Rhyme Of The Day

Births, Marital and Non

2012-02-18T17:49:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has gotten around to covering the story that Charles Murray's new book made popular:

After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

The NYT article mentions something I had missed before.

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together.

So these are not what I usually think of as "single" mothers. They are mothers in pair-bondings that are (statistically) even more tenuous than the average American marriage! Nonetheless, at least when the child arrives, there's a dad on the scene.

It's almost like common law marriage. But the participants don't consider themselves married.

So when they break up, of course,
there's no need to file for divorce.

But still they're likely to end up in court
if only to settle on child support.

Devil May Care

2012-02-18T00:10:00.003-06:00

Saw "Devil May Care", by Kendall Sherwood, put on by the Wishbone Theatre Collective.

Devil May Care combines the unlikely topics of gasoline, a gun and religion, with the result being a dark, and twisted drama.

I found it rather harrowing.

A man and a woman encounter each other in an otherwise empty church - in the dead of night. They've both got a lot on their minds, heavy burdens that they're desperate to be rid of.

John Mark Sawyer and Denise Smolarek are both excellent in their roles. He plays a Baptist preacher, and she plays a woman with a badly damaged soul who seems lost in despair.

It's a journey through hell,
done very well.

Shadow

2012-02-16T23:50:00.001-06:00

Saw part one of Peter Pan's Shadow again. Noticed internally-recurring themes more this time.

As sun and moon go round and round,
your shadow shifts along the ground.

Where light is not, the shadow's found.

Crackdown

2012-02-15T23:51:00.001-06:00

Illinois wants to crackdown on Medicaid fraud, by making sure people really live in Illinois, and making sure they're poor enough to qualify, but there's a problem: the Feds won't let us.

The Department of Health and Human Services argues that those enforcement efforts could violate the 2010 health care reform law, which forbids states from making Medicaid eligibility standards more restrictive.

I continue to be in awe
at what is in this law.

Patient Satisfaction

2012-02-14T18:28:00.002-06:00

Here's an interesting (but not yet reproduced) result:

A UC-Davis study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on Monday found that the most-satisfied patients are more likely to be hospitalized, have higher health care costs and are more likely to die than less-satisfied patients. The study is believed to be the first to warn that focusing on patient satisfaction could have unexpected adverse effects.

Why were the ones who were satisfied
more likely to be the ones that died?

Were there doctors giving them whatever they asked for, whether it was good for them or not?

Some things you can ask a doctor to do
may not be good for you.

I imagine Michael Jackson
had high patient satisfaction.

Birth Control Economics

2012-02-13T09:23:00.002-06:00

I'm hearing arguments that the "free" birth control mandate will "pay for itself" because birth control is cheaper than abortion or birth, at least as far as medical expenses are concerned.

But do private health plan administrators believe this? If they thought they could "save money" by dispensing birth control at no charge, wouldn't they already be doing this?

To actually save money, this mandate would have to prevent a substantial numbers of births or abortions that would have occurred otherwise. Do you think that will happen?

Of course, I also expect to see
arguments that we need to have free
treatments for infertility.

Population Economics

2012-02-12T12:01:00.002-06:00

The U.S. has been (barely) maintaining its population, with a higher rate of reproduction than Canada or Western Europe. But, why? Here's a theory that's new to me:

... an important new study by economists Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi has found that the real reason for larger families is the unusually large supply of low-cost babysitters and child-care workers in the U.S. – mainly due to immigration, much of it “illegal,” from Latin America.

I'm not sure why the "illegal" is in quotes. Are those scare quotes? Or just "we don't know any other way to say this" quotes? It's from a Canadian paper, so maybe they're just trying to be polite.

Opt for low-skilled immigration
to build our population!

Wasted

2012-02-11T23:50:00.002-06:00

Whitney Houston, after a long spiral down, has died. It's sad what happened. She had a great voice.

Crashed too young.
Songs unsung.

The Doyle And Debbie Show

2012-02-11T09:14:00.002-06:00

We went to see the Doyle & Debbie Show which has been getting rave reviews here, and turned out to be very funny.

Doyle Mayfield, an old-guard country star with a handful of hits back in the 70s and 80s, is reviving his career thirty years, four wives, and three Debbies later. The new Debbie, a single mother with three children, sees this lovable lothario as her last chance to make it big in Nashville – but she also questions hitching her star to this loose cannon.

The songs are original parodies of different genres of country songs. The songs are musically lively, and the performers have real singing talent, so you find yourself enjoying the music while cracking up over the lyrics. Song titles include "For The Children", "Barefoot And Pregnant", and "I Ain't No Homo (But Man You Sure Look Good To Me)". The parody material runs a bit toward older styles of country music, rather than contemporary, and the crowd at the show last night had a lot of people who looked like they were in their 40s and 50s.

Bruce Arnston, who plays Doyle, wrote the songs and put the show together. The show played in Nashville for 5 years, and then came 450 miles north to Chicago, where it has been extended at least once so far.

It's a bit like Spinal Tap,
but on a Tennessee map.

Gastro Bistro

2012-02-10T08:00:00.003-06:00

The lady at the cute little French restaurant told us this is always a quiet week for her business.

But V-day is coming
and hearts will be strumming
and cute little places
will flood with young faces.

Natural Kinds... More Thoughts

2012-02-08T21:24:00.002-06:00

Philosophers use "natural kinds" in a special way.

Scientific disciplines divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping or ordering that does not depend on humans.

An interesting question is: What if a grouping depends on dogs, rather than humans? Specifically, we now know that animals, although unable to study or theorize, do categorize, or group like things together.

So, supposing my dog has a wordless category, which we would call "raccoon". His grouping the masked beings together doesn't depend on humans.

It nonetheless remains true that '"raccoon", considered from the evolutionary viewpoint, is a blurry category. They are evolved from something else.

Of course, dog cognition
may not provide
the very best guide
to species definition.

Natural Kinds and Genetic Lines

2012-02-08T00:06:00.001-06:00

Will Wilkinson writes:

You are not an instance of a natural kind. You are a member of a genetic line. You have no essence.

He asserts
till it hurts.

To back it up, he links to a paper in which the author, near the end, says:

In fact I think that the species category may very well be a natural kind and that part of its essence is variability.

So the cite
doesn't quite
back
his attack.

