Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Liquorature

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

A Funny Correction

I've seen and read many newspaper corrections, but for some reason which I can't explain, I find this very, very funny. That might be because I can neither speak nor read Chinese. I bet if you could do both, you'd find it funny, too.

I found it at The Huffington Post.

Some Comments On Health Care

Well, Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, legislation that has greatly changed health care in the United States.

If you want the details, please go to other web sites -- preferably news sites and those sites of a liberal/progressive nature.

Don't go to conservative sites. Too, too many of them have opposed health care reform. Some have mentioned the free-market approach to health care.

Well, if our health care system in the U.S. is free-market oriented, then why can't I open, say, my brain-surgery center next week?

That's the snarky, sarcastic, smart-ass reply. For one, I'd be arrested and charged for practicing medicine without a license. I would get one if it was like, say, getting a permit for any other business. But the medical establishment won't allow that.

Health care in the U.S. had a serious flaw. Medicine in this country is a guild, with admission to it very, very limited, and it charges what it wants, like any businessman.

I have a personal example of how screwed health care was, and I bet will be in the future.

Back on a Sunday night in December 1977, I was opening a pack of lunch meat to make a sandwich when the knife I was using to cut open the pack slipped and cut the underside of the middle finger of my left hand.

I tried to wash it and bandage it, but blood from the wound still kept flowing. I decided that I couldn't fix it myself, so I went to the emergency room of my local hospital.

When I got there, the people in charge realized that situation didn't need immediate care, so I waited until help was available. A nurse came and washed it. She said I would need a shot to fight any possible infection, but had to wait on the doctor on duty to give it.

I found that funny, because junkies give themselves shots all the time. They didn't need any specific training to do that.

The doctor came, gave me the shot, and then sewed up the wound.

The whole procedure, if I remember correctly, cost between $220-$230. The nurse or any emergency medical technician could've done it. But the doctor had to do it.

So I have little pity with doctors and insurance companies who piss, bitch and moan about the changes. They overcharged; they're the type of people who give capitalism and the profit motive a bad, bad name.

This is all that I have to say about the situation as of now. If I have anything else to add, I'll put it in this post later.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Four And 20 And So Forth

Four and twenty black birds baked in a pie.
Five and twenty red birds caught in a lie.
Six and twenty blue birds set free -- they fly.
Eight and twenty convicts sentenced to die.
Nine and twenty fresh fish -- they soon will fry.
One and thirty redheads -- Jack made them cry.
Two and thirty people Jack conned -- he's so sly.
Three and thirty people watch Jack, and sigh.

Four and thirty drunkards drink beer and rye.
Five and thirty people say of that -- oh fie!
To all of this I say -- oh my oh my oh my!

A Prophetic Vision

I wrote what's posted below on Dec. 1, 1996. I know the date for certain because I noted is from some pages I took from a notebook I kept during that time. It definitely was written before 9-11.

I was afraid that, in 20 to 25 years, the world would see a depression, then a big war.

One scenario would be Christendom, for lack of a better word, against Islam. Japan and China would be wild cards. Would they be neutral at the start of the war but end up helping Christendom, just as the United States did in World Wars One and Two?

Another scenario would be, no later than 2040, an alliance between Moslem countries, China and some Orthodox countries against "The West" -- nominally Catholic or Protestant countries in Europe and the Americas, along with Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia. No nukes would be used. The big factors would be if Russia would stay neutral or at the least out of the anti-western camp and what side Sub-Saharan African countries with a non-Moslem majority would take

By that time I'll be too old for it or possibly dead.

The Old Days

Below is a picture that came to my mind sometime in the middle 1990s. I plan to flesh it out and use it in some fiction I'll write. In the meantime, I present this picture in words for you.
*
The scene opens on a Saturday during the winter, sometimes between Eisenhower's second term and Kennedy's assassination, in a small town in the Midwest ... the old men born when Theodore Roosevelt was president are still around ... they wear hats and long coats when it's cold ... they still run the businesses in town ... local control still exists ... local owners and operators ... groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores and haberdashers are still downtown ... this was a time definitely before most malls were built or even imagined ... the interestate was only on blueprints ... and the interurban is gone ... they believe that the high school kids are a little confused but all right ... some of them might throw rocks through a few windows ... but if that was all they did, they weren't bad ... they were controllable ... it was a strangely quiet time in a square john world ...

