Brian Malow and science humor

Scientists and philosophers are not always droll...they do have some fun and chuckle now and then. The current issue of Symmetry features the humor of physicist Brian Malow. Not a Richard Pryor or Mort Sol but as he says: "As one colleague put it, "Your jokes contain more information than other comics' jokes.""

"Women have passed through my life like exotic particles through a cloud chamber, leaving only vapor trails for me to study for clues to their nature."

"Science yuks"

by

Brian Malow

March 9th, 2009

Symmetry

If someone had told me when I was in high school that one day I would meet Stephen Hawking and have a meeting at NASA, I never could've guessed the trajectory I'd follow to get there. I would've assumed I had become a physicist.

I was good at—and enjoyed—math and science, but I couldn't decide if I wanted to be a scientist or a rock star (not that there is a difference!) I ended up taking the arts path, but rock star morphed into stand-up comedian.

Most comedians dream of "making it" in nightclubs and theaters. Corporate gigs and private events, while often lucrative, are considered sellouts, because you can't do anything remotely provocative. You have to edit yourself or risk not getting paid—or worse, not getting laughs.

I've never been particularly dirty. My act has always reflected my love of science, drawing on its language and concepts for analogies and metaphors. My sensibilities were shaped more by Asimov and Clarke than Carlin and Pryor. I'm geekier—and I say that proudly—than the average comedian. As one colleague put it, "Your jokes contain more information than other comics' jokes."

A few years ago I had a revelation: I was editing myself more in the comedy clubs than at certain private gigs. Some of my favorite routines were gathering dust because the typical nightclub audience isn't likely to laugh at a joke whose punch line invokes the inverse-square law.

But, at shows for Apple or Microsoft or Stanford—when my audience contained a critical mass of engineers and science enthusiasts—I could wax scientific in the voice that was most colorful and entertaining to me. I could crack a joke about cloud chambers and it would be greeted with laughter and appreciation.

It was gratifying. It was as if I'd grown up speaking a foreign language and then one day found myself in a land where the people spoke that language. It was like coming home.

I decided to really focus on science comedy, to seek out and bond with the complementary audience I knew was out there—the adenine for my thymine, the guanine for my cytosine. I concentrated on performing for science organizations, museums, festivals, medical and technology companies, and conferences.

I've been thrilled by the response.

At public outlets of the National Academies, increasingly large crowds have shown up, curious to check out the "science comedian." They seem as excited and grateful to have found me as I am to have found them.

And I'm pleased to report empirical evidence that scientists do, in fact, have a sense of humor. True, they sometimes have a tendency toward literal interpretations—like when I compared the 125-degree heat in Arizona to the surface temperature of Venus, and a loud voice in the room countered, "No!"

Of course Venus is much hotter than that. I was employing a comedic device known as exaggeration. Other comedians just have to be funny. They don't have to strive for scientific and mathematical accuracy. I do, or the audience will dissect me.

I also reach out to general audiences, hoping to dispel the fallacy that science is dull or impenetrable, by using humorous analogies and radiating enthusiasm.

During a recent appearance at the Koshland Museum of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, an impassioned argument I made in favor of the manned space program led to a meeting at NASA headquarters and an invitation to attend an exclusive lecture by Professor Hawking. At the reception afterwards I met him, spoke with him, even told him a couple of jokes.

Quite suddenly, I'm meeting and entertaining some of the most interesting people on the planet—physicists, chemists, rocket scientists, cell biologists, entomologists…heroes. And not just the famous ones, but people who are quietly advancing the frontiers of science.

I'm thriving in the ecological niche to which I'm peculiarly adapted. And I'm constantly exposing myself to new information, expanding like the universe.


A chuckle...

Darwin levity

Fuzzy math?--some humor

Deceased--Al Feldstein

Al Feldstein
October 24th, 1925 to April 29th, 2014

 

"Soul of Mad Magazine, Al Feldstein Dies at 88"

by

Bruce Webermay

May 1st, 2014

The New York Times

Al Feldstein, who took over a fledgling humor magazine called Mad in 1956 and made it a popular, profitable and enduring wellspring of American satire, died on Tuesday at his ranch in Paradise Valley, Mont. He was 88.

His wife, the former Michelle Key, confirmed the death. In recent years, he was a wildlife and landscape painter in Montana, outside Livingston.

Mr. Feldstein had been a writer and illustrator of comic books when he became editor of Mad four years into its life and just a year after it had graduated from comic-book form to a full-fledged magazine.

The founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman, established its well-informed irreverence, but Mr. Feldstein gave Mad its identity as a smart-alecky, sniggering and indisputably clever spitball-shooter of a publication with a scattershot look, dominated by gifted cartoonists of wildly differing styles.

Sources disagree about Mad’s circulation when Mr. Feldstein took over; estimates range from 325,000 to 750,000. But by the early 1960s, he increased it to over a million, and a decade later it had doubled.

He hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of ...” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling); and George Woodbridge, who illustrated a Mad signature article, written by Tom Koch: a prescient 1965 satire of college sports, criticizing their elitism and advocating the creation of a game that could be played by everyone. It was called 43-Man Squamish, “played on a five-sided field called a Flutney.” Position players, each equipped with a hooked stick called a frullip, included deep brooders, inside and outside grouches, overblats, underblats, quarter-frummerts, half-frummerts a full-frummert and a dummy.

“The offensive team, upon receiving the Pritz, has five Snivels in which to advance to the enemy goal,” Mr. Koch wrote, part of a nonsensical and hopelessly complicated instruction manual that nonetheless inspired the formation of squamish teams on campuses across the country.

In his second issue, Mr. Feldstein seized on a character who had appeared only marginally in the magazine — a freckled, gaptoothed, big-eared, glazed-looking young man — and put his image on the cover, identifying him as a write-in candidate for president campaigning under the slogan “What — me worry?”

At first he went by Mel Haney, Melvin Cowznofski and other names. But when the December 1956 issue, No. 30, identified him as Alfred E. Neuman, the name stuck. He became the magazine’s perennial cover boy, appearing in dozens of guises, including as a joker on a playing card, an ice-skating barrel jumper, a totem on a totem pole, a football player, a yogi, a construction worker, King Kong atop the Empire State Building, Rosemary’s baby, Uncle Sam, General Patton and Barbra Streisand.

Neuman became the symbol of Mad, his goofy countenance often intruding, Zelig-like, into scenes from the political landscape and from popular television shows and movies. He signaled the magazine’s editorial attitude, which fell somewhere between juvenile nose-thumbing at contemporary culture and sophisticated spoofing.

Mad made fun of itself as well. The staff was referred to on the masthead as “the usual gang of idiots,” and the magazine warned readers not to take it seriously even as it winkingly promoted its importance. Its irreverence made it especially popular with teenagers — many comedians have confessed to slavering over issues in their adolescence — and in its tone and fearless targeting of sacred cows it anticipated social satire vehicles like The Harvard Lampoon, National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park” and The Onion.

Albert Bernard Feldstein was born on Oct. 24, 1925, in Brooklyn, to Max and Beatrice Feldstein. His father made dental molds. Attracted to drawing as a boy, Al won a poster contest sponsored by the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and, after graduating, took classes at the Art Students League. He also worked part time for a studio that produced comic books. During World War II, he served stateside in the Army Air Forces.