History in the Taking

2012-02-07T23:42:00.002-06:00

A noted historian has filed a guilty plea - for stealing valuable documents.

Barry Landau of New York City admitted to taking documents from the Maryland Historical Society and conspiring with his assistant to steal and sell more documents from that institution and others in the Northeast.

Apparently he had been thieving for a long time. He was finally caught at the Maryland Historical Society.

A sharp-eyed worker made the collar
of this trusted but busted scholar.

Material Support

2012-02-06T19:09:00.002-06:00

Normally Chicago cabbies just terrorize you with their driving.

But Raja Lahrasib Khan took it to the next level.

A Pakistani-born Chicago taxi driver has pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to al-Qaida as part of a plea deal hammered out recently with prosecutors.

Best to hold off on helping buddies
who are enrolled in Terrorist Studies.

Superbowl Roman Numerals

2012-02-05T23:36:00.002-06:00

I will admit I'm not a big football fan, but it was a good game. We hosted a small family party.

My father and I got to talking about how the Romans *pronounced* their numerals. I mean, when they looked at something like XLVI, how did they say it?

XLVI is 46. It turns out that they had words for 40 and 6 , namely "quadraginta" and "sex", and from this page it looks like they said 46 simply as "quadraginta sex".

But if you read on you will see that when it came to 48, they said,"duodequinquaginta", which is literally "two from fifty".

Pity the Romans, who had to make do
with a pair of i's as a symbol for two.

If I were a Roman, I would feel glum
whenever I had to add up a sum.

Politics by Photo Puzzle

2012-02-04T12:35:00.000-06:00

Tyler Cowen asks how we know - just from looking at this photo - whether this woman's politics lean left or right. Click on it to make it bigger if you want.

Actually, he specified which one we know. And he has links to her blog and twitter accounts to verify. (See item 3 here.)

A lot of his commenters focus on her clothing and her hair. A couple go for her ethnicity, which didn't occur to me. Some are interested in her age in combination with the other factors, such as her weight. A few are concerned with expression, which is what I naturally took an interest in.

I have the pre-existing idea that people of different American locales and worldviews *present* themselves differently - have different characteristic facial expressions. These are maddeningly hard to nail down. But actors often adopt different facial expressions for different characters they play.

So, how does she look to you -
red or blue?

Push Ups

2012-02-04T09:45:00.001-06:00

It sounds scripted to me, but the First Lady and Ellen DeGeneres engaged in a push up contest on the Ellen show. DeGeneres made it just past 15. The First Lady did 25. When I first heard she hit 25, I wondered exactly what kind of push ups they were doing. Because there are lots of kinds.

You can see their push ups here.

DeGeneres goes deeper on her push ups than the First Lady. And neither of them does a push up that gets down to the ground, the way this guy does:

I just completed one thousand or so.
Of course, I started three years ago.

Design Fail

2012-02-04T00:30:00.002-06:00

Look at the yellow spot on the cow's shoulder. Do you see the outline of a porky creature?

Major fail -
letting prisoners draw
a decal
for the forces of the law.

Peter Pan's Shadow: Neverland

2012-02-03T00:29:00.003-06:00

Part One of Jeremy Menekseoglu's Peter Pan trilogy opened tonight at Dream Theatre. It is a remarkable play, a dark-tinged prequel to the Peter Pan we know.

There are no wires hoisting people into the air. You have to imagine the flying. But the show is a delight for the senses, featuring wild costumes, beautiful art, and a very effective sound design that leans toward classical music.

The performances were creative and crisp. For whatever reason, the one that struck me the most, or perhaps tugged at my heart the most, was Annelise Lawson's Tinker Bell. She agonizingly waits for Peter to grow up, just a little, so that he can finally appreciate her love for him. But, of course, Peter doesn't want to grow up.

Mishelle Apalategui was a fine Peter. I found myself forgetting that she's really a female. Avery Ferguson was riotous as a crocodile, and strangely perfect as a dog. Jeremy Menekseoglu brought winsome charm to the murderous Captain Hook. Chad Sheveland was precise and hilarious as Hook's Number Two, Smee. Rachel Martindale was eerily controlled as a woman who feels her sanity slipping away over the disappearance of a child. Lana Smithner made a very convincing Wendy.

Finally, Anna Menekseoglu played The Shadow, a complicated role with a lot of acting challenges built into it. She made it look easy, with a trance-like absorption and an elegance of movement. Watching her in this role is like watching some mysterious dance unfold.

Out of the embers, reborn,
she undulates, dark and forlorn.

More DOJ Trouble Reported

2012-02-01T23:48:00.000-06:00

The Daily Caller has what sounds like a hot scoop, but they're not naming their source, who is supposed to be an official inside the Department of Justice.

at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives

The source alleges that Attorney General Eric Holder knows about it, but has been keeping a lid on it for political reasons.

I find it hard to believe, for a couple of reasons.

1) Federal prosecutors rarely get in that particular kind of trouble.

2) Holder would have to be nuts to try to keep this quiet. The longer you hold this sort of thing, the stinkier it gets - and the closer to election time it gets.

So I basically doubt
this will shake out.

Romney in Florida

2012-01-31T19:16:00.001-06:00

Romney appears to have won big in Florida.

Glenn Reynolds yesterday speculated on whether Romney was electable:

Well, the theory is that (1) He’s not Obama; and (2) He’s not scary.

I think it's a plausible theory.
I think the voters are weary
of economic drift
and are hoping for a lift.

Will they see Romney as capable of providing that lift? I don't know.

How much better for the economy
would Romney be?

Epiphany

2012-01-30T23:13:00.002-06:00

You think, and you think, and you wait, and it hurts,
And then it pops up on your plate like dessert.

Rewriting

2012-01-30T00:54:00.002-06:00

Rewriting is a curse
But it keeps my stuff from coming out much worse.

Shakespeare and Prokokiev

2012-01-29T10:06:00.003-06:00

Saw Romeo & Juliet last night. The ballet, not the play, as produced by the State Ballet Theatre of Russia.

Here's a version that I think looks better than what we saw, in case you want a general idea of the music. The choreography is quite a bit different, however:

That's Nureyev and Fonteyn doing the balcony scene.

Here's the big Knight's Dance scene from a Paris production:

In the program notes, they mentioned that Prokokiev had a lot of trouble with the fact that the dying don't dance. I suppose it's even worse than the opera problem that the dying don't sing.

