some king chooser
will wind up with my number


Mitch Epstein, Tag Sale III, 2000

* From Harper's April 2010:

-- Chance that a U.S. automobile accident occurs when at least one of the drivers is texting or talking on a cell phone: 1 in 4

-- Average number of hours a U.S. child aged 8 to 18 spends using an electronic device or watching television each day: 7.6

-- Number of volunteer ministers sent to Haiti in January by the Church of Scientology: 110

-- Average number of arrests made each year since 2001 by all 4,000 Federal Air Marshals combined: 4

-- Federal spending this represents per arrest: $200,000,000

-- Number of arrests in California last year for solar-panel theft: 4

* Two new blogs on the sidebar to check out:

-- Civil Eats, which "promotes critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities," and

-- Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, which chronicles the making of a film in the filmmakers backyard, from set building to sound and everything in between. The film (also called Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then) is the "true story about a man named Leonard Wood who lived outside of Louisville Kentucky. He found out his wife Mary was dying and he wanted to save her life. He built a house around her that he thought would heal her. He played music to God hoping for miracles. He even wrote her a letter over a decade after she died begging her to communicate with him somehow."

* Of interest:

-- Hemingway, ee cummings, John Dos Passos and Dashiel Hammett were all volunteer ambulance drivers in Europe during WWI

-- William Carlos Williams died at 79 having lived virtually all his life within a ten-minute walk where he was born

-- The first occasion on which the word shit appeared in the New Yorker was quoting Richard Nixon

-- Willem de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until he was 43

-- Clement Greenberg was asked to deliver the eulogy at Jackson Pollack's funeral, but refused -- outraged that Pollack had caused the death of an innocent passenger in the crash that killed him.

* "How many Cy Young awards would Cy Young have won?" -- David Markson