After the war, Mr. Feldstein was a freelance writer and illustrator before going to work for William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC, short for Educational Comics and, later, Entertaining Comics. At EC, Mr. Feldstein created Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Tales From the Crypt and several other horror and suspense titles.

Mr. Gaines also published a comic book, full of irreverent and sometimes juvenile humor, called Mad, the brainchild of Mr. Kurtzman, and a second humor-based comic, Panic, an offshoot of Mad, edited by Mr. Feldstein.

The early 1950s were a grim time for comic books. Moralizing newspaper columnists and eventually Congress attacked them as having a corrupting influence on America’s youth. When Mr. Feldstein’s horror books were singled out, EC nearly went out of business, and in 1955 Mr. Feldstein temporarily lost his job.

Mad began to flourish under Mr. Kurtzman, but he and Mr. Gaines clashed, and when Mr. Kurtzman left in 1956, Mr. Gaines hired Mr. Feldstein to replace him. He was its editor until 1985.

By then Mad was a victim of its own success. With its brand of satire increasingly available in many other publications and on television, its circulation had been in decline for a decade. Mr. Gaines, who died in 1992, sold the magazine in the early 1960s to the Kinney Parking Company, which went on to buy Warner Brothers and the company now known as DC Comics as well.

Today, Mad, published by the DC Entertainment division of Warner Communications, has a much lower circulation than it did at its peak, but an active and popular website.

After his retirement from Mad, Mr. Feldstein pursued a painting career in Montana and had exhibitions in galleries in the West.

His first marriage, to Clair Szep, ended in divorce. His second, to Natalie Lee Sigler, ended with her death in 1986.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by five children, a stepdaughter, three grandchildren and two step-grandsons. 

As editor of Mad, Mr. Feldstein had a palpable influence on popular culture at large. To cite just one example, in 1965 Mad published letters and photographs from college students who said they had been inspired by the squamish article to field teams. (Whether this was true or not is difficult to prove.) One letter writer, from Marquette University, said the school had its own squamish team, and that “at last tally, we have lost two Deep Brooders and one Dummy, who were suspended for sportsmanlike conduct during the course of play.”

Al Feldstein [Wikipedia]

Al Feldstein [Home page]

Mad [Wikipedia]

Defiling a corpse...disgusting but historically accepted

This is nothing new...the degradation of a corpse. This is just fodder for the besmirching of the American "clean cut" image of American's at war. American soldiers have done a lot worse. I remember the Ken Burns documentary on World War II and the confrontations between American and Japanese troops...the mouth of a dying Japanese soldier was smashed by a GI to extract gold teeth. Documentation of such incidents abound for just about every armed conflict: Scalps are taken, gold teeth removed, skin filleted, bodies defiled and dismembered, corpses displayed in degrading poses. Kenneth Robert's Northwest Passage depicts a member of Roger's Rangers decapitating an Indian and carrying the severed head throughout the journey. And then there was Pharaoh Merneptah [1213 BC to 1203 BC] who after a battle with the Lybians "...among other things, he took the penises of all uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of all the circumcised...." It is war and war's reprehensible consequences but remember as the fictional police inspector Kurt Wallander said in one episode..."It is not a person, just a corpse."

"Reprehensible Behavior Is a Risk of Combat, Experts Say"

by

James Dao

January 13th, 2012

The New York Times

Talk to almost anyone who has fought in combat, and chances are they can tick off a string of reasons why the YouTube video showing four Marines urinating on the bodies of dead enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan is horrible. Horrible for America’s image around the world. Horrible for its strategy of winning support from the Afghan people. Horrible for a professional military that believes its troops behave with the utmost decorum, even in the heat of battle.

And yet, their outrage often also comes with a caveat. Reprehensible behavior, combat veterans and military experts say, is an ever-present risk when troops in their teens and early 20s are thrown into nerve-racking battle for months at a time. And if there are weaknesses in their leadership or breakdowns in discipline, that behavior can easily spill over into acts that might be considered war crimes.

“The degree to which a squad or platoon in combat becomes calloused toward the enemy that they are facing is almost always high,” said Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer who did combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington policy group. “There is always, always, always the temptation to abuse a detainee or pose for a picture with some dead fighter. And that’s why noncommissioned officers and commissioned officers have to be extra vigilant.”

Military officials said they had identified all four Marines in the video, though they have not released their names. The Marines are thought to be members of a scout sniper team that was deployed last year to northern Helmand Province — one of Afghanistan’s most violent precincts.

The actions depicted in the video represent the modern unit commander’s worst nightmare: crude behavior over dead or captured enemies that is broadcast across the globe with the push of a cellphone button, as happened with the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Yet the act of desecrating an enemy’s body is as old as war, perhaps most famously described by Homer in “The Iliad,” when Achilles drags Hector’s lifeless body behind his chariot before the eyes of a shocked and despairing Troy. Nancy Sherman, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University who has written a book about the moral implications of war on troops, “The Untold War,” said dehumanizing the enemy can be a psychological defense mechanism for the troops whose job is to kill that enemy.

“Desecrating bodies is not routine, nor is it expected or condoned,” Ms. Sherman said. “But you can understand it, in complicated ways. Because war requires a very complicated moral psyche.”

Mr. Exum said black humor is another coping mechanism for young troops trying to act tough beyond their years. “I remember being a young officer in Afghanistan in 2002 and standing over the body of this partially decapitated Taliban and cracking jokes,” he said. “Humor is how we cope with pretty horrific stuff. It’s almost dangerous to be too sensitive.”

Alex Lemons, a Marine scout sniper during the fierce fighting in the Iraqi city of Falluja in 2004, said that on several occasions he encountered American troops who either urinated on insurgent bodies or manipulated them for photographs, like putting them in ridiculous poses. While he called such behavior disgusting, he also said it could be cathartic.

“I’ve never spat on a dead body or urinated on one, but I’ve certainly screamed at a dead body because they’ve taken a friend’s life,” said Mr. Lemons, who left the Marine Corps in 2008.

Snipers in both the Army and the Marine Corps are elite teams highly trained in marksmanship, surveillance and camouflage who can operate independently from larger units. They often patrol dangerous areas and get more kills, and are sometimes viewed as cowboys by regular infantry troops as a result. But Mr. Lemons and other officers said scout snipers tend to be more mature and disciplined, precisely because they are expected to face greater danger.

“In sniper school, we were taught not to relish in killing,” Mr. Lemons said. “We’re professional gunmen. That’s what the other side does, not us.”

Though some military blogs have been filled with reader comments supporting the Marines in the video, some of the harshest criticism against them has come from other Marines who feel that the corps, and even the entire American military, have been disgraced.

“There is no excuse for what they did,” said Timothy Kudo, who served with a Marine unit in northern Helmand Province and now works for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “It goes against everything you’ve been trained to do as a Marine.”

Michael Newton, a former Army prosecutor who now teaches at Vanderbilt Law School, said the international laws of war and the American code of military justice are intended to instill discipline in troops and set boundaries for what is acceptable in combat. Prosecuting war crimes is necessary to ensure that crossing those boundaries does not become the norm, he said.