Even in film today,
the dying often say
their last words with perfect clarity
which in real life is surely a rarity.

Bitter Over Twitter

2012-01-27T22:31:00.001-06:00

Funny the way they stepped in this just after the SOPA dust-up:

Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.

Of course, it's not easy being a freedom-loving company that operates in a lot of freedom-hating countries. You get caught in the crossfire between the people, who want to be able to speak, and the censors, who want to be able to silence the speakers.

Now the people are threatening Twitter boycotts.

If you're a Twitter exec, one of the things that can keep you up at night is the ability of your customer base to desert you at any time. Competing platforms exist. Everyone uses Twitter partly because that's what everybody uses. It's popular partly because it's popular.

That sort of thing can change overnight.
That sort of thought gives the bosses a fright.

86'd

2012-01-26T22:39:00.002-06:00

Tonight we saw Courtney Arnett's very enjoyable one-woman show, 86'd.

It's a scripted show about life as a restaurant server, and it is by turns funny and touching. The show features some great original songs. Arnett plays multiple characters, and is very funny. Tonight's crowd loved the show, as did I.

It plays on Thursdays only, through February 9th. Admission is free, but donations are accepted and go to MD Anderson Cancer Center in honor of James W. Arnett. BYOB.

Courtney played our server
with uproarious fervor.

21st Century Problems

2012-01-25T23:57:00.002-06:00

This caught my attention:

Campaigning in Florida today, Newt Gingrich said, per BuzzFeed, “When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state.”

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” Gingrich added.

It's bigger than Alaska,
and it has no air pollution,
but is making it a state
allowed by the Constitution?

Groupon

2012-01-24T22:33:00.002-06:00

I know two actresses, both recent transplants to Chicago, who now have jobs at Groupon. These young women don't know each other. And they don't work in the same part of the company.

I don't know whether Groupon somehow favors actresses, or whether it's just that it's one of the few companies here that's actually expanding a lot lately.

It's nice to see a company do
well in the midst of this muddle-through.

Snowy Owl Release

2012-01-23T21:49:00.001-06:00

There's some neat video here of a female snowy owl being released in the woods, after "rehabilitation". She had been hit by an SUV, suffered a broken clavicle, and got wedged in the vehicle's grill. But the vets put her on the mend, and now she's free again.

With apologies to the late Amy Winehouse...

They made the owl go to rehab,
she said: Who? Who? Who?
Yes she was sick,
but now she is quick,
and she flew, flew, flew.

Dowd Tries To Help

2012-01-22T10:08:00.002-06:00

Maureen Dowd tries to make sense of it all:

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage.

It's not that she wants the Obamas replaced by the Gringriches or the Romneys. But she sees trouble on the electoral horizon, and is offering bracing advice: nobody likes whiners.

Well, with one exception. On Saturday Night Live in the 80s, Doug and Wendy Whiner were pretty popular:

If you're so bright,
just let it shine.
It doesn't play right
to win and then whine.

Upheaval

2012-01-22T00:55:00.002-06:00

Romney played it safe and boring.
Gingrich raced up and caught him snoring.

Email Emotional Fail

2012-01-20T23:37:00.002-06:00

Newly appreciated old truth:

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail)

This is not specific to e-mail!

It has to do with the written word, which is not heard. This problem goes back to the invention of writing, And a great deal of what careful writers do is work to bridge that gap, to cultivate a "voice" so that the reader can fill in the emotional intention.

Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

Again, an old literary problem.

Which parts of Plato are meant as moral tonic,
and which parts are totally ironic?

Charles Blakeley, Inventor

2012-01-19T20:22:00.002-06:00

Here's something that surprised me. It looks like one of my great-grandfathers was an inventor.

The patent is for some kind of improved way to make a socket for an incandescent bulb, applied for by Charles Bakeley of Covington, Kentucky in 1903.

Name's right. Name's rare. Town's right. Date's about right. I think it's the right guy.

I knew all 3 of this man's daughters - my grandmother and 2 great aunts. None of them ever told me he invented anything. Maybe they didn't know. They probably weren't born yet. And probably he never made any money from it. Most patented inventions don't make money. Most never go into production at all.

Finding a patent
for an incandescent socket
for me is like finding
a long lost locket.

Gruesome

2012-01-19T18:29:00.002-06:00

Not too far from here, in Hammond, Indiana, a Rottweiler recently found a missing woman's bones on the site of a demolished bait shop. The owner of the store next door was letting his dog sniff the ruins:

"I noticed he had something in his mouth. It turned out to be hand with a ring on the finger".

He let the dog sniff around some more, and soon it came up with a skull as well.

They have identified the victim, who went missing in 1999, Francine Carlson:

It's a dreadful cold case,
and I look at her face,
and hope the killer can be trailed
and nailed.

Google This

2012-01-19T00:36:00.002-06:00

4.5 million people signed the Anti-Sopa petition at Google today. That was something new.

That's a huge number.
The kind that disturbs congressional slumber.

Prophecy

2012-01-17T23:45:00.002-06:00

Saw a documentary at the theater tonight: Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged. It's professionally done, but I'm sure I wasn't the target audience. I'm too familiar with most of this material. What made it worth watching for me was the interview segment with Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, who explains how he blew his chance to do the movie version of Atlas back in the seventies. (He didn't want to give her final script approval. She insisted upon it. Stalemate. But the details are colorful, and Ruddy is a character.)

I'm not sure why it's being screened tonight and January 26th at selected theaters. I mean, it was shown at a single theater in the entire Chicagoland area tonight - and that showing was in the far South Suburbs. Well, I'm sure it's part of some master marketing plan.

One central thesis of the film is that Americans in the booming 1950's were not in a position to grasp the predictive power of Atlas. Things needed to get a lot worse - and the government's handling of the fiscal crisis reminded a lot of people of the novel's events - thus reawakening interest in the book's warnings of what could go wrong.

It was hard to grasp during the 50s boom,
but easier now midst signs of fiscal doom.

Gurdjieff

2012-01-16T17:53:00.000-06:00

I had an interesting but perplexing conversation with a man who is a fan of Gurdjieff. Unfortunately, the theory behind it couldn't quite gel in my mind.

