Galleria Borghese

The Galleria Borghese is a small museum, an old mansion, with the world's best collection of Bernini statuary, and a very impressive collection of ancient Hellenistic and Imperial statuary as well.

If you love figures fluidly rendered in stone,
This place will prove a pleasure zone.

Weren't They Also Ninja Turtles?

Saw Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. A 9 year old girl was in our party and asked what "Sistine" might mean. I told her the chapel was built for the pope's little sis who was a teen. But the 9 year old didn't believe me. The correct answer is that a pope named Sextus had it built, and somehow Sistine is the adjectival form of Sextus. Who knew?

I also got a good look at Raphael's School at Athens mural, another favorite of mine. I had never seen these works in person before, so it was nice to get a better idea of the architectural context.

Why are people such snobs
About ceiling and wall paint jobs?

Somehow the figures seem to shine
As if they really were divine.

Outside the Wall

We're staying a block from the door to the Vatican museums.
Tomorrow we'll go see 'em.

Vivacious Vivaldi

Heard nice version of Vivaldi's 4 seasons in San Vidal, an old church that hasn't been a church for years. Vivaldi was born in Venice, and local musicians have figured out he's a good draw for tourists.

Church attendance in Italy is down,
But not Vivaldi's renown.

Cash or Credit Card

In Italy, small shop owners strongly prefer cash,
I suspect to add to their tax free stash.

Venice

Venice may be sinking slowly into the sea,
But its art still projects undefeated ESPRIT.

Even If You Don't Mind The Dirtiness

When swimming in the canals of Venice,
Gondolas are an ungodly menace.

Irregularity

I'm doing light posting
Due to traveling with uneven hosting.

The Grisly/Glorious Adventure

I went to see: The Grisly/Glorious Adventure of Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh and Billy Moon.

It's the new show at Dream Theatre. It's wonderful and magical.

It's not quite as grisly as the title might suggest, but as the story opens, something deadly is stalking the denizens of the 100 Acre Woods.

The show takes those denizens very seriously, and I think that many grown-ups who loved the Christopher Robin stories will also love this play, which looks at the relationship between the "actual Christopher Robin" and the one in the stories.

As usual at Dream, the acting was superb and the staging was stunningly clever.

I would like to write more, but I have too much to do.

I recommend that you

spend an evening with Pooh.

Wrap Up

In case you're wondering, the jury found Marni Yang guilty of shooting the pregnant other-girlfriend of the former Bears player.

The jury took an hour to decide.

In closing arguments, the defense maintained:

a) There was only circumstantial evidence against Yang.

b) The recorded admissions of guilt were just an exercise in story-telling on the part of Yang.

“I took one last shot in the head, finished her off,” Yang said on a snippet of tape played for jurors before they began deliberating.

I just wonder why the jury took a whole hour.

Stuff like that on tape
leaves no room to escape

Evergreen Park Fatality

After ranting yesterday about Evergreen Park's heavy-duty issuance of traffic tickets, I started wondering again about an incident from October, when an Evergreen Park squad car broadsided the car a teenager was driving, killing him. At the time, facts in the news seemed... thin.

Now the teen's parents are suing the village and the officer. Oddly enough, they've got a lawyer named Karen Enright - no relation!

"It's our opinion that the officer was speeding, in pursuit of a speeder, but he was going too fast for the conditions," said Enright, whose team conducted their own investigation of the accident. "Our witnesses say he was speeding without lights or siren and he pulled out in front of Brian DeWitt and caused the accident."

That may just be bluster, of course.

The police car reportedly had a camera mounted on its dash. To record things.

However, authorities said the video was unable to be retrieved from the camera.

Maybe the video got wrecked in the crash.
But I predict the village will pay out cash.

Pratt Fall

 
Steve DeQuattro, "Sustainable Liberalism In a Box" (2011)

This work is by a student at New York's prestigious Pratt Institute.

Last week, the chair of the fine arts department stepped in to prevent Mr. DeQuattro’s participation alongside the other students in the group show--an unprecedented move in the history of the department, says Mr. DeQuattro, despite the fact that none of his work is pornographic, libelous, or in violation of the laws of free speech.

Apparently some of his peers complained that his work was... wait for it... offensive.

With intellect gone broke,
and arteries turned to lard,
the established avant-garde
cannot take a joke.

Everticket Park

I live in Chicago, but I'm just half a mile away from Evergreen Park, IL, known as "Village of Churches" and also as "Former Home of the Unabomber".

The town was recently featured in a Chicago Tribune story on top-ticketing area suburbs. And you better hope that all they get you for is speeding or rolling through a stop sign. Because for a lot of offenses they will impound your car. In 2009 they impounded 1 in 12 cars stopped, on average, and there's a $600 fee to get your car back. Evergreen made half a millions bucks from the tow fees in 2009.

I saw a family get pulled over tonight. Their car was traveling with the traffic. They were maybe a couple of miles per hour over the limit.

What does the police chief have to say?

Saunders said the department isn't looking to cash in on traffic stops. Its officers give warnings to a third of stopped motorists.

I'd like to know how often they give warnings to Evergreen residents, as compared to outsiders. Evergreen has been a speed trap for at least 5 decades, but it has gotten a lot worse lately. I suspect the village needs the dough - bad.

Declining tax base?
I try to drive around the place.

Flame Grilled

Our local disgusting murder trial continues.

A key witness is Christi Paschen, a psychic, who was friends with the accused. Ms. Paschen wore a wire and recorded some very damaging conversations with the accused.