“Some people will look at this and say all Marines are animals,” he said. “But that’s not true. That instance was undisciplined and unprofessional. And that’s why it’s a war crime. The law exists to instill professionalism. But it is also there to create a humanitarian imperative, even in conflict.”

Beyond court-martial or prison, the desecration of an enemy’s body could also leave psychological scars on the perpetrators, in the form of guilt, Mr. Lemons said. “Even though there are all these consequences on an international level that these guys didn’t comprehend, the worst effects are the ones they will have to come to terms with later in life,” he said. “Every memory gets stored in you. Even if it was something that just took two seconds, you’ll have revisit it at some point.”

"Urination video: Outcry aside, history suggests minimal punishment for Marines"

Experts say that despite the strong language from the Pentagon over the video showing Marines urinating on dead Taliban, the military's record for prosecuting similar crimes has been lackluster.

by

Anna Mulrine

January 13th, 2012

The Christian Science Monitor

The language of rebuke has been robust among top US military officials in the wake of a web video depicting Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters.

The Marines, for their part, have already promised two separate investigations into the incident, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has vowed that, “those found to have engaged in such conduct will be held accountable to the fullest extent.”

But military law experts point out that despite the strong language coming from the Pentagon’s top brass, the US military’s track record in prosecuting those accused of crimes against enemy forces in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been lackluster.

That’s because there is a “disconnect” between military law and the policies that the Pentagon is pursuing as it wages war in Afghanistan and, earlier, Iraq, says Christopher Swift, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law.

Though top US military officials recognize the often-devastating impact on public perception that comes with these charges, they are often difficult to prosecute, Dr. Swift adds.

“When you look at the military law side,” he says, “there’s a very high threshold for actually proving that these soldiers and Marines were doing what they were doing with deliberately bad intentions.”

The trial this week against a US Marine facing nine counts of manslaughter for US military actions in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 that killed two dozen Iraqis, including unarmed women and children, offers one window, for example, into the Pentagon’s prosecutorial process.

The Marine on trial at Camp Pendleton, in southern California, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, is the final defendant in one of the most visible cases against US troops in the Iraq War. After the charges came to light, eight Marines were charged in connection with the crime. Of those, one Marine Corps squad member was found not guilty, and six others had their cases dropped.

Three officers were reprimanded for failing to report the killings. Charges against Capt. Randy Stone, who was charged with dereliction of duty and violating a lawful order, were dropped. First Lt. Andrew Grayson, who was charged with obstruction of justice, dereliction of duty, and making a false statement, was found not guilty.

Sgt. Sanick de la Cruz, who was given immunity in exchange for his testimony, supported accounts that Wuterich shot five Iraqis attempting to surrender. Sgt. Cruz also admitted to urinating on the body of one dead Iraqi, and repeatedly firing into the bodies of several others who had already died.

Haditha was frequently compared to the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which 504 villagers were killed. While 22 officers were put on trial for the massacre, all but one were acquitted, a lieutenant who ultimately served three years of a life sentence.

In the most notorious case of the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib – which in addition to the well-known charges also included allegations of US prison guards urinating on detainees – 11 troops were charged.

The highest-ranking officer to be disciplined in Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas Pappas, was relieved of his command for allowing military dogs to be present during interrogations. Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, was acquitted of all prisoner mistreatment charges. He received a reprimand for disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation.

The remainder of those who faced charges were relatively low-ranking enlisted soldiers, who received sentences that ranged from three months of hard labor to 10 years in prison. Specialist Charles Graner, who received the 10-year sentence, was paroled from Fort Leavenworth in August after serving six years.

Though lower-level troops tend to bear the brunt of prosecutions in these instances, the cases are often the result of a “failure of command responsibility, rather than a fundamental pathology on the part of soldiers,” says Swift, author of The Fighting Vanguard: Local Insurgencies in the Global Jihad.

Because such troops are often under incredible stress after multiple deployments, command climate in upholding laws of war becomes even more important, he adds. Such laws exist not only to protect the innocent, but also the troops themselves from the dehumanizing effect that war can have on soldiers authorized to use violence to carry out policy on behalf of the US government.

“So it’s okay to kill an adversary, but not okay to defile the body. It’s okay to kill them on the field of battle, but not mistreat them when they are in custody,” says Swift. The laws exist not just to regulate conduct, but to preserve the integrity of the troops fighting the wars. “If you take actions that dehumanize the adversary, then what you are actually doing is dehumanizing yourself.”

That’s why, although the Taliban’s record is far worse than that of the US Marine Corps, Swift argues, “and as much as our enemies can be nastier than us – this is about us.”

"Viral Atrocities and the Dark Complexity of War"

by

by

Nate Rawlings

January 13th, 2012

Time

A funny thing happens when you speak with a room full of school children–they have a tendency to say exactly what’s on their minds. When I returned from my first tour in Iraq, just before Christmas 2006, the principals in my hometown’s two elementary schools asked my mother if I would come talk to the students.

After my presentation when I opened it up for questions, an 8-year-old asked if I had killed anyone. Amid the horrified looks on the teachers’ faces–a silent assurance that they had told the children not to ask this question–I gave the answer I always do: I don’t know.

It’s true. The times my platoon and I were in firefights, many people were shooting in the same direction. I knew soldiers who kept tallies of the enemy they killed; the men in my platoon were not among them. We went about our business believing that killing is part of the professional duty of a soldier, not a sport or a game.

In my nearly 25 months as a soldier in Baghdad, I never personally witnessed anything like we saw this week. Choose your adjective to describe the video that went viral online showing Marines in Afghanistan urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable;” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was “absolutely inconsistent with American values.” My friends and fellow veterans have remarked that it is not only morally reprehensible, but also tactically stupid–Afghan men who may have been indifferent to the presence of Americans will surely see this video and take up arms.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen desecration of both the living and dead in these wars–from the Abu Gharaib detainee abuse to reports of soldiers cutting fingers off of dead fighters as souvenirs. Last year brought the devastating story in Rolling Stone about a “kill team” from the 5th Stryker Brigade who murdered civilians and posed laughingly with the corpses of dead fighters.

Every time I hear about atrocities, large and small, I think back to March 12, 2006, when four soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment raped and killed an Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi, then killed her family near the town of Mahmudiyah, just south of Baghdad. The day that horrific crime occurred, I was on a patrol about six miles away. We shared a base with 1st Battalion’s sister unit, so we heard about the crime a couple of days later.

That was a rough year in Iraq, and nowhere did American troops suffer more than in the “Triangle of Death” where 1st Battalion operated. We were stationed just to their east and saw some spillover from the fights they endured, but 1st Battalion suffered mightily. Finally, this small group of soldiers snapped, and I remembered thinking, how could this have happened, and what in the world can we do to keep it from happening again?

In every war, the act of killing and seeing ones friends brutally slaughtered causes soldiers to break down and commit heinous acts. It happened even in the “Good War,” where one scholar estimates that American GIs committed 18,000 rapes in the European theater. The prevention of acts like the 2006 murders in Iraq and the video we saw this week come down to leadership, which doesn’t work on autopilot.