Frank On The Beach

Here's another letter from Frank:

a naked woman wades thigh high in the water a few feet from a beach ... i'm on that beach and i'm watching her ... she stops and opens her legs ... from her vadge flows a stream of little black balls ... they look like caviar ... as the stream flows faster and it grows in volume there's a rip in her torso at the top of her vadge ... i'm in the path of the flow of the the black balls ... i jump with fear as they flow toward me but they go around me ... and them i see them as a stream as they turn and go out to the the water ... a lake or sea i'm not sure ... i turn toward the woman ... she's split apart as the eggs finally stop flowing from her ... i rush to the place where she stands ... she suddenly drops down into the water but immediately jumps up from under it and she's her old self again ... i embrace her and ask her "what the hell was that all about?" ... she says "baby i've been fucked and fucked over by a lotta guys and i held in my anger at them all this time 'til i just couldn't take it ... i was filled with white cum so i had to release it as black stuff" ... i say "was any of that from me?" ... she says "just a little bit but hon when you did it you din't know any better in fact you did it the least of all" ... i say "i'd like to apologize' ... she says "apologies accepted" ... i say "you ought to be scared to death about what happened" ... she says "i'm not ... i'm taking it pretty lightly ... it was an unpleasant task that's over and done with and now i can go on with my life" ... all during this time other people are on the beach but they're dressed and don't point out what happened and that she's naked ... by the way, her name is sandy because she has sandycolored hair ...

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Mink Stole

Yesterday, I posted some jottings. Today, I'll do the same. I usually don't post them so close together in this blog, but I found several of them in some old notebooks yesterday and I want to post them now to get them off my mind and out of the way.
*
I stole the mink stole
*
Tomorrow seems forever far away.
*
Is the Manchurian candidate's mustache a Fu Manchu?
*
A redneck from the South
Has few teeth in his mouth.
*
Instead of the black sheep of the family, he was its blacksmith
*
"That movie is so family friendly that any child could take his or her parents to see it."
*
Spuds 4
Every 1
*
The king is gone but he's not a dud.
This is the story of Johnny Spud.
It's better to burn out that be mashed away
Bake, bake and fry.
(All apologies to Neil Young.)
*
Richard The Hampster-Hearted was not the bravest boy in the bunch.
*
I laughed, I cried -- I birthed quintuplet daughters
*
Here's the hanky. Where's the panky?
*
For the bored student at the end of the school days, hope springs when the bell rings.

About The Ladies

Ace: Hey, do you want to hear something?

Deuce: What?

Ace: The sound of someone spitting up -- PL-PL-PL-PL-FEW!

Deuce: Jesus, you fucking idiot! Watch it!

Ace: At least I didn't spit anything up and out and onto the floor.

Deuce: Shit like that is why you're a loser with the ladies. Remember that girl you told me about? You took her out on a date last month. How did that go, anyway?

Ace: Not so well. She had sensuously plump lips, beautiful enough to kiss. And I wanted to do that slowly and for a long, long time. But she wouldn't let me. She said, "You don't know me." I said, "You won't let me know you. Why not?"

Deuce: You said that on the first date?

Ace: Yep.

Deuce: Too soon, Lothario.

Ace: But if she had let herself know me, she would've found out that I'm sensitive. I notice the lightness of cotton candy, butterfly wings, and the hopes and dreams of all small children. And I also noticed that the sky sometimes is not pearl gray, but a pastel gray. A lot of people don't see that; they think pastel colors are in blue or pink. But I see it.

Deuce: Oh well ... her loss ... I guess.

Ace: You guess so. I know so.

Deuce: You miss Dee, don't you?

Ace: A great woman.

Deuce: She hung around for a while. I guess she could tolerate you.

Ace: She dug it when I said, "Dog me, dog my love."

Deuce: Your dog?

Ace: Yeah -- the mad dog on the night train.

Deuce: If I remember rightly, your love life was pretty good.

Ace: Yeah. I once asked her, "Let's take a trip to the dark side, and I'll be your tour guide." Another time, I said,
"Sit on my lap and we'll talk about the first thing that pops up."

Deuce: Damn. She was pretty open.

Ace: Yeah.

Deuce: O well ... things change.

Ace: I remember one time when we were sitting side by side on a couch, watching a movie with Cameron Diaz in it. Our arms were touching. We turned to each other at the same time and started French kissing -- pretty hot and heavy. I knew I could fuck her. I started to take off her clothes when, all of a sudden, Cameron crawled out of the television set. She asked if she could join us and we said yes -- definitely. She took off her clothes. We were all naked and they were licking me all over when I woke up.

Deuce: I bet you're pissed that something like it never happened in real life.

Ace: And while we're talking, I have a question: If the apex is the highest point, is the zeepex the lowest?

Deuce: It doesn't work that way.

Ace: O well, it's time for the first fifth ...

Deuce: Of the day, you goddamn alcoholic?

Ace: No. Of the week, perhaps ...

A Progression

I found this out or figured it out by myself in early March of 2007:

If you add three consecutive numbers together, their sum goes up by increments of three.

Examples:
1+2=3
2+3=5
3+4=7
4+5=9
And so on.

I took that progression out a few numbers more but dropped it then.

When I came across it while I was going through some old notebooks, I thought I'd see if that was true for larger numbers.

So:
500+501+502=1503
501+502+503=1506.

I believe it goes on for infinity.

I'm sure there's some name for this, but I don't know what it is, since I'm more of an arts guy than a science/math guy.

The Weather, Always Changing

For the last week and a half, we've had great weather in central Indiana. No precipitation -- neither rain nor, thank the fates and the weather patterns -- snow -- had fallen. The sun was shining.

Yesterday, however, it was rainy and overcast with temperatures in the 40s. As of now, it's overcast with rain clouds and temperatures are in the high 30s.

That's an example of the fickle weather in this part of the country. Here's another one:

On March 25, 2007, I saw that the grass on the lawns in my neighborhood was that emerald-green tint that shows that it had started to grow after cold weather had left.
And if I remember correctly, the high one day that month was 75 degrees.

But on April 12, 2007, snow fell.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Monkey Has Moved

The monkey that was on my back ...

Its claws have left some nasty wounds ...

They're now starting to heal ...

It's now on someone else's back ...

But why there ...

Why not the leg or the balls ...

Friday, March 12, 2010

A Mutato

A mutato is another name for a mutant potato.
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"Didn't go out the other day. Stayed home with a sick friend. Me."
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Little did he know of the little he did know.
*
"On Pearl Harbor Day, sadly enough, there is no Japanese lady who would blow the hell out of me."
*
Le Bimbeau and Les Bimbeaux are descriptions of the ignorant in dog French.
*
Crosstown Ladies, Midtown Wives: Sounds like the title of a Jackie Collins novel.
*
Things inevitable in winter: Death, television, snow.
Things inevitable in spring: Death, taxes, tax dodging.
*
The children in a family of idiots were named Dizzy, Daffy, Dopey, Dummy ... and Zaccariah.
*
Thus sayeth X, in the manner of the King James Bible:
I am vengeful upon mine enemies, which are legion upon this earth, alas.
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I have
the deep dark
blues
tonight
from drinking
too much
booze
tonight.
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A old man wonders:
When was the last time I had an erection? Or a hard stool? Or both during the same day?
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Outer space --
it's a
far-out place!
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Rufus
is not a doofus.
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The snow was a shallow cover on the ground. The grass poked through it. The cars were covered lightly. The streets were wet, not slick, as if rain fell during the night.
*
You have a fuck off, but never a fuck on.
You have a fuck up, but never a fuck down.
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"I call that state O-sigh-O."