Maybe that's not my fault. I came across this in Wikipedia:

Gurdjieff deliberately tried to increase the effort needed to read and understand the book. As a result the book is perhaps not the best introduction to Gurdjieff's ideas since part of the book's intention is to frustrate and usurp the normal patterns of thought.

I suspect this is not a unique approach. It reminds me of the "break you down to build you up" method of military training.

If understanding is truly sought
then clarity and logic ought
to be the natural aim of thought.

The Night of January 14th

2012-01-15T22:53:00.003-06:00

My friends Arena Mueller and Walter Foddis exchanged vows yesterday evening. It was a very intimate ceremony held at a national landmark - one of the top floors of Frank Lloyd Wright's tallest tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. For a Wright fan, like me, who had never visited the building before, it was quite the destination wedding.

Arena and Walter actually met at a get-together my wife had organized. It was just our usually discussion club, but they both happened to attend that night. Walter was visiting from Canada!

My wife said last night that she had not been involved in matchmaking, but that she had been very glad when they ended up together, since she thinks so highly of both of them, and since they seemed so suited to each other.

Attendees were asked to make their own declarations, whether spontaneous heartfelt words, or prepared comments. Poems were specifically invited, so I wrote one, which I quoted from this morning on this blog. Arena's sister, Rachael, also wrote her own poem, which I liked a lot, and another relative read a poem as well.

They modeled their wedding ceremony after the Quaker practice in which a couple would declare that they were marrying, and witnesses would sign a document certifying the marriage.

I signed on the line.
The honor was mine.
May their love and joy continue to shine.

From a Wedding Poem

2012-01-15T10:17:00.001-06:00

Life is a treat
That tastes better when shared,
And happiness comes
To those who have dared
To pursue without rest,
Through every test,
The one they love best.

In the Air

2012-01-14T00:28:00.001-06:00

TSA
Seemed extra vigilant today.
Is this about the Iranian scientist who met his doom
When his car went boom?

Juliette

2012-01-12T19:17:00.002-06:00

We called her Juliette because we got her, as a puppy, from a farm outside Verona, Illinois. I know, obscure joke, but the play Romeo & Juliet is set in Verona, Italy.

She live into her dog nineties, 13 plus in human years, but a serious illness finally caught up with her. We had to put her down a few days ago.

Juliette was a friendly girl
unless you happened to be a squirrel.

Snow at Last

2012-01-12T19:01:00.002-06:00

We've got a decent snowstorm going. But just decent. Four to six inches expected. Blustery winds.

I am stunned by the media hype this snowstorm got. People at work were joking about the hype, saying things like: "Hey, it's snowing outside - I've never seen that before!"

We've had a warm winter so far, with very slight snowfall, but this is normal. It made me wonder whether our weather announcers are recent imports from Miami, Florida.

This storm
is not warm
but it's well within norm.

Unmasked

2012-01-12T00:27:00.001-06:00

I hesitate to mention D.C. Unmasked & Undressed: A Memoir, for fear of giving it undue publicity, but I saw it at the library today on the New Books shelf.

It was written by a woman who puts herself forward as Clarence Thomas's girlfriend from a long time ago - from before he was married - and it's really big in the Too Much Information department, including a description of his man parts.

The author is a former federal administrative judge, and the book is a sort of sexual tell-all, about herself and her friends and their strangely boring (at least to me) escapades. I found the passages I read to be flatly undramatic and lacking in the ring of truth, mostly because she didn't seem to make the characters come alive.

The book doesn't seem to have gotten any traction,
despite chronicling a fair amount of "action".

At the Symphony

2012-01-11T00:00:00.002-06:00

Heard "Harold in Italy"
Played very prettily.

Rejoice

2012-01-09T22:18:00.002-06:00

One of the odd features of the War on Terror has been the sending of money to local police forces where there seemed to be no particular terror threat.

Of course, maybe it worked - and that's why there has been so little terror in small towns across America.

We've had a few serious threats here in Cook County, but we've also wasted 45 million dollars in surveillance equipment:

The report states that current county officials said "it appears highly unlikely that the installed equipment could be used effectively in an emergency situation." The county now is trying to salvage and reuse what it can to improve countywide security.

If you're worried about the Big Brother state,
rejoice that their competence isn't so great.

Enthalpy

2012-01-08T09:34:00.002-06:00

Enthalpy is my word of the day - the word I had to look up.

Enthalpy is a measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system.

Chemists use this word all the time apparently. And I have known some chemists! Why didn't they tell me?

The word dates back to 1909.

The word enthalpy is based on the Greek word enthalpos (ἔνθαλπος), which means to put heat into.

And the word gets used a lot in discussions of heating up chemicals.

This is to be sung to the tune of McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory":

Entropy and enthalpy
are both thermodynamic properties
having something to do with energy
in chemistry.

Random Randian References

2012-01-07T09:04:00.001-06:00

Peggy Noonan gets alliterative in praise of Rick Santorum:

He is a Catholic who sees society not as an agglomeration of random Randian individualists but as part of a community, part of a whole.

It's a strangely structured thought. Drop out the part about Randians, and you get:

He is a Catholic who sees society... as part of a community, part of a whole.

That actually does not make sense. Society is part of a community?

Her underlying notion, of course, is that we are individual parts of a whole - that we are cells in the Communal Wholeness. I'm not sure whether "society" in this case is global, national, or the Great Chain Of Being itself.

What first caught my eye was that "agglomeration of random" part, because Rand certainly saw society as neither random nor as an agglomeration. She recognized that cohesive forces are at work in human social life. She thought it was important to be able to defy those cohesive forces on occasion, because sometimes those cohesive forces are taking you in a disastrous direction.

I also wondered about the focus on his Catholicism. I'm not at all sure that Catholicism is really all that associated with the Organic Wholeness of Humanity idea. Catholicism, like most forms of Christianity, takes the individual soul very seriously, but also makes much of family and community in their various forms. Noonan is Catholic, so she may be suggesting that Protestants tend to be more individualistic in their theology than Catholics are.

You might say we're part
of the great web of life,
but somehow the parts
are often in strife.

In The Next Room

2012-01-06T18:29:00.002-06:00

Just finished reading In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sara Ruhl.

I've read a couple of other plays by Ruhl, and admired her gift for creating interesting situations and meaning-laden dialogue, but this is the first time I really liked an ending in one of her plays.

As Wikipedia dryly describes the play:

It concerns the early history of the vibrator, when doctors used it as a clinical device to bring women to orgasm as treatment for "hysteria." Other themes include Victorian ignorance of female sexual desire, motherhood and breastfeeding, and jealousy.

The play might be regarded as R-rated by many, but I would say that Ruhl works hard to avoid being too "sexy" in a modern way, despite the subject matter. She keeps the primary focus on the characters' thought and emotions as they struggle to understand the situation they have stumbled into. She maintains a brisk pace and a lightly ironic air throughout the play. The language of the play sounds charmingly antiquated, but never interferes with understanding.

I took my time getting around to reading this play, because I was worried it would disappoint.

But in my judgment it does
live up to its buzz.

The Key

2012-01-05T22:14:00.002-06:00

So, say the prosecutors have your encrypted laptop, which is loaded with data that may tend to incriminate you. Can you be compelled to tell the prosecutors the password?

You might think that telling them the password is like testifying against yourself. If it's enough like that, in the U.S., the 5th amendment applies, and you don't need to tell them.

Or you might think that telling them the password is like surrendering a physical key which you have in your possession. If it's enough like that, legal precedent says you have to give it up.

Now it's a hot legal case, in Denver.

Your very best bet
may be to forget.

What is Green

2012-01-05T00:16:00.001-06:00

Green can be so ill-defined, especially when specific proposals carry trade-offs:

Feds propose allowing wind-farm developer to kill golden eagles

You see, windmills kill birds, including eagles. And the Feds want to let this windfarm kill 3 golden eagles every 5 years.

I actually am just waiting to hear that windmills damage the planet by sucking kinetic energy out of the atmosphere. Just wait. The effect will be small, but cumulative, and ultimately disastrous!

Someone will declare
that windmills stop the air
from moving as it should
to keep the weather good.

Resilience

2012-01-03T22:44:00.000-06:00

To heck with Iowa. Let's focus on something important:

Cat survives 2 euthanasia attempts at Utah shelter

Feline uses 2 of 9,
feels fine.

Lucid Dreaming

2012-01-02T17:10:00.003-06:00

Had a dream I was playing Hamlet, but hadn't learned my lines,
so I was faking iambic pentameter with whatever came to mind.

True story. Usually I don't recall my dreams, but I slept late this morning, which I think makes for lighter sleep and a greater likelihood of recalling them.

There are people who work on experiencing lucid dreaming, which is a dream where you know you are dreaming, and where you may even begin to exert conscious control over the dream.

I've occasionally experienced that sense of knowing I'm in a dream - often it's a nightmare, where I'm struggling to wake up. But I've never really cultivated my potential lucid dreaming abilities.

One thing would-be lucid-dreamers do, is develop the habit, when awake, of checking whether they are dreaming. For example:

When you are dreaming you cannot read text for longer than a few seconds, so try reading text to prove to yourself you are not dreaming.

This again will carry over into your dreaming world and you will start asking the same questions in your dreams which can turn into a lucid dream.

On the other hand, I've heard that constantly checking "Am I dreaming?" can sometimes lead to an unhelpful inner sense of distance from reality.

When a car is coming at you
is not the time to doubt
whether you are in a dream
or out.

New Year's Hamster

2012-01-01T09:54:00.003-06:00

An artistic friend put this new creature together. Thank you, Anna!

A hopeful little hamster,
with butterfly ambition,
grows a set of wings,
and starts his own transition.

August: Osage County

2011-12-30T18:02:00.004-06:00

I just finished reading "August: Osage County", a 2008 play that won lots of prizes, including the Pulitzer.

I found it funny in places, but mostly depressing. "Darkly comic", as the critics say.

I had read, on some conservative website, that the play had a political message. But it only had one clearly political passage, and here's its key message:

"You know, this country was always pretty much a whorehouse, but at least it used to have some promise. Now it's just a shithole."

There's more, along those lines, less vulgar, but just as vague. Is it backed up by anything else in the play? Not really, except for the fact that the characters in the play all seem deeply lost. With citizens like these, what kind of country could America be?

I suspect the playwright's view of people was caught by this line: "He's not perfect. Just like all the rest of us, down here in the muck."

I felt stuck
in the muck -
it rolled on, unrelenting.

Now I'm free.
Lucky me!
Excuse me for my venting.

Jingle Cycle

2011-12-29T22:42:00.001-06:00

Weight gain from holiday cheer?
Resolve to lose it next year!

Ninja Canine

2011-12-29T00:10:00.000-06:00

Black dog in the night
provides an invisible bite.

Dawn

2011-12-28T08:08:00.001-06:00

Eastern sky goes pink.
See the sun unsink.

Party Like It's 1996

2011-12-26T09:36:00.002-06:00

Matthieu is back, for a surprise visit, and it's Christmas 1996 all over again.

In the school year of 1996-1997, we hosted a foreign exchange student, from France: Matthieu. We have kept in touch, but it has been quite a while since we all actually saw him.

He flew in from Paris on Thursday night and is back in his old room for the holidays.

My son coordinated it, but my wife, my daughter, and I were clueless about it until he showed up at the door.

His presence is a gift
and gave us all a lift.

The Lark

2011-12-24T21:56:00.000-06:00

Finished reading Jean Anouilh's play, The Lark. It's the third striking play I've read over the years about Joan of Arc, the other 2 being Schiller's Maid of Orleans and Shaw's Saint Joan.

As Wikipedia says, "much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise." That's true for this play, and I can vouch that it's also true for his Becket and his Antigone.

All three
defy
the powers that be
and die
with integrity.

Snicker-Poodle

2011-12-24T17:06:00.001-06:00

My daughter missed the fine print and took a bite of these snicker-poodle cookies.

She spit it out with great haste.
The dogs, who do like the taste,
were sad that the treat went to waste.

Frosting Too Gel-Like, Says The TSA

2011-12-23T21:56:00.002-06:00

Cupcake confiscated
as security threat:
possibly overrated,
hasn't blown up yet.

Survival Supplies

2011-12-22T22:44:00.002-06:00

"Empty calories" helped keep her alive:

A U.S. university student said she had nothing to eat but two candy bars while her car was stuck in the snow for 10 days in a remote area of Arizona.

A couple of Forest Service employees on snowmobiles eventually rescued her - after they came across her car while they were checking to see if gates were closed.

