He hated to lose, but the bomb got him.

secret of success ... do whatever can be done to avoid losing

John von Neumann (1903-57), the father of the modern digital computer, loved toys and playing games for fun, so much so that he compiled an immense library of jokes which he used to liven up a conversation. Undoubtedly this passion contributed to his important work in Game Theory where he determined that the secret of success was not to aim to win, but to do whatever can be done to avoid losing. Not so much fun were his crucial calculations on the implosion design of the atomic bomb, affording a more efficient, deadly weapon. In the end he lost, succumbing at 54 to bone cancer attributed to radiation exposure to the atomic tests on Bikini atoll.

Alone, unarmed and unafraid

Marked for death

The 30 year old American pictured here on trial in 1960 as a spy in a cold-war Soviet Union court room, spent 17 months in prison for it. He literally flew over downtown Moscow alone, unarmed and unafraid. The related so-called 'U2 Incident' grabbed world headlines at the time, and afforded him more than his share of the proverbial allotment of 15 minutes of fame. He died in 1977 at 47 when a television news helicopter he was piloting crashed in Los Angeles.
     ... Francis Gary Powers (1929-77) an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident.

Angst ... from the sublime to the ridiculous

"The Scream"

 

insecurity and despair

“Why did I come into the world without any choice?” asks Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the Norwegian artist who pictorially coined the existential notion of ‘angst’ in the lithograph "The Scream" in 1893, described by a noted art critic at the time as: "a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair".

Self Portrait with the Grim Reaper

Kindred to Munch’s work is the surrealistic artistry of Roland Topor (1938-97), a French artist and writer who also explored alienation and identity, asking disturbing questions about how we define ourselves and social conformity. He was a Polish Jew spending his early years in Savoy hiding from the Nazi peril:

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WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.
WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.
WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]

... from the movie "Play It Again, Sam" directed by Woody Allen
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0yuqpk00Ts&feature=related)