“Human organizations are flawed because humans are flawed,” TIME International editor Jim Frederick wrote in Black Hearts, his gut-wrenching book about 1st Battalion’s tour in the Triangle of Death. “Even with the best intentions, men make errors in judgment and initiate courses of action that are counterproductive to their self-interest or the completion of their mission.” When asked to do something as brutally inhumane as killing someone, some soldiers will inevitably suffer lapses in their humanity. That’s why leadership is crucial to prevent atrocities of all kinds before they occur.

I hope that we’ve seen the last viral atrocity from the war in Afghanistan. Marines who have fought and bled and died in the Helmand Province will likely suffer further because of the heinous acts making their way digitally around the globe. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the Marines who committed those acts are now safely home while their brothers and sisters still over there doing the hard business are the ones who will suffer for their momentary amusement.

You can’t teach someone how to be human; I doubt you can fully prevent the breakdown in humanity once it’s begun. But you can lead and inspire and teach and cajole and most importantly supervise young troops. That’s the way to prevent these things from happening again.

Jorge Cham's "Piled Higher and Deeper: Life (or Lack Thereof)"=PhD

Some trials, tribulations, and humor of young academics.

"Piled higher and deeper"

Jorge Cham's popular comic strip about the lives of hapless grad students takes him to the Large Hadron Collider-and launches a series of comics that explains the science with remarkable clarity.

by

Kathryn Grim

March 2009

Symmetry

During graduate school, Jorge Cham used to procrastinate by drawing cartoons for the school paper. Now he makes comics for a living, "and I procrastinate by doing research," he says.

Cham, 32, draws the online comic strip PhD, or Piled Higher and Deeper: Life (or Lack Thereof) in Academia. In his spare time, he visits research institutions for inspiration and gives lectures about the benefits of putting off work.

A couple of trips last summer took him to CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the Swiss-French border. There he studied high-energy physics graduate students in their natural habitat.

Cham doesn't consider himself a reporter; "I just write about what interests me," he says. But the five comic strips he drew after his visits give a clearer explanation than many articles do of the research to be conducted with the Large Hadron Collider. They illustrate the goals of the accelerator and how it works. In fact, his depiction of the LHC so impressed lab officials that they commissioned him to draw a series of CERN comics they can use for public outreach.

The comics also stand out because they illustrate grad students' ability to laugh at themselves. In the case of the LHC, Cham finds humor in preparing to do research when the thing you're most certain about is that you will find something you never expected.

Hooked on comics

Cham was born and raised in Central America, where his parents worked in the Panama Canal Zone for the US government.

He learned English in part by watching a television channel produced for North Americans working at the canal. He soaked in The Cosby Show, The Brady Bunch, and The Flintstones.

But sitcoms weren't the only bit of Americana Cham took to heart.

"One day my father stopped at a garage sale one of the American families was having," he says. "He picked up a box full of old comics-Archie, Peanuts. That got me and my brother into reading comics, and we never stopped."

Cham's parents held advanced degrees, and his older brother, Jaime, went to the United States for college. Eventually Cham and his younger sisters all did the same.

He followed his brother to the Georgia Institute of Technology and then Stanford University, studying engineering with the intention of becoming a professor. He took a full load of classes and knocked on professors' doors, offering to work without pay in the hope that they would like him so much they would hire him.

"It was pretty painful," Cham says. "It wasn't just the workload. It was the level at which you were expected to perform." He was at the top of his class at Georgia Tech, he says, but at Stanford he barely kept up.

He was also doing a lot of doodling.

During Cham's first term, the Stanford student newspaper ran an ad asking for student cartoonists. "I imagined they were asking undergraduates," Cham says. "But my brother said there should be a comic by a grad student- because that's when the real pain begins."

Cham agrees. "It's a story you don't hear anywhere else," he jokes-"the ignominy, the humiliation."

Nameless in academia

Piled Higher and Deeper follows the lives of several graduate students, most in scientific fields, as they navigate a world of living on Ramen noodles and coffee, teaching clueless undergraduates, and searching for thesis advisors who appear only when you don't need them.

The name of the strip came from students' interpretation of the degree titles BS (Bull…), MS (More of the Same), and PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper).

The main character, a grad student modeled after Cham, remains nameless in the strip. "When you're a graduate student, professors never remember your name, so it seemed appropriate," he says.

One of the charms of Cham's comic is that he often shows the world of research through the eyes of the underdog. He was curious about the start-up of the LHC, from the cutting-edge science down to the rumors he'd heard about the possibility that it would create a black hole and destroy the Earth. So he asked a few graduate students to give him the unofficial tour of the facility.

"I'm really always interested to talk to grad students," Cham says. "I feel like they are still at that point where they're enthusiastic and curious and aren't jaded about research. When someone becomes a professional researcher, it becomes a different thing in their head. They've had to sell their research so much at this point they automatically go into their sales pitch. Grad students are still sort of struggling to understand what they're doing, what it all means."

Cham encountered that level of self-reflection when he asked one of his tour guides at CERN why he volunteered to show him around.

"Well, it's interesting to work on this stuff," the student said, "but it's also interesting to share it."

The power of procrastination

In the early days of the Internet, Cham started putting his comic online, first as part of his personal Web site and then on a site of its own. The site gradually built a following and now has an international audience of almost 3.4 million unique visitors per year, including representatives of more than 1000 schools. Cham has sold more than 46,000 books of his comic strips.

While refining PhD, Cham earned his PhD in mechanical engineering and taught at the California Institute of Technology for two years. He then embarked on a new experiment: writing his comics full-time. He augments his earnings by visiting universities to give a lecture he calls "The Power of Procrastination."

"Historically, a lot of great things have happened when people were procrastinating," Cham says. Take the story of Sir Isaac Newton, who supposedly discovered gravity when an apple fell onto his head: "The real question is," Cham says, "what was he doing under that tree?"

Cham says he hopes he can alleviate some of the guilt grad students, who so often make up the backbone of research, feel for procrastinating in academia. After all, he's made a career of it.

According to Piled Higher and Deeper, Newton's First Law of Graduation states that "a grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it."

So Cham can rest assured he will always have an audience of grad students reading just one more comic, they swear, before they get back to work.

Piled Higher and Deeper: Life

You have many strange new e-mail messages

Errors happen and sometimes with humor. Case in point...

JoAnne Hewett’s most recent paper is a collaboration between physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team relies heavily on e-mail; at certain stages of the project, they were sending between 50 and 100 e-mails per day.

Somewhere along the thread, one of the physicists mistyped an e-mail address, rerouting the deluge from Ben H. Lillie, a particle theorist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, to Ben V. Lillie, a 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative and father of two in Auburn, Alabama.

“The first e-mail showed up in early June, and I honestly thought it was spam,” Alabama Ben recalls. “It looked like one of those pharmaceutical online purchase deals or viruses that had nothing but characters and numbers.”

Oblivious to the error, SLAC’s Hewett and her colleagues continued their discussions of ILC simulations and novel SUSY parameters. “We were wondering why we weren’t getting any e-mails back from our Ben,” Hewett says, “but we went our merry way.”