"Why?"

"You'd sigh, too, if you'd think about it. And also if you once lived there."
*
The homosexual vampire says, "I want to suck your cock."
The perverted vampire says, "I want to fuck your blood."

History, Possibly Repeating Itself

History often seems to repeat itself.

Some times, it's as if the thing happening now is exactly like a thing that happened in the past.

Some times, it's as if a Bell curve is unfolding before you.

For example, John F. Kennedy was a handsome, charismatic man in his 40s who was elected to office. While in office, however, he was assassinated.

He was followed by Lyndon B. Johnson, a politician from Texas who got the United States involved in an unpopular land war in Asia -- back then, in Vietnam.

George W. Bush was a politician from Texas who got the United States involved in an unpopular land war in Asia -- this time, in Iraq.

He was followed by Barack Obama ...

Just saying, folks. Just saying.

A Pyramid Of Fat

The last part of the week before and the first part of this week has seen wonderful weather in central Indiana. In fact, it got up to the low 70s Thursday.

Most importantly, no rain fell.

Rain has been forecast, however, today through Sunday, with highs averaging in the middle 50s and lows in the middle 30s.

But most importantly of all is this: No freezing weather is forecast for the next two weeks, and it probably won't return until November, at the earliest.

Since good weather has arrived, I've decided to start walking to lose weight. I'm about 50 pounds overweight for my age and height. My gut is starting to bother me and I need to improve my health

I walked for a while while during the summer of 2008, but didn't keep it up. Some things discouraged me, like the following scene that I will post now.

I walked in the morning when it was cool and I had the time. One morning while I was walking I saw, coming toward me, a guy who's driving one of those mobility chairs.

From the waist up, he was a pyramid of fat.

I guessed that he wasn't out for exercise. Is he out for fresh air? I thought. Hell, for that he could've just rolled out into his back yard and breathe.

Our paths crossed. We nodded, although I didn't know him. We passed each other.

Then I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that he was giving me one of those goddamn think-you're-better-than-me? glares.

I lived and still live in a small town with a large contingency of Scotch-Irish people from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia: In other words, rednecks. Most of them are either ectomorphs -- thin and wiry -- or endomorphs -- fat and stocky. I've seen a lot of couples who, as they walk side by side, look like the number 10.

They also carry their resentments with them. Some seem as if they have five chips on each shoulder.

Hey, you fat ass redneck bastard, I thought, I may not be better than you now, but I'm trying to be better than you. I'm doing NOW what you should've started doing about 20 years ago, you goddamn bucket of lard.

As I was walking back to my home, I saw that the guy must've went to the local grocery store, because he had a grocery sack full of potato chips and two-gallon bottles of pop, definitely NOT diet.

Another New Word

And the new word is explosure.

It's an explosion that exposes something: Say the inside of a house after a bomb goes off in it; or an outburst that destroys a dirty secret -- little or big, it matters not the size.

Mr. Leaf

Mr. Leaf, the sneak-a-peek thief, often walks the back alleys in the city of P. during the nights.

He looks into the back windows of some houses. Few notice him because it's as if he's invisible.

He often sees a lot of dirty little secrets. He also sees some clean little secrets, too.

He wondered: Why don't people talk about their clean little secrets? Too insignificant, perhaps? Not interesting enough to others?

"It's just not done," a woman once told him. "Some lines aren't just crossed."

And what the hell does that mean? Mr. Leaf wondered.

Then he realized that if the KGB and the Gestapo had ever bottled that attitude, and make people drink it, they'd still be in power.

Taking and Making -- Related

The National Collegiate Athletic Association will announce the participants of its Division I men's basketball tourney at 6 p.m. Sunday. As I write this post, many conferences are having tourneys to determind who will participate.

I've written about the tourney before. If you want to read that, please click here, because I have little to add to it.

