Yes, July 3 is the date of Franz Kafka’s birth in 1883. If he hadn’t died of starvation brought on by tuberculosis in 1924, he would have been 125 years old today! I imagine the news report: “A doddering Franz Kafka celebrated his 125th birthday today surrounded by friends and the uncomfortable notion that he had unwittingly invented some of the more profound absurdities of the modern state.”

Did Kafka actually prove that the worst and darkest ideas operating in the deepest recesses of the human dreamscape will eventually manifest themselves as government/business policy? I think maybe he did, though it took a while for us to get it. He got the very heart of our paranoia — the ways in which we don’t trust ourselves. It’s a little strange to toast such a thing, but there you go.

To one of the Titans of the Art Scatter pantheon, happy birthday!