As the paper neared its final stages, the content of the e-mails increased in complexity. “They hardly seemed like English,” says Alabama Ben. “I have a BS in business management and a minor in computer science, so I would like to think I am not a complete idiot, but these e-mails were on such a high level I thought they had to be a joke. Even my computer programs have fewer symbols and characters.”

Although the e-mails were incoherent, they seemed harmless, so Alabama Ben ignored them for three weeks. “But then I realized that someone else—my clone in Chicago—was probably feeling left out,” he says. “So I told them they were sending their messages to the wrong address.”

His attempt to clarify the situation, however, only made it worse. “We thought that message came from our Ben,” Hewett says, “so it led to a huge flurry of e-mail messages—more than 100 per day for about a week.”

Finally, Alabama Ben explained it as clearly as possible for the theoretical physicists. “I’d love to help you guys out,” he insisted, “but I’m just a pharmaceutical rep in Auburn, Alabama, and I’m afraid this is way over my head. But thank you for the interesting e-mails.”

“Just a pharmaceutical rep,” he may be, but one with a unique link to the field of theoretical physics. Hewett and her colleagues acknowledge his contribution in the paper they submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, “General Features of Supersymmetric Signals at the ILC: Solving the LHC Inverse Problem,” with a line citing him by name “for his good humor and patience.”

As for Alabama Ben, “I see it as the time I dabbled in particle physics and linear theory,” he jokes. “The particle accelerator in the garage still has a few bugs in it, but it’s getting there.”

Reported by Lizzie Buchen in the October/November 2007 issue of Symmetry.

Fuzzy math?--some humor

Some mathematical humor here via the likes of Abbott and Costello and Ma & Pa Kettle. Reminds me of the old finger addition math telling children that they have eleven fingers: Count backwards on the left hand...10, 9, 8, 7, 6 and hold up right hand adding five digits that equals "eleven", namely 6 + 5=11.

Abbott and Costello



Ma & Pa Kettle

A chuckle...

Deceased--Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol
June 24th, 1930 to September 12th, 2010

"Claude Chabrol, 80, Director, Dies"

by

Dave Kehr and Joseph Berger

September 12th, 2010

The New York Times

Claude Chabrol, the director and critic who helped give rise to the French New Wave and who went on to make a series of stylish, suspense-filled films like “Le Boucher” (“The Butcher”) and “La Femme Infidèle” (“The Unfaithful Wife”) that were often compared to those of Alfred Hitchcock, died Sunday in Paris. He was 80.

The death was announced by Christophe Girard, the chief cultural affairs official in Paris and confirmed by his press agent, Eva Simonet, who said he had been hospitalized for “severe anemia.” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said on television that Mr. Chabrol “took the finesse of his social depictions from Balzac” and “his humor and vividness he got from Rabelais.”

Mr. Sarkozy added, “But he was most of all himself in his films, as in life, and I’m certain that everyone will miss him.”

Mr. Chabrol was a young film critic working for the magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema alongside François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard when a family inheritance allowed him to form his own production company. In 1956, he produced and wrote the screenplay for the short film “Le Coup de Berger,” which was directed by Mr. Rivette, then used his own money to finance “Le Beau Serge” (1957).

“Le Beau Serge” and a subsequent Chabrol film, “Les Cousins” (1958), are often cited as the opening volley of the French New Wave.

“Le Beau Serge” (“Handsome Serge”) is an acerbic study of a smug Parisian, François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns to the provincial village of his youth and attempts to rescue his former best friend, Serge (Gérard Blain), from a seemingly pointless, working-class existence. The film established the piercing antibourgeois themes that would shape much of the rest of Mr. Chabrol’s career. It also demonstrated, to a professionally closed and aesthetically conservative French film industry, that an outsider could break into the system and make a commercially successful, critically acclaimed film.

This lesson was not lost on his Cahiers colleagues. Mr. Truffaut followed Mr. Chabrol’s example with “The 400 Blows”(1959) and Mr. Godard with “Breathless” (1960), both of which became internationally successful and established La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) as a phenomenon.

While never quite equaling the fame of Mr. Truffaut and Mr. Godard, Mr. Chabrol continued to explore questions of class and sexuality in films like “Les Bonnes Femmes” (1959) and “L’Oeil du Malin” (1961). An unabashed admirer of the American cinema — he and the director Eric Rohmer co-authored an early and influential study of the work of Hitchcock in 1957 — Mr. Chabrol also happily accepted more commercial assignments, like the thriller “Landru” (1962) and the pulpy spy films “Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche” (1964) and “Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha” (1965).

Like the Hollywood professionals he admired, Mr. Chabrol refused few of the projects that came his way, no matter how doubtful their origins. As a result, he averaged two or three films a year through the 1960s and 1970s, alternating personal films like “La Femme Infidèle”(1968) with international co-productions like the dual-language “La Decade Prodigieuse”/“Ten Days Wonder” (1971), starring Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli and Orson Welles.

Frequently working with the cameraman Jean Rabier and the screenwriter Paul Gégauff, Mr. Chabrol, in more than 50 films, developed an elegant, formally distant style, built around controlled camera movements that often seemed to be describing the imprisonment of his characters in a stifling social order. His style was studiously cool, his detachment from his characters disguising a deeper compassion for their plight as victims of a hypocritical middle-class moralism. He employed close-ups with discretion, as if he were declining to violate the privacy of his characters out of a concern for bourgeois propriety. But behind the well-bred manners could be found a sly, mocking sense of humor — a quality Mr. Chabrol carried over to his frequent appearances on French talk shows.

“Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence,” Mr. Chabrol once observed. “Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none. To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.”

“Le Boucher” (1969), a Hitchcockian suspense film starring Stéphane Audran as a schoolteacher attracted to an Algerian war veteran (Jean Yanne) who may be a serial killer, became a commercial and critical hit in the United States Other films, like the broadly comic “Docteur Popaul” (1972) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, were barely seen outside France. Referring to the uneven critical reception of his work, Mr. Chabrol is said to have remarked, “You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.”

Mr. Chabrol made some 25 films with Ms. Audran, who was his wife from 1964 to 1980. Many of those belong to what has come to be known as the “Hélène” cycle after the name Mr. Chabrol frequently gave to the elegant, reserved but erotically vulnerable characters he created for her. In “Violette” (1977), Ms. Audran appeared as the mother of the main character, Violette Nozière, an obedient young woman secretly addicted to depravity, memorably played by Isabelle Huppert.

It was Ms. Huppert who took up the role of Mr. Chabrol’s muse when she was reunited with him for the 1988 “Story of Women,” and they worked together in a long series of films that included “Madame Bovary” (1990), “La Cérémonie” (1995) and “Comedy of Power” (2006). In 2008, he celebrated his 50th year as a filmmaker by working for the first time with another giant of the French cinema, the actor Gerard Depardieu, on the police thriller “Bellamy.”

