Read-Think-b4-u-Write

In comics this season, we studied the graphic adaption of Kafka's Metamorphosis  by Peter Kuper. In the story, a salesman wakes up and finds he has turned into a bug - seems the perfect premise for a graphic novel. Kafka's novellas led to the creation of the adjective Kafkaesque which according to Mirriam means something "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality, such as Kafkaesque bureaucratic delays" (we've all had those). The hoops one has to jump through are often so twisted and frustrating that success is pointless. Kafka's many short stories have strange illogical, usually bureaucratic, twists that are worth reading. They reflect the disconnect in industrialized societies, the alienation that comes when life is reduced to working for faceless bureaucracies and corporations and being subjected to the rules and laws of the same. One strange twist in Kafka's Metamorphosis  is that when Gregor discovers he's turned into a b...

Predicting the future is never easy and when we look back at 1930 clothing predictions for the new millennium it all seems so ridiculous, but these styles weren't created for laughs, these designers on history's cutting edge were serious. What did they predict? Women will wear trousers (what a shock), climate controlled dresses, and even a headlight to "catch a man." The male narrator treats style for women as simply a way to attract the other sex. Maybe that's true in an evolutionary sort of way, but hey, if any guy saw the way I dressed on the weekends . . . not to mention sexuality in the 1930s could only be fathomed in the female/male variety. The one prediction designers of the 1930s seemed to get right was the portable phone--today's cell phone, except that only men would "wear" them. Predictions are a sticky business and there have been a lot of bad ones. Remember Y2K when all the computers would stop working. Or the Mayan calendar crisi...