As we head into the holiday weekend, let's take a brief moment to remember Franz Kafka, the Bohemian writer whose dystopian chronicles of an all-powerful state where the hopeless are unfairly persecuted for crimes of which they are accused but never quite made aware served as a blueprint for the Bush administration's terrorist detention programs. Author of, among others, The Trial, The Castle and The Metamorphosis, Kafka's bleak vision of life as an unwinnable existential struggle against unidentified forces has resulted in his name being turned into an adjective, used to describe situations similar to those in his work. He was also really into porn. He was born on this day in 1883.