Candy, to be candid,
can be handy when you're stranded.

Downtown Today

2011-12-21T23:26:00.000-06:00

Young people roll the sidewalks with their going-home suitcases,
miles left to go, but smiles on their faces.

The Science of Room for Dessert

2011-12-20T23:41:00.000-06:00

Lots of us have had the experience - we're feeling full after a meal, but once we view the dessert options, we're ready for more!

Now, some scientists think they can explain this phenomenon. But it's not that "dessert goes in a different place".

The sugar in sweet foods stimulates a reflex that expands your stomach, writes senior researcher Arnold Berstad and assistant doctor Jørgen Valeur from Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital in the latest issue of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.

Food that's sweetly yummy
somehow expands your tummy?

It's your body's evil plot
to make you eat a lot!

Researching the Researchers

2011-12-19T18:08:00.003-06:00

Mark Bauerlein has an interesting article that is getting some attention. Called "The Research Bust," it runs some numbers on academic research in English departments. He shows, at least plausibly, that a lot of published research is barely read, even by other professors. He argues that universities shouldn't require so much professorial research - at least in English - and should focus on getting the professors to teach instead.

The unfortunate conclusion is that the overall impact of literary research doesn't come close to justifying the money and effort that goes into it.

I'm curious about how old this argument is. I've been hearing it for decades. Of course, in those decades, the percentage students majoring in English has plummeted.

English should be a popular major.
It may not make you any sager,
but since it's a language you already know,
it ought to be easy to give it a go.

Kim Jong Il

2011-12-18T21:50:00.002-06:00

He had been ill for a while.
I will not miss his smile.

I was just listening to this talk about the way intellectuals continue to push socialism despite its stupefying body count:

As an idea, it refuses to die.
Kors works hard to say why.

Suppressed Desires

2011-12-17T18:22:00.003-06:00

I was reading a book, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition. Yes, it's a serious book about comedy. There's something funny about such books, and I tend to enjoy them.

Anyway, somewhat in passing he described Susan Glaspell as the playwright who determined the typical plot formulas for modern short plays, having given usTrifles (1916) as the exemplar of a short serious play, and Suppressed Desires (1915) as the exemplar of a short comic play.

I sat up straight in my chair, because I didn't really know anything about Glaspell, or Trifles, but I was pretty sure from his description of Suppressed Desires that I had stumbled across it, some months ago, in an old volume of short plays. And I had thought it was wonderful, and had mused over the fact that I had never heard of it before.

And here it was, singled out as a landmark, in a book from 1983.

Well, I don't really know theater the way theater majors do. I was an English major. Different worlds, even then. We just read a bunch of the same stuff, but the professors tackled it from different directions.

English professors always want
to set the play in its Age.

Theater professors always want
to put it - now! - on Stage.

Unhinged

2011-12-17T13:39:00.000-06:00

A family of five was shot to death in a small town in Illinois yesterday. Police are calling it a murder-suicide, and aren't saying who did the killing, but one of the neighbors saw something bloodcurdling:

She said she saw Sara McMeen in the next yard over hovering over her baby as if she'd dropped her. Fiedler asked McMeen if everything was alright, and "she looked at me and said, 'No, everything is not alright.' "

McMeen fired a shot at the infant, "and then I just ran," said Fiedler, a town trustee.

The stereotype is that it's always the dad,
but mothers, too, can go bad.

Practical Considerations

2011-12-16T19:39:00.004-06:00

Client: "How long will I be locked up?"

Lawyer: "Don't worry - it's nothing definite."

Everyone's worried about some new exception to the habeas corpus rule. I just want to know - what's the food like in there?

As long as your prison has a good chef in it,
why worry whether your stay is indefinite?

2011-12-15T20:53:00.001-06:00

Can I please go in the yard?
Sitting still is oh-so-hard!

Hunter by Bidinotto

2011-12-14T22:46:00.001-06:00

Tonight I finished reading Hunter, a first novel by Robert Bidinotto, who I've known a long time. It's a thriller, and while I haven't been reading many of them lately, I enjoyed this one a lot. It's fast-moving, and imbued with a strong sense of right and wrong. I especially enjoyed the Big Dramatic Finish, which I found exhilarating.

He published it independently, and it is moving very well in the Kindle edition. I read it partly on my iPad and mostly on my iPhone, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I was struck by the way the Kindle edition has a feature where I can see which passages other people have tended to highlight. The author has some thematic points to make, and those passing sentences in particular seemed to be highlighted the most.

There are people to root in favor of,
and people to root against,
and when the story's over
justice gets dispensed.

Home Sales Revised Downward

2011-12-13T23:24:00.000-06:00

Well, this can't be good news:

Data on sales of previously owned U.S. homes from 2007 through October this year will be revised down next week because of double counting, indicating a much weaker housing market than previously thought.

"Much weaker"?

Why did they have to tell us this? It's going to depress consumer confidence!

If it makes the numbers come out nice,
why shouldn't one sale be counted twice?

Drone Down

2011-12-12T23:43:00.000-06:00

I see where we're asking for our drone back,
but my guess is we won't see it again
unless we attack,
and probably not even then,
because they'll first consider
selling it to the highest bidder.

Screwdriver

2011-12-12T00:12:00.001-06:00

I couldn't figure out the etymology of screwdriver - as in the mixed drink. But the online etymology dictionary has this surmise:

Screwed/screwy had a sense of "drunk" since 19c.

I don't recall hearing that usage, but it's close to a lot of other slang for being drunk. By the way, there is no end of slang about alcohol and drunkenness, and I speculate that's because there has been an ongoing need to speak about it evasively.

When open discussion makes people nervous,
slang is often pressed into service.

Swift's Epitaph

2011-12-11T00:04:00.002-06:00

Tonight in the car I flashed on a poem I had long ago admired and memorized. I knew it as "Swift's Epitaph", but I was unsure who had written it. Yeats, I thought... but the timing was wrong for Yeats to be writing an epitaph for Jonathan Swift.

So, I looked on Wikipedia, and now I know. Yeats's poem is a very free translation from the epitaph Swift wrote for himself in Latin.

I'm just going to let Yeats be my honored guest rhymer for this one. Here's his poem:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Virtually

2011-12-10T09:23:00.000-06:00

An Australian news website has fun with an International Red Cross newsletter:

Six hundred million gamers could be war criminals, Red Cross says

If you click through to the newsletter, you get this mealy mouthed pablum (warning - PDF):

While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL.

