge of about 25,000 visits that June. Since then interest has risen and declined with the election cycles, but the general trend has been downward, with an average of 300 visits/month for most of the past year. This left me unprepared for a spike of just over 41,000 visits in the course of the twenty-four hours comprising last Wednesday. Criminentlies! Another increment of my fifteen minutes of fame! The good people at dotmac have already objected to my profligate use of their bandwidth.

I'm a little puzzled that the New Hampshire primary, fercrissake, appears to have been the occasion of the present kerfuffle. I'm actually an agnostic on the subject of e-vote fraud, having undertaken the project principally as a designer, and not as anyone who has meditated at length on, much less mastered, the technical impedimenta. Those of you craving red-meat analyses of the geek stuff should depart these precincts and head for Bev Harris' admirable Black Box Voting site. I do believe that instruments for committing vote fraud without undue effort either in the perpetration or the concealment ought not be left lying around where Karl Rove might find them, but when election fraud is the first conclusion arrived at by the losing side it creeps me out just a little bit.

The boy Kant help it

Found on Crooked Timber, a Kant attack ad!

Urschleim reborn!

I tried. Vishnu knows, I tried to make it work with "IBlog," the worthy offering from a little one-man software house in distant Hindustan, but at the end, and with this morning's, ah, fraught upgrade to the long-overdue v.2, I need to walk away from the crater and begin anew. So: same name, saner authoring environment, perhaps more frequent attention from its onlie true begetter. We'll have to see, won't we?