Mr. Chabrol was born in Paris on June 24, 1930, the son of a pharmacist who dwelt in the same sort of bourgeois social environment that he went on to satirize. He spent much of his childhood in Sardent, a village in central France, where he passed the war years running a film club. He returned to Paris to study law (one of his classmates was Jean-Marie Le Pen, who became the leader of the right-wing National Front political party), but he dropped out to study pharmacology (his father’s profession), eventually ending up with a degree in literature.

His passion for the cinema led him first to a job as a publicist for Twentieth Century Fox, then to writing reviews and interviews for various publications including Art and Les Cahiers du Cinéma. He immersed himself in the city’s film culture and met other aspiring directors. In 1955, he and Mr. Truffaut interviewed Mr. Hitchcock on the set of “To Catch a Thief,” and two years later he and Mr. Rohmer wrote a book-length study of Mr. Hitchcock’s films.

He married Agnes Marie-Madeleine Goute, whose inheritance allowed him to establish his production company, in 1952 and had two sons with her, Jean-Yves and Mathieu Chabrol, the latter a composer who has scored most of his father’s films since the 1980s. His marriage to Stéphane Audran produced one son, Thomas, an actor who has appeared in many films for his father and other directors. Mr. Chabrol’s survivors also include his third wife, Aurore Pajot, who acted as his script supervisor on nearly all of his movies from 1968 on and whom he married in 1981, and Ms. Pajot’s daughter, Cécile Maistre, who was an assistant director on his films and co-wrote the script of “The Girl Cut in Two” (2007).

In 2004, Mr. Chabrol was awarded the European Film Prize for his body of work.

In a 2003 interview, Mr. Chabrol shrugged off those who labeled him the Gallic Hitchcock, but reassured his admirers that he would continue to make thrillers.

“I like using the thriller genre because when people go see a thriller — unless it’s really worthless — they never say, ‘We’ve wasted our time,’” he said. “It’s a good way to make people feel like going and not complain too much. Because you don’t make a film to express your ideas. You make a film to distract people, to interest them, perhaps to make them think, perhaps to help them be a little less naïve, a little better than they were.”

"In Memoriam Claude Chabrol"

by

Richard Brody

September 13th, 2010

The New Yorker

Parallels are perilous; it would be tempting to call Claude Chabrol, who died on Sunday at the age of eighty, the Falstaffian figure of the French New Wave (though his friend Paul Gégauff, who became his screenwriter as well as one of his stars, lived far more riotously and suffered for it far more grievously). But if Falstaff had lived in the twentieth century, he might well have made movies and been spared the royal rebuff, and he might have resembled the cheerfully caustic and openly hedonistic Chabrol.

Interviewed in Libération in 1995 about being in his sixties, he said, "Except for the fact that one fucks much less than at twenty—except for that horrible detail, everything is better"; and that newspaper interviewed him about his gourmandise twice, in 2003 and last year, upon the publication of the cookbook and film book "Chabrol Se Met à Table" ("Chabrol Sits Down to Eat"). The filmmaker liked to cite the country phrase "faire chabrol," which refers to the practice of pouring a bit of wine in a nearly empty bowl of soup and drinking the blend. His wide-rangingly cynical satire was aimed in particular at the pompous bourgeoisie, its assumptions of earned authority and hypocrisy of public honors. He was plus bourgeois que les bourgeois, but cavalier about it and unproud of it; he took his pleasures gleefully and without dissimulation, ostentation, or bien-pensant respect for the trappings of respectability, and he filmed the same way.

He was a movie buff who started writing for Cahiers du Cinéma at the age of twenty-three, in 1953 (with a piece about "Singin' in the Rain"); he co-wrote, with Eric Rohmer, a book about Hitchcock (which appeared in 1957). He was the practical man of the New Wave—starting in 1955, he worked as a publicist in the Paris office of Twentieth Century-Fox (and then helped Jean-Luc Godard get a job there too). He was the first of the New Wave filmmakers to make a feature, in 1957 ("Le Beau Serge")—he did so with an inheritance from his first wife's family—and with the money he made back from his first films, he financed the first features of his cohorts Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. His second film, from 1958, "Les Cousins," is one of his best. Set in the riotous milieu of Parisian students and their bohemian friends, it tells the classic story of the ant and the grasshopper—and it tilts all to the favor of the grasshopper. Here's Chabrol, in his very entertaining 1976 critical autobiography "Et Pourtant Je Tourne…" ("And, Yet, I Shoot…"),* on his classmates at the prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, known as Sciences-Po, where he spent a miserable week:

They were pretentious kids, or else, children of worthies—heirs, heir-heads—or else, they were hard workers who were servile and en route to jerkification. They all stank of caste, self-importance, pedantry. Their ignorance of life, of people, was gross. They perorated in two vocal registers: the haughty and worldly, in order to drip, like dowagers, such lines as "What a world" or "It's crazy"; the other—doctoral—to dissertate on nonsense without having taken the trouble to think, or to look anywhere but in a book…. And yet it's a matter of our daily existence, because we are stupid enough to let these pipsqueaks govern us, legislate for us, administer us.

This sublime venom infuses his best films; besides "Les Cousins," there's "Les Bonnes Femmes," from 1960, which seethes with derision equally for the unhappy drudges who run a small store and the fanciful young women who, while toiling there, harbor romantic dreams and illusions. It's worth mentioning a hysterically extravagant movie unavailable here on video, "Les Godelureaux" (meaning "smooth operators"), from 1961, a movie of a rare emotional sadism, a portrait of frivolous youth in its naïve and sentimental varieties, a dazzling catalogue of cinephilic winks and nods along with the emotional registers to match, a depiction of a primordial toga party to end all toga parties, a quasi-documentary on the artistic happenings of the day; it is perhaps the most sumptuously bourgeois of his anti-bourgeois outrages. Recently, there's "The Comedy of Power," from 2006, in which Chabrol depicts happy wickedness with wry sympathy: a high-placed government official (Isabelle Huppert) who prosecutes a businessman for insider trading turns out to be a narrow, joyless scold, unlike the expansive, carnal, if arrogant, target of her investigation. His last feature, "Bellamy," a police drama starring Gérard Depardieu, is scheduled for release here soon.

Chabrol was the cinematic equivalent of a graphomaniac—in fifty-two years, he made about seventy films, and the haste sometimes showed, in positive and negative ways. Following the ideal of the Hollywood studio director that stopped existing around the time his own career started, Chabrol made commissioned films, personal films, films in many genres (though he made the detective story and the Hitchcockian suspense thriller something of a specialty), films on high and low budgets, and the result was a sort of automatic writing in which the personality—insolent and sybaritic, easygoing and paradoxical, deeply intelligent yet casually superficial, passionate yet capable of stunning detachment—shines through unmistakably. At his best, he was, simply, the peer of his peers.

__________

*A pun on Galileo's "And yet it moves"—in French, "et pourtant elle tourne"—"tourner" means "to turn" and also "to shoot [a film]." As for the book, it features the wonderful title-page credit, "cameraman and editor, René Marchand."

H. Hefner...huge impact on society and human sexuality

Shay Knuth

September 1969

Well, well, well, today is Hugh Hefner's birthday [1926]...creator and publisher of Playboy magazine. Of course one must understand that males bought the publication for the "articles". :) Playboy has had many imitators but none could equal the quality of material presented in photography, fiction, non-fiction, humor, etc.

