So it goes.

1. I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

   (I’m tempted to fill this threat with Vonnegutisms!)

2. Only recently have I noticed how much of my daily vocabulary and favorite phrases are, in fact, Vonnegutisms. Wikiquote maintains a great selection.

3. Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.

   The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my one-time hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.

   My stolen answer to Nixon was this: “Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

   From: Jailbird, K. Vonnegut

4. Kinda reminds me of all the people writing about Douglas Adams being in heaven now. Makes you wonder how many of them actually read anything by the guy.

5. “The only evidence I needed for the existence of God is music.”

   -Kurt Vonnegut
   RIP

6. To be clear (since I wasn’t) by “guy” I meant Adams.

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