Recently, however, I realized this:

In basketball, you take a shot. If the ball goes into the basket, you make a shot.

I find that use of words interesting. At the least, it rhymes.

By the way, the finals will be April 3rd and 5th in Indianapolis.

These Times, Part 2 ...

As I did last week, I present a link to Gawker.com about these times. If you want to read it, please click here .

The most amazing -- and saddest -- part of the post is this: Detroit is reverting back into semi-rural farmland by plan.

You read it correctly: Back to semi-rural farmland by plan.

Go to the fifth paragraph of the post, and click where noted.

Again, I ask you: How fucking screwed are we?

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Active Hormones, Just Like Mine

In the early 1980s, I lived in a small city in east central Indiana. It was known mostly for its manufacturing, which was going to hell then, and its high school basketball program.

One Friday night, I was working the late shift. As I was going home, I saw, about two blocks ahead of me, a group of young black men. They were more like kids; I doubt any of them were older than 15 years.

At first, I felt scared. I grew up in a small town that had no black residents, so my contact with them was limited. I had no idea what their intentions were.

But then I realized that they were teens, just as restless as I was when I was their age. My friends and I roamed the streets in packs, rode our bicycles because none of us had driver's licenses, and acted like idiots at times, especially when we were together, because we were changing from boys to men.

I didn't feel ashamed, just satisfied because I had a reason why they were in a group.

The Moon Is Red


Some people -- women, in particular -- might look at the moon differently that me.

When I see a crescent moon, I think: Ah, how lovely.

When a woman sees the same moon, she might think: Oh God, it's about time when my period should start.

I've never asked a woman that question. It's a little too personal, and I've never been close enough to one to ask that and not either be slapped or hated.

But Enough About Me ... Or Maybe Too Much

I'll post an interesting quotations that I recently read. It comes from a review by Daniel Mendelsohn published in the Jan. 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. It's about memoirs in general and the book Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda.

The quote appears on page 73. It goes:

A question that Yagoda never really explores is why, now in particular, there seems to be so much blurring between reality and fiction ... The answer to this question suggests why it's hard not to feel that there is, in fact, something distinctive about the current cycle of memoir proliferation and anti-memoir backlash.

Realty itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: On these shows, "real" people (that is, people who aren't professional actors) are placed in artificial situations -- they go on elaborately arranged dates, are abandoned on desert islands, have their ugly apartments redecorated, or are dumped into takes of worms or scorpions -- in order to provoke the "real" emotions that the audience tunes in to witness (disappointment, desire, joy, gratitude, terror). This craving on the part of audiences for real-life displays of increasingly extreme emotion (over, say, the carefully rehearsed emotions that are provided to us when we go to the theatre or the movies) surely stems from the rise, in the seventies, of talk shows whose hosts put ordinary people and their problems in the Spotlight: First, Phil Donahue and, later, Sally Jessy Raphael and Montel Williams. These TV shows helped crate and promulgate their wider culture of self-discussion and self-exposure without which the recently flurry of memoir-writing and reading would be unthinkable.

Race Trumps Sex

When S. heard his friend A. say he probably wouldn't fuck a black woman because of her race, S. was surprised.

He's fuck some black women if they were sexy enough and fit his standards of lust. Race wasn't a factor at all. But A.'s statement proved mind over cock. Most of the time, the cock wins because it's not an inhibited.

Looks like racism has another victim, S. thought of A. And this one's white. He's closed himself off to experiences if they are predominately black. Too bad.

As the years passed, S. became less of a friend to A. and more of a semifriendly acquaintance. He didn't entirely cut A. out of his life, but he put a lot more distance between them then he had in the past.

A lot of people say: Don't burn you bridges, S. thought. I'm not gonna do that with A. but I'm gonna let it rot from neglect.

Then he realized bridges didn't rot because they weren't organic. The word decline wasn't strong or powerful enough, so he checked the dictionary and found the word he wanted to use was deteriorate: The best example of a process of a thing that wasn't living and never was alive.