The Writer's Almanac...

"...Hugh Hefner, born in Chicago (1926). He wanted to start his own magazine, so he raised $8,000 — $600 of which he borrowed from a bank using the furniture from his apartment as collateral. He put together an issue of Playboy in his kitchen, and he wasn't sure if he would ever have enough money to print a second, but when the first issue came out in 1953 featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover, it sold more than 50,000 copies."

And from Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

The Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy, Hugh M. Hefner, is a man who has profoundly influenced society in the last 50 years while his publication remains the world's best-selling men's lifestyle magazine. It has inspired a media empire and one of the most recognizable brands in history.

Hefner was born in Chicago on April 9, 1926, the elder son of conservative Protestant parents, Glenn and Grace Hefner, and a direct descendent of distinguished Massachusetts Puritan patriarchs William Bradford and John Winthrop. He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High on the West Side of Chicago, where he was no more than an average student, despite a genius IQ (152). He distinguished himself instead with his extracurricular activities: founding a school paper, writing, cartooning and serving as president of the student council where he championed student causes.

Following graduation from high school in January 1944, Hef (a nickname preferred since adolescence) joined the Army, serving as an infantry clerk and drawing cartoons for various Army newspapers. After his discharge from service in 1946, he spent the summer taking art classes (anatomy, of course) at the Art Institute of Chicago, enrolling that fall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hefner earned his bachelor's degree in two and one-half years by doubling up on classes while drawing cartoons for the Daily Illini and editing the campus humor magazine Shaft, where he introduced a new feature called Coed of the Month.

He subsequently took a semester of graduate courses in sociology at Northwestern University where, pursuing his interest in individual freedom, he wrote a term paper examining U.S. sex laws in light of the then-astonishing Kinsey Institute research on human sexuality.

In June 1949, Hefner married a classmate, Mildred Williams. Their ten-year marriage produced two children: Christie in 1952 and David in 1955.

Following college, Hef tried his hand at cartooning and, failing to sell any of his ideas for a cartoon strip, published a book of satirical cartoons about Chicago titled That Toddlin' Town.

Hefner worked as an assistant personnel manager for the Chicago Carton Company for $45 a week in 1949, and as an advertising copywriter for the Carson Pirie Scott department store for just $40 a week in 1950. His future seemed uncertain when he landed a promising job as a promotion copywriter at Esquire at $60 a week in January 1951. When Esquire moved its offices to New York, his request for a five-dollar raise was denied and he decided to stay behind and start a magazine of his own.

Hefner and a fellow copywriter from Esquire tried to raise enough capital to launch a Chicago magazine and failed. While working as the newsstand promotion director of Publisher Development Corporation in 1952, he became convinced there was a market for a sophisticated men's magazine that would reflect the views of the post-war generation and that he was the man to start it.

To support his family, he took a better-paying job as circulation manager of Children's Activities magazine in January 1953, but by that spring and summer the dream of starting his own magazine had become an obsession. He found a printer willing to print the first issue and a distributor to distribute it. He got friends and family to invest in the venture, raising just $8,000, including $600 of his own money borrowed from a bank using his apartment furniture as collateral.

The first issue of Playboy magazine, which featured the now-famous calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe, was produced on a kitchen table in his South Side apartment. On the newsstands in December 1953, it carried no cover date because Hefner was not sure when or if he would be able to produce another. But the first issue sold more than 50,000 copies, enough to pay for the paper and printing costs and to finance another issue.

Thereafter, Hefner never doubted that the magazine would be a success. He plowed profits back into the publication and hired a young, enthusiastic editorial, art, promotion and advertising staff to assist him. Playboy grew at a phenomenal rate. By the end of the decade, the magazine was selling more than a million copies a month and to celebrate, Hefner held the first Playboy Jazz Festival at the Chicago Stadium. It was called, at the time, the greatest single weekend in the history of jazz.

At the start of the new decade, Hefner began to live out the "Good Life" depicted in the pages of his publication. He hosted a popular syndicated television show called Playboy's Penthouse, purchased the Playboy Mansion at 1340 North State Parkway, and opened the first Playboy Club on the Near North Side of Chicago on February 29, 1960.

Throughout the Sixties, Hefner and Playboy became what Chicago columnist Bob Greene has called "a force of nature." Hefner wrote an extended series of editorials titled The Playboy Philosophy, championing the rights of the individual and challenging our heritage of Puritan repression. The magazine became the largest-selling, most influential men's magazine in the world.

By 1971, when Playboy Enterprises went public, the magazine was selling seven million copies a month, there were 23 Playboy Clubs, resorts, hotels and casinos with more than 900,000 members worldwide. The Company's assets included book publishing, merchandising, a modeling agency, a limousine service, a record label and a TV and motion picture company. It was truly an empire ruled by one man.

Hefner hosted a second syndicated television show, Playboy After Dark, taped in Hollywood in 1968 and 1969, and in 1970 acquired the famed black Big Bunny jet, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30, in which he regularly commuted between Chicago and California and toured the world.

In 1971, he established a second residence in Los Angeles with the acquisition of a five-and-one-half acre estate in Holmby Hills known thereafter as Playboy Mansion West, where he was able to more closely supervise Playboy Enterprises' increasing interests in television and film production.

In 1975, Hefner decided to make Los Angeles his permanent home, reflecting the extent to which Hollywood movies had influenced his dreams and aspirations as a boy. In 1980, Hefner championed the reconstruction of the Hollywood sign, then in serious disrepair, and was honored by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his efforts. In saving the sign, Hefner referred to it as "Hollywood's Eiffel Tower." The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honored him further with its first Annual Hollywood Hall of Fame Award as Outstanding Citizen of the Year. In October of 2006, Brenden Theaters at the Palms Casino Resort also recognized Hef's ongoing dedication to the big screen with a star on its Brenden Theater Walk of Fame.

The Hollywood sign restoration was only one of Hefner and Playboy's major projects as a part of the Hollywood creative community. The Company produced such features as Roman Polanski's Macbeth, distributed by Columbia Pictures, which was voted Best Picture of the Year in 1971 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures; Monty Python's first film, And Now For Something Completely Different; and The Naked Ape, with Universal Studios.

Playboy also produced such popular television movies as Third Girl From The Left, with Kim Novak and Tony Curtis; The Death of Ocean View Park; The Cop and the Kid; and A Whale For The Killing.

The increasingly conservative Eighties took their toll on both Hefner and his company. In 1985 he suffered a stroke that changed the direction of his life. He referred to it at the time as "a stroke of luck."

Bringing his life full-circle, the world's most famous bachelor was married on July 1, 1989 to Kimberly Conrad, Playboy's 1989 Playmate of the Year. Their fairy tale courtship resulted in an uncommonly romantic wedding ceremony conducted at the wishing well where Hef first proposed at Playboy Mansion West. Their first son, Marston Glenn, was born in 1990 on April 9, the same date as Hef's birthday, and their second son, Cooper Bradford, was born on September 4, 1991. The Hefners separated in the late 1990s and, after their sons moved on to college, divorced in early 2010.

