Most fish records are eaten, notes the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wisconsin (Box 33, 54843), sadly. “Hardly a week passes that a frantic phone call from someplace in the U.S. or Canada from an angler reveals that he just ate a record fish.” The hall offers free rules, guidelines, and application forms to those fisherpersons who would rather be immortal than well fed.
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Defused Nuclear Atoms? Doubtful New Androids? Desperately Narfing Asparagus? “Genetic engineering, which has the potential of becoming an important topic on the national political agenda, is a topic that we could not have a normal democratic debate about,” says Northern Illinois University political scientist Jon Miller. According to his surveys, U.S. adults don’t know enough science to understand arguments about recombinant DNA, “or even have any idea what DNA is in the first place.” (OK. OK. It’s deoxyribonucleic acid, the complex organic chemical containing an organism’s genetic code. Now get out there and have a normal democratic debate, you sluggard.)
We’re so rotten, we don’t deserve anything better. “Salle’s work is crudely painted, conceptually trivial, and incapable of sustaining prolonged attention,” writes Naomi Vine in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner (April 1988) after viewing the David Salle exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “But in what field of endeavor are excellence, profundity, and substance criteria for success in the 1980s? It is their very absence that makes a great deal of contemporary art truly representative of our time and place. . . . Unless and until we apply universal, rigorous standards of competence, we can’t honestly denigrate the artists who are successful at creating work that doesn’t live up to our ideals and expectations.”
Reasons of state. From Harper’s “Index” (May 1988): “Number of the 30 Palestinians killed by tear gas since December 12 who were infants: 14.”