Man U, And Not The Soccer Team

Ace: Hey -- what happened to the clock on the wall?

Deuce: I dropped it when I was winding it.

Ace: Is it broken?

Deuce: Yes. I broke it with my own two hands.

Ace: So it's manufractured.

Deuce (for ten seconds, at the least): Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That is such a terrible pun!

Ace: And some people think that man in manufacture means made by man. It doesn't. The man comes from the Latin word manus for hand.

Deuce: Ignorant fuckers. And because you dropped the clock, you're a worthless fucker.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

These Times ...

Lately, I've felt a little perturbed about the times. Three things put those vague thoughts and feelings about that into words.

The first was this review of the book
Next Man Up: A Year Behind The Line In Today's NFL by John Feinstein. In it, he quoted Brian Billick, the former head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. It appeared in the January 8, 2007 issue of The New Yorker:

Billick says grimly about cutting players, "Whenever I have to make these cuts, I always think about what Clint Eastwood said in 'Unforgiven': 'when you kill a man, you not only are ending his life, you're taking away everything he ever had or is going to have.'" The unhappiness that you feel among the (Baltimore Ravens) players is hardly the misery of the oppressed, but is something more familiar these days, the rancor of the near-miss. Why them and not us? is a radical question. Why the guy at the next locker and not me? a bitter one.

(I forgot to note the author of the piece. For that, I apologize.)

The second is from the blog Gawker.com. It's entitled What Are You Even Doing, America? Here's the first paragraph:

The Way We Live Now: Ass out. We barely even know what we're doing any more. Stealing a bus? Living on the front lawn? Buying in before yet another real estate crash? It's a party!

The rest of the post was written in the same tone. Click here to read it.

The third is also from Gawker. It's about Joe Stack, the man who flew his private airplane into an Internal Revenue Service office on February 17 of this year in Austin, Texas. Click here to read it.

After I read all of them at about the same time, I wondered to myself: How fucking screwed are we? The bad economic times do not seem to be going away. There's a strongly vocal minority who opposes the president either for his policies, his race, or both. Add to that the lousy weather this winter. It's no wonder that I, along with many other people, feel somewhat helpless.

But when I think of all that, I think of this picture:


It reminds me of a famous quote from Candide, the satirical novel by the 18th-century French writer Voltaire. While Pangloss, Candide's mentor, tells him that "All is for the best in in the best of all possible worlds," Candide replies, "We must cultivate our gardens."

I cultivate my garden the best that I can. I hope you do the same.

There also is a quote by Shakespeare that's from Act 4, Scene 1 of King Lear:

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/So long as we can say, This is the worst.


I believe that. I hope you do, too.

So take care, please.

A New Use For An Old Word

Last night, I hardboiled some eggs. After they were cooked, I thought to myself: Now I'm going to fridge them.

Then I realized that I had made a new use for an old word. I had verbed a noun, which you can do well in English.

To me, fridge meant to put into a refrigerator to keep cool. It came from the noun fridge, which was short for refrigerator.

And the word fridge is a lot like the word freeze. There is the fr- at the beginning of both. There is the short i in fridge and long e in freeze. And the z in fridge often slides into zh and zh often slides into j, which is a combination of d and zh.

Everything In Its Place

Hammond was one of Rogers' first bosses when he started working fulltime after college. He was hired after Rogers' old boss was fired.

But Hammond had some quirks that came to dismay him.

The first was when Hammond complained that a local drug store was selling beach balls and metal folding chairs alongside drugs and other related items. Rogers thought: Hey, buddy -- are you a commie? Are you against someone making a profit?

Practices like that didn't bother him, and his bosses at the home office were strongly professed capitalist -- especially in their monopoly position.

But rogers began to think things were strange when Hammond had a strong reaction against female sexual display. It came after a discussion of a playmate of the month and other pictures of women either half naked or half dressed.

Rogers later found out that Hammond was Catholic and was against the changes that Vatican II had made to that church. He wondered if Hammond's reaction was that of a devotee to the sin of sexual desire.