Frequently interviewed by major news and entertainment media the world over, in-depth profiles of Hugh Hefner have appeared in publications such as Esquire, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine and the Times of London. In March 2001, Vanity Fair published an exhaustive, photo-illustrated 15-page profile on Hef, his lifestyle and the resurgence of the Playboy brand.

In 2003 Hefner was the subject of an A&E special, Playboy's 50th Anniversary Celebration, a star-studded two-hour event filmed at the Playboy Mansion featuring live music, comedy performances and interviews. Hefner was also profiled in a two-hour special, Hugh Hefner: American Playboy, as part of A&E's prestigious Biography series in 1996. He had previously been the subject of a feature-length documentary film, Hugh Hefner: Once Upon A Time, produced by Lynch/Frost Productions and distributed by IRS Releasing.

Recent profiles on Hefner include a 2008 biography written by Steven Watts entitled Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, Taschen's Hugh Hefner's Playboy, a six-volume illustrated autobiography with highlights from Playboy's first 25 years, Hugh Hefner: Girlfriends, Wives and Centerfolds an E! True Hollywood Story, and an in-depth look at five decades of Playboy's wildest and most famous parties hosted by Hef entitled Playboy 2000-The Party Continues. The roster of famous names who have enjoyed the legendary hospitality at Playboy's Mansions in Chicago and Los Angeles over the years runs the gamut from Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles, Buddy Rich, Mel Torme, BB King, Tony Bennett and The Grateful Dead to Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Elizabeth Hurley, Gwyneth Paltrow and many more.

In September of 2009 "Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel," a documentary focusing on Hefner's humanitarian efforts, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Academy Award winning documentarian Brigitte Berman, the film garnered rave reviews and is scheduled for a 2010 theatrical release.

Hefner's most recent venture on the small screen is The Girls Next Door on E! Entertainment. For six seasons, this behind-the-scenes look at the Playboy Mansion has been one of the network's top rated programs. It is an international sensation airing in more than 150 countries around the world resulting in multiple spinoff shows for the cast members.

The recipient of a number of awards for his contributions to society in general and the publishing industry in particular, Hefner received the 1996 International Publishing Award from the International Press Directory in London and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors at its 1998 ceremonies in New York. In September 2001, Hef was inducted into the New York Friars Club as an honorary Friar on the occasion of his gala Roast in New York City, an evening of uninhibited comedy subsequently aired nationwide on the Comedy Central network. January of 2002 brought Mr. Hefner back to New York where he received the Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the highest honor of the Magazine Publishers of America. In March 2002, Hef was inducted as an honorary member of the Harvard Lampoon, which named him "Harvard Lampoon's Best Life-Form In The History Of The Universe" and in 2008, Spike TV honored Hef with their Guy's Choice "Alpha Male" lifetime achievement award. In early 2009, Hefner was an honored guest at the 59th Annual San Remo Music Festival in San Remo, Italy, a hugely popular event televised throughout Europe.

Throughout the years, Hef has become a fixture on the Hollywood celebrity club scene and the Mansion has once again become a mecca for entertainment industry superstars including a new wave of young motion picture and television celebrities, rock groups and more. Hollywood and cinema continue to be major factors in Hef's personal and professional life.

At his direction, the Playboy Foundation instituted an annual Freedom of Expression Award, given at the Sundance Film Festival. Hefner underwrote the West Coast retrospective of the late British filmmaker Dennis Potter's works at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; he personally endowed a course in Censorship in Cinema at USC, for which he serves as a guest lecturer; and he has been a major contributor to UCLA's project to restore classic films. In 2006, Hef made a $1 million donation to the UCLA Film & Television Archive for public screenings of American cinema, establishing The Hugh M. Hefner Classic American Film Program. He was a sponsor of the acclaimed American Cinema series on PBS, and he has long been active in seeking out and restoring such vintage films as Vitaphone shorts and the films of the Twenties British crooner Al Bowlly.

On March 28, 1996, Hefner was honored in formal ceremonies at USC for his lifelong dedication to film and his endowment of a chair for the Study of American Film at the University's

School of Cinema-Television. The Hefner gift marked only the second such endowment in the history of the prestigious film school. The other chair was endowed in memory of the late Steve Ross, who had served as chairman of Time-Warner. In 2007, Hef made a $2 million dollar donation to the USC School of Cinematic Arts to help fund a central exhibition space in the new headquarters and a new archival repository for student films and historic documents.

In 1994, Hefner established and Playboy funded the Playboy Jazz Film Festival, the first-ever showcase on the West Coast for many of the best and rarest films in the jazz lexicon. This event was in addition to the annual Jazz on Film program traditionally presented free to the public by Playboy on the eve of the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. In 2010, the Playboy Jazz Festival celebrates its 32nd successful season.

Hefner's personal archive at the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills contains more than a thousand feature films. Each weekend, he screens films at the Mansion for celebrities and personal friends: Sundays are first-run features; Friday nights are vintage classics; Saturday nights are often a mini-festival of silent films.

Hef has appeared as himself in numerous television shows and movies, including Entourage, Sex and the City, Shark, Curb your Enthusiasm, Last Comic Standing, Las Vegas, The Simpsons and most recently Sony Pictures' feature film The House Bunny. In 2005, the world was invited to "step into Hef's slippers" for the launch of the hugely popular video game titled "Playboy: The Mansion," and in the summer of 2009, Hefner was joined by a dozen Playboy Playmates for a Brett Ratner-directed commercial filmed at the Playboy Mansion for the very successful Guitar Hero gaming franchise.

In 2006, Hef celebrated his 80th birthday with weekend long festivities at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. The celebration included the annual "Casablanca Night" movie screening and buffet dinner, a glamorous pajama and lingerie party with Playboy Playmates, celebrities and nearly 1,000 partygoers, and an appearance at the Long Beach Grand Prix in support of Playboy Racing (from the Grand Am Series) where thousands of race fans joined together to sing "Happy Birthday" to Hef. He continued the festivities in Europe as he and his girlfriends embarked on a two-week, eight-city tour visiting London, Cannes, Paris, Barcelona, Munich, Rome, Pompeii and Venice.

Hef's dreams and fantasies again became a reality with the recent resurgence of the iconic Playboy Clubs and in 2006, the Playboy Club and Casino at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas made its official debut. Named the "Fantasy Tower," this entertainment destination features a Playboy Club Casino and lounge, "Moon" nightclub, a Playboy retail store, the 9,000 square-foot Hugh Hefner Sky Villa and the famous Playboy Rabbit Head, emblazoned on the side of the tower. In 2007, for the first time since moving into Playboy Mansion West in 1971, Hef stepped outside his famous estate to celebrate his 81st birthday at the Palms venues, bringing dozens of Playmates along for the festivities.

Hef continues to serve as the company's Chief Creative Officer and magazine's Editor-in-Chief, playing a key role in determining the path of Playboy Enterprises and directing other areas of the corporation including cable television, video production, licensing and digital content. Hef has frequently been quoted as believing that the United States' most important export is "the American Dream," which he feels is conveyed to the world through motion pictures. His own dreams are soon expected to reach the big screen in a feature film produced by Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment.