Very sad. Interesting, I was rereading Cat's Cradle after many years, when I heard about it.

I would not be surprised if they gave Vonnegut's passing short shrift. He's a treasonistic pacifist librul who wrote books, essays and speeches beloved by filthy hippies.

Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut

_{Give Texas Back to Mexico!}

of their target demographic needing to know how to read in the first place.

is exactly what i wanted to say.
superb writer, i'll miss him.

That's right, what if we are actually making Veal Planet (TM) for some aliens? These aliens, the Olonoi, just love planets with runaway greenhouse effects, but not quite as bad as Venus, for vacation spots. The Olonoi are the true money and power and controllers behind Exxon and Shell, and have an interplanetary hit out on Al Gore.

Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise.

Ah, and here's the requisite Vonnegut hater! A real funeral all right.

Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise.

Granfalloon was a term Vonnegut coined to describe groups of people that appear superficially to have something in common but in actuality don't. I believe it was from God Bless You Mr. Rosewater which was set in Indiana and one of the grandfalloons was "Hoosiers". My comment was meant to point out the irony that Vonnegut fans, like me, are likely have little more in commmon other than their enjoyment of his work and yet will equally mourn his passing. I guess I didn't do a good job of that.

”I despise ideologues masquerading as objective journalists.” - Bill O’Reilly, March 30, 2007

Oh, I see what you mean. OK. Still, why the rush to call us a granfalloon, when we have never clamed to be a true Karass, only a random bunch of people paying respects to Kurt Vonnegut? It seems unduly harsh.

Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise.

from October, '99.

The author of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" talks about Capote and Kerouac, Hillary and Rudy, television and, of course, the end of the world.

By Frank Houston

This is really it. After entertaining and provoking us with his novels for 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut says he is retiring from the literature business. His last book, "Bagombo Snuff Box," is a short-story collection that harks back to the dawn of his literary career in the 1950s, a Golden Age of magazine fiction long since vanished, when he left his job as a General Electric PR flack and began publishing stories. In his introduction, he calls these new-old (and previously unavailable) pieces -- simple melodramas about materialism, pretense, love and heaven -- "Buddhist catnaps," observing that the short-story form, "because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment." In "A Present for Big Saint Nick," children expose a gangster's egotism and their parents' hypocrisy. In the title story, a 9-year-old sniffs out an adult's pretensions. A couple of the stories rise to culminating jokes in the vein of Vonnegut's classic tall tale, "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog," from his only previous collection, 1968's "Welcome to the Monkey House."

"Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity."