Ghost Cane revisited

My majority of my comments tonight were going to focus on the Turner Prize, the U.K.'s most prestigious and controversial art prize worth 25,000 pounds. I will talk briefly about it but I have to talk again about the ghost cane. The Turner prize was given to Jeremy Dellar, a 38 year old self described party planner who was told in his youth that he couldn't draw or paint and was refused entrance into art school. The work that he submitted seems to be the tamest work the Turner has awarded in recent memory. His submission, called the History of the World, was for lack of a better term a multimedia presentation. It included a wall painting with phrases like acid house, miner's strike, and brass band joined by lines, photographs of memorials that he has set up to people he feels passionate about, and two videos, one of a Spanish street procession and one of interviews he did in Crawford, TX including a woman who served Pres. Bush a hamburger. Previous Turner prizes have included an empty room with a single overhead light that switches on and off every 5 minutes and a painting of an African Virgin Mary festooned with cow dung and butterflies made of photographs of female genitalia.

Now for the ghost cane. As I mentioned last night, a woman was auctioning off her father's cane to convince her 5 year old son that the ghost was going with it. Her father had died at home of cancer and was gettiing irritable at the end, occasionally poking her son. The media frenzy has prompted bids to $15,000 for the cane. The bidding for the cane is now over but a look on Ebay reveals several copycat ghost canes using very similar language, a ghost cane of candy, a ghost of a cane with a free thumbtack, and a ghost Carhartt jacket. The woman selling the cane was selling it for her son's well-being and was going to buy him something nice with the proceeds. With $15,000 she'll be able to buy her son something really nice and also get a good start on a college fund.

In Iraq today, 3 more people were killed. Which brings the total of Americans killed in Iraq to 1273 and the total for the month to 16. In October 2004, there was a drop in the number of casualties. I will guess that it was because of the upcoming Presidential election. If the number of soldiers killed in Iraq went up yet again, the Pres. would have had a hard time telling Amurikans that things were getting better and it was just dead-enders and Al Qaida doing all of the fighting. A terrorist is just a freedom fighter from a different perspective. The number of soldiers killed in October 2004 was 63 and the names of these people are as follows:

October 1: Sgt. Jack Taft Hennesy, Sgt. Michael A. Uvanni

October 3: Sgt. Christopher S. Potts, Sgt. Russell L. Collier, Ssgt. James L. Pettaway Jr.

October 5: Ssgt. Richard L. Morgan Jr.

October 6: Pvt. Jeungjin Na "Nikky" Kim, Spc. Jessica L. Cawvey

October 7: Spc. Morgen N. Jacobs

October 8: Sgt. Andrew W. Brown, Ssgt. Michael S. Voss

October 9: PFC Andrew Halverson

October 10: Pvt. Carson J. Ramsey, PFC James E. Prevete

October 11: Sgt. Pamela G. Osbourne, PFC Anthony W. Monroe, Ssgt. Michael Lee Burbank, PFC Aaron J. Rusin

October 12: Cpl. Ian T. Zook, Capt. Dennis L. Pintor, Spc. Michael S. Weger, PFC Oscar A. Martinez, Lcpl. Daniel R. Wyatt, Spc. Christopher A. Merville

October 13: Spc. Jaime Moreno, Maj. Charles R. Soltes Jr., Lt. Col. Mark P. Phelan, Lcpl. Victor A. Gonzales, Spc. Jeremy F. Regnier, 2nd Lt. Paul M. Felsberg, Spc. Ronald W. Baker

October 14: Spc. Bradley S. Beard, Ssgt. Omer T. Hawkins II, Pvt. David L. Waters, Spc. Josiah H. Vandertulip, PFC Mark A. Barbret

October 15: Spc. Alan J. Burgess, Cpl. William I. Salazar, Spc. Jonathan J. Santos, Sgt. Michael G. Owen, Lcpl. Brian K. Schramm

October 16: Capt. Christopher B. Johnson, CWO William I. Brennan

October 18: Spc. Andrew C. Ehrlich

October 20: Sgt. Douglas E. Bascom

October 22: Lcpl. Jonathan E. Gadsden

October 24: Lcpl. Richard Patrick Slocum, Sgt. Dennis J. Boles

October 25: Cpl. Brian Oliveira

October 27: Ssgt. Jerome Lemon

October 28: SFC Michael Battles Sr., PFC Stephen P. Downing II, Spc. Segun Frederick Akintade

October 29: Sgt. Maurice Keith Fortune, Pvt. Kevin Thomas McHale

October 30: Corporal Christopher J. Lapka, Lcpl. Travis A. Fox, Lcpl. John T. Byrd II, Sgt. Kelley L. Courtney, Lcpl. Jeremy D. Bow, Lcpl. Michael P. Scarborough, PFC Andrew G. Riedel, PFC John Lukac

October 31: 1st Lt. Matthew D. Lynch

Details on these soldiers can be found at Iraq Coalition Casualties.