Another Catholic who tugs his forelock to the priest, Rogers thought. What a fool. He's either not a very sophisticated thinker, like St. Thomas Aquinas or a Jesuit priest, or he's scared of the top dogs.

Such obedience to authority would help him advance at the company.

Later, after he got another job at a different place, he wondered if Hammond's reaction was from latent homosexuality -- fear and hate of a female sexual body. Or possibly it came from a combination of the two. And what percentage was what.

All Hail, Macbeth!

Here is another entry in the commonplace post category. It's a review of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart and performed in early 2008 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

It was written by John Lahr and published in the March 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker:

At a thrilling first stroke,with the clatter and cries of a wounded soldier being wheeled in on a stretcher, the plays bursts the somnolence of a dingy field ward -- linoleum, white tiles, an iron-gated upstage elevator, a washbasin whose spigots will in time run red with blood. We are thrust into the heart-stopping hurly-burley that Shakespeare's prologue merely prophesies. The walls flicker with projections of a flatlining soldier's electrocardiogram printout.; The Nursing Sisters hover. With sanitary face masks over their mouths and noses and starched wimples on their heads, which make them look like bustling predatory birds -- one of them even holds a hacksaw -- they swoop around the traumatized soldier as he babbles news of battle and Macbeth's military bravery.

The audience is shocked to discover that the Nursing sisters are Shakespeare's witchy Weird Sisters, who greet Macbeth in the ward with a prophecy of his rise to power, and who are all the more terrifying because they successfully masquerade as part of the ordinary world. "All hail, Macbeth!" they incant three times promoting him in each preduction from "Thane of Glamis" to "Thane of Cawdor" and, finally, "That shalt be King hereafter." The words stop Macbeth in his tracks. "Good Sir, why do you start, and seem to fear Things that do sound so Fair?" his cohort Banquo asks. In the witches' "imperial theme," Macbeth instantly recognizes his own murderous subterannean ambition: His selfdestructive course is set. Traditionally, the Weird Sisters are stages as the Fats, and their scenes verge on Halloween voodoo. Goold (Rupert Goold, who directed the production) stages the Sisters are their psychologically astute author intuited them to be -- as incarnations of Macbeth's unconscious. In theis production, the sisters, spectres of the subversive, are rewoved into the entired fabric of Macbeth's saga; they ratch up the atmosphere of menace, shadowing action with the unsaid and the uncontrolled.

John Lahr is, by the way, the son of Bert Lahr.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The Weather Lately

I'm hoping with all my hopes that the weather has finally turned.

About one and one-half inch of snow, which covered the ground, fell sometime between nightfall last Friday and sunrise last Saturday.
By Sunday, however, it was gone because it was light and powdery.

The snowfall was frustrating. Before it happened, I could see clear patches of ground where the earlier snow had melted. A lot of the remaining snow was in large drifts or in mostly-shaded places.

By Monday, however, the scene looked as it did before the snowfall.

With highs this week forecast from the mid 30s to the mid 40s, most of the snow should be gone by next Sunday.

As for last month, weather people say 17.5 inches of snow had fallen in the Indianapolis area. The average snowfall is 6.1 inches.

The record snowfall during February in the Indianapolis area was 21.7 inches in 2003. (By the way, and for your information, 18.2 inches fell in February 2007.)

The Best Words For A ... Female

I don't use the B-word to describe a woman. It's sexist. (In case you're wondering what it is, it rhymes with witch.)

Also, I definitely don't use the C-word to describe a woman. It's mysoginistic, nasty, and demeaning. (In case you're wondering what it is, it rhymes with punt.)

I will call a woman a bastard female, because:

  • A woman can be just as big a bastard as any man;
  • When I call them female, I acknowledge their gender, but not their humanity. Of that, they have very little.

Word Pic

Wordle: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Made by me at wordle.com.

Please click to increase its size.

It's the lyrics to It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, by Bob Dylan.

The song was originally on his album Bringing It All Back
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