Of course, what they're floating is bans on violent video games.

But is banning war games adequate? Can we allow half a billion virtual war criminals to go unpunished?

Let's charge them with something vague
and try them all at the Hague.

Crafty

2011-12-09T20:04:00.001-06:00

The holiday wackiness continues:

A Connecticut woman faces multiple charges after a craft fair incident that allegedly ended with her stabbing another woman with a Christmas ornament.

The woman was observed stealing stuff. When confronted, she stabbed someone with a weapon of good cheer.

When accused of craft fair thieving,
I suggest quickly leaving.

Ornament assault
is a grievous moral fault.

Creating an Opening

2011-12-08T18:15:00.001-06:00

Mythbusters Accidentally Shoots Cannonball Through House

"Unfortunate bounces" they say.

The cannonball proved that
contrary to myth
it's still a good thing
to knock stuff down with.

Sentenced

2011-12-07T21:08:00.001-06:00

Our former governor was sentenced to 14 years today. He has to serve 85 percent of that, even with good behavior. So he's looking at 12 years in Club Fed.

We elected him twice. Well, I'm not saying I voted for him, so maybe the "we" is misplaced. But the voters of Illinois gave this guy the governor's seat twice.

Giving him the governor's seat
was like giving a baby a hand grenade.

Now the catastrophe is complete,
who's to blame for the mess he made?

After Visiting The Eye Doctor

2011-12-06T17:44:00.000-06:00

My pupils are dilated,
and everything's too bright.

I'm feeling kind of grateful
for winter's early night.

ECM

2011-12-05T17:56:00.001-06:00

Amusing development of Electronic Counter Measures to the dreaded photo of one's drunken state that someone else posts to Facebook:

Developed with Buenos Aires-based agency Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Photoblocker is -- no joke -- a beer cooler which senses cell phone flashes in its vicinity and flashes its own counteractive light, rendering the photos overexposed and the inebriated subjects unidentifiable.

Amusing video can be found toward the bottom of the link.

Avoid teeth-gnashing
Facebook hell
by counter-flashing
your frenemy's cell.

Passing

2011-12-04T09:57:00.001-06:00

Logical and disturbing outcome:

Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

That's because many colleges make it harder to get in if you're an Asian. Asians, as a group, are outperforming other ethnic groups at test-taking. But colleges, while prizing academic excellence, also prize ethnic diversity. So...

Studies show that Asian-Americans... often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission.

When applying to top schools,
don't be among the fools
who admit their race persuasion
leans toward Asian.

Your prospects will be brighter
if you check the box that's whiter.

How Eponymous

2011-12-02T18:30:00.000-06:00

Sheriff's new abode
leads to irony overload:

A former Colorado lawman with a record so distinguished he was once honored as the nation's sheriff of the year now finds himself in a jail that was named for him, accused of offering methamphetamine in exchange for sex from a male acquaintance.

He was a drug warrior, of course.

The temptations for corruption for drug warriors are simply horrendous.
And the opportunities for hypocrisy are tremendous.

Throwing

2011-12-02T00:18:00.000-06:00

Interesting:

Researchers find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence

Humans throw better than chimps, by the way. Which is why we invented baseball.

And how are humans at throwing poop?
Just watch the media dive for a scoop!

Thumbs Up

2011-11-30T17:46:00.000-06:00

My wife, close kin to 2 surgeons, says she has heard of this procedure. Great photos at the link, if you don't mind looking at slightly freaky rearranged anatomy.

It all started with a do-it-yourself woodworking project that went wrong.

But surgeons had an ingenious solution, amputating one body part from its original spot, and grafting it onto an analogous location.

He sawed off his thumb,
and was feeling real glum.

So they sewed on a toe,
and he's all good to go.

Art as Bifrost

2011-11-29T22:34:00.002-06:00

In Norse Mythology, there's a rainbow bridge between the land of the gods and the land of men. It's called Bifrost, and a few other names as well.

In Schiller and Rand, art is seen as such a bridge, between the the human power of abstraction and the human power of perception, between the human sense of the moral ideal and the human recognition of the difficulties of living morally.

Schiller describes the problem to be bridged as a gulf or opposition. Rand sees it as ultimately a computational challenge, which art is capable of solving, by means of subconscious integration.

I'm sure that somehow this issue can be chased back to Plato.

The rainbow bridge takes you up into the blue.
Forgetting your fear of heights,
charge forward and push till the journey is through,
absorbing the pulsating lights.

Schiller and Rand

2011-11-29T00:28:00.001-06:00

Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto proposes a very broad outline of the Romantic movement in Western literary aesthetics, but she never names anyone as the chief progenitor of the trend. If you just took her list of notable Romantic authors from her book, it might jump out at you that the earliest figure is Friedrich Schiller, poet, dramatist, aesthetician. He's so early, in fact, that he is frequently not even counted as a Romantic, although his influence on the Romantic drama and fiction is easy to document. I am thinking in particular of his influence on Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

I've long been struck by parallels between Schiller's aesthetic theory and Rand's. They are not easy parallels to draw. Their philosophical vocabulary is so alien. And I have not done anything like a thorough study of Schiller's thought, although I have given rather careful study to his plays.

Today, I was looking at The Theatre of Goethe and Schiller, by John Prudhoe, and he writes of Schiller:

He is ultimately responsible for the stress on choice - Free Will - in so many subsequent plays. We detect the inheritance of Schiller's thought in the decision which has to be made by the heroine in The Lady from the Sea; in John Proctor's refusal to put his name to the confession of witchcraft in The Crucible; and in the inability of Williams's heroines to find harmony in themselves.

That is a very sweeping statement, to say the least. It also connects to Rand's attempt to boil the Romantic movement down to one literary premise: an embrace of human volition, i.e., the human power of choice, also known as free will.

Schiller had a complicated, Kantian-influenced, theory of art and free will, which had to do with the power of reason to rise above the sensory world.

For Schiller, the world is lovely, and fills our hearts with awe,
but somewhere high above it, he glimpses Eternal Law.

Tenured, Of Course

2011-11-28T19:30:00.001-06:00

At Cal State, they have a professor who walks out of class for a week if students haven't brought him snacks.

Better bring him a muffin,
or else he'll teach you nuffin'.

But he wants it understood:
it's for the students' own good!

J. Edgar

2011-11-27T11:24:00.000-06:00

Saw the movie about J. Edgar Hoover, directed by Clint Eastwood. I thought it was slow. The narrative takes place in 3 distinct periods of his life, and switches among them. I could follow along, but I didn't feel the out-of-sequence stuff helped much. The narrative also uses the "unreliable narrator" technique in places, as Hoover dictates his memoirs, which I found annoying. I knew an awful lot of the history, but was unsure where the screenwriters were just making stuff up.

Hoover himself is portrayed as a well-intentioned but flawed man.

A lot of the movie is focused on his gay, but Platonic, relationship with his second-in-command. I don't know how much of this stuff could possibly be verifiable, and although the movie is very well acted as a rule, I never felt there was much romantic chemistry between actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer.

By the way, nobody in the 1930's, gay or not, would have used "fashion forward" as an adjectival phrase to describe a necktie!

I say 2 stars out of 4,
no more.

A Little

2011-11-26T23:31:00.000-06:00

Chris Matthews of MSNBC Cable said he could argue that the U.S. national media "leans a little to the left".

They lean a little to the left
and do it with substantial heft.

November's Embers

2011-11-25T22:31:00.001-06:00

Snow will come soon enough.

For now, enjoy the warm stuff.

Pilgrim Lessons

2011-11-24T12:04:00.001-06:00

Alex Tabarrok posted today about the lessons of the first Pilgrim thanksgiving. The Pilgrims had tried a system of collectivist farming - with bad results. They then tried a more private-property based approach, with good results. At the time, Governor William Bradford reflected upon the experience. I'm not usually one for long quotations, but the learning of this one impressed me:

[Ending corn collectivism] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

Sharing work and product whole
across a big community
is bad for the body, bad for the soul,
and fosters envy, not unity.

You'll Put Somebody's Eye Out!

2011-11-23T21:02:00.000-06:00

In Washington State:

Bellingham police say a 10-year-old boy defended his mother from an attacker by shooting him in the face with a BB rifle as many as four times.

Said attacker is described as a drunk angry roomer in their house, who kicked in the woman's bedroom door and started choking her. He has been arrested, and treated at a hospital for his injuries.

Well, if you don't have a real gun handy, I guess a BB rifle will do.

I hope that the thought of being shot in the face with BBs
gives this guy some ongoing heebie-jeebies.

15 Minute Video of a 10 Minute "Post Mortem"

2011-11-22T20:56:00.001-06:00

If you'd like to see my "ten minute play", it's here on Youtube. Somehow it runs almost 15 minutes!

I'm guessing it was shot with a Flip video camera from someone sitting in the front row.

I was extremely happy with the way this play was performed. I wasn't part of the rehearsal process, so I don't know who came up with what, but the director and actors added a lot that I thought worked very well. And they hit an emotional tone that I really liked.

The video is accidentally missing the last line of the play. I'll put the missing line in a comment in case anyone watches the video and just has to know.

Only 3 people are in the play,
but there were 4 characters, in a way.

Just My Vote

2011-11-21T23:46:00.001-06:00

I'm in favor of ugly art
being wheeled away in a cart,
preferably in the dead of night
so none of it bumps against my sight.

White Picket Fence

2011-11-20T13:48:00.001-06:00

The "we" in this sentence that made me wonder about the writer's social circle:

The open relationship is the white picket fence of the 21st century, something we aspire to because we think it makes us look good.

If you work your way through the piece, which is a meditation on the Demi Moore / Ashton Kutcher break-up, she actually gets around to the idea that humans are natural "mate guarders" who are not comfortable with total "sharing".

What's funny is that most people think this is obvious.

It's regular marriages they see
as bounded by white pickets.

Open marriages look more
like dense and painful thickets.

Post Mortem, Part Two

2011-11-20T10:11:00.001-06:00

I was happy with our 2 performances last night. It came out crisp, chilling, funny, and suspenseful.

It was directed by Alexis Randolph, whose philosophy of theater makes sense to me:

I have lost count how many times mentors and fellow artists have reminded me to "Keep it simple, stupid". And they are right, because what it all really boils down to are those three simple words: tell a story.

I wrote for 3 actresses: Rhiannon Ross, Steph Garrett, and Avery Ferguson. Each was compelling, and they projected a wonderful sense of relationship - which was good, because they were playing 2 daughters and a mother.

I had seen on Garret's resume that she had a background in puppetry, which led me to write lines for one more character - a dog puppet carried around by her character:

I saw she had a background in show tunes, too. So I gave the dog a little poem to sing. Somehow she came up with a melody and let that little dog really belt those verses out. That's the kind of thing where you write something into a script that you know is an opportunity for a person with the right talents. And it paid off.

Thank you, director and cast,
watching your work was a blast.

Post Mortem, Part One

2011-11-19T03:02:00.000-06:00

From 9 to 1, I wrote my 9-page play.

I felt like I was moving really fast
then was surprised so many hours had past.

My working title was Reunion, but when I was done with my first draft, I changed it to: Post Mortem.

From 1 to 2, I edited a 2nd draft, and turned it in. Tomorrow it will be on stage.

It's a piece for 3 actresses, finished in the a.m.,
and may involve some mayhem.

Illegal AND Illegible

2011-11-18T18:00:00.000-06:00

Educational failure was sadly obvious this Monday at a bank in West Virginia:

WTOV reports that detectives said a "white, scruffy-looking man" handed a teller a note demanding money, but the teller couldn't tell what the note said. When she handed the would-be robber his note back, he got frustrated and walked out, authorities said.

This may be a widespread problem. Just last month, in Delaware:

Troopers say about 2:50 p.m. on Saturday, a man walked into the WSFS Bank branch in New Castle and gave a teller a deposit slip with a note written on it.

Police say the teller could not read the note, handed it back to the would-be robber and asked him to rewrite.

To avoid the shame of looking this absurd,
bank robbers should make use of Microsoft Word.

Steel Magnolias

2011-11-17T22:38:00.001-06:00

I saw the MPTG production of Steel Magnolias tonight. I somehow had missed seeing the movie, and it's not my usual favorite sort of play, but it was a very good production with excellent performances.

For me, it was low on plot,
but I still enjoyed it a lot.