The defense attorneys are going after her credibility, which is easy enough, but I'm not sure how that is going to help with the damaging recordings.

Anyway, the psychic testified that she had been part of a military intelligence program named "Gondala Wish" that was later called "Grill Flame." She said she went on a mission to the Mideast, and that all of the men in her unit were killed.

This sounded loopy, but I googled those 2 program names and got a lot of links to what the Wikipedia people would call unreliable sources. Wikipedia itself has an article on "the Stargate Project" which is a "disputed" article about the same basic idea that the U.S. government ran big psychic programs for military and intelligence purposes. The government doesn't seem to have admitted to all this, so I guess the psychic can just say "it's still secret".

Given our continued intelligence failures, I think it's clear that any government psychic research was unsuccessful.

If we had good surmises
of what would happen next
we wouldn't be so vexed
with terrible surprises.

The 4th Wall

Last night, at The Moonstone, the actors, in character, turned and addressed the audience directly, as narrators. It got me thinking about the various ways the imaginary 4th wall can be broken.

If you look at Shakespeare's practice, you don't find much direct narration of the Our Town sort. But you do have the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, spoken directly to the audience:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene...

In prologues, the actor recognizes that he is speaking in a theater, to an audience. The same is true of epilogues.

Soliloquys involves the character talking "to himself", but the actor is likely to "speak to" the audience.

Asides are brief comments directly to the audience.

Contemporary playwright Jeremy Menekseoglu often speaks of breaking the 4th wall, and I've noted these other techniques from his work:

1) The characters are aware of the fact they have an audience, but don't seem to be aware that they are actors in a theater. They may ask the audience why it has come to visit their lives.

2) The characters are addressing an unseen character, a waitress for instance, but they address the audience, or some person in the audience, as if they were that character.

3) Actors begin the play in the lobby, in character, greeting the audience as it comes into the theater.

In what I've seen, however, Jeremy keeps the actors in character until the show ends. His practice doesn't seem designed to break the illusion of the drama, but rather to extend it, or to further draw the audience into the imaginary world of the drama.

As for me, I have not assaulted the wall. Except that in a short verse drama one of the characters turned to the audience at the end and gave a very brief epilogue - or perhaps it was a closing aside.

I think when I watch live theater I often get in kind of a trance, where I sort of forget there's an imaginary wall.

If a play is absorbing, that is all
I need to float through the wall.

The Moonstone

We saw a well-done dramatization of The Moonstone at Lifeline Theatre.

The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, was a pioneering 19th century novel, considered to be the first detective novel in English.

I just realized tonight that Chicago has both a Lifeline Theatre and a TimeLine Theatre.

I somehow had them jumbled together in my mind.

I think we need a Lifetime Theatre
to make the confusion even sweeter.

Beast

We live on a sleeping beast.
which sometimes gives a shake
and the energy that is released
leaves terror and death in its wake.

Walker Winning

That wasn't easy:

The Wisconsin Assembly on Thursday gave final approval to a GOP measure that sharply limits collective-bargaining rights for most public employees.

The media double-standard on the excitement in Wisconsin has been spectacular. Especially on the "uncivil tone" issue.

Here's a rare anti-Walker sign that made me laugh, photo courtesy of Ann Althouse:

 

But if you put on the "civil tone" lenses, it's clear that this poster is recommending that the governor's face be shredded!

Now settle down, kitty.
Democracy isn't always pretty.

Capital Crimes

In today's Illinois news, we got rid of our death penalty.

I have very mixed feelings about this. The way I see it, there are people who deserve to be killed by the state. Unfortunately, the state has a history of convicting the wrong people. Partly this happens because murders are most likely to occur in communities where the people don't like to talk to the police.

Personally, I'd be in favor of keeping the death penalty, if we could raise the level of evidence needed to justify it. Something beyond what now passes for "beyond reasonable doubt". What would that extra-sure standard be? Good question. But there are some high-profile murder cases where there is no doubt who did it - such as the case of Jared Loughner who shot all those people in Arizona.

In cases where such certainty is found
I don't mind consigning him underground.

Motive for Murder?

We have a strange and tawdry murder trial going in Chicago. The crime dates back to 2007, and concerns the murder of a pregnant young woman who had been having sex with Shaun Gayle, a former player for the Chicago Bears.

Accused of the crime is another woman that Shaun Gayle had been having sex with - once in a while. The prosecutors' theory is that Woman B was upset that Woman A was pregnant with Gayle's child, so upset she staged an elaborate murder.

I have read that some women see getting pregnant by a sports star as a major form of victory. I guess because he will continue to see the woman, at least somewhat, in order to see the kid. She will be "in his life". And also because there will be good money coming in, to pay for the kid's expenses, money which will also make the mom's life easier in various ways, especially if she funnels some of it into her own expenses, which she may find easy to rationalize.

A child can be a tie
that keeps a guy
from just saying bye.

Unfair Advantage

I finished reading a couple of plays from Shakespeare's time, by competing playwrights:

A Woman Killed With Kindness, by Thomas Heywood, a domestic tragedy about adultery.

The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson, a caustic comedy about con-men.

They are both written in iambic pentameter, occasionally rhymed, similar to Shakespeare that way. But somehow the poetry seemed to lack his punch. Which is interesting, because Jonson was certainly capable of writing powerful poetry.

There's a joke that Shakespeare had an advantage over other writers, in that he coined lots of great quotations early, before other writers had a chance to think of them. But these people had the same chance he did.

It wasn't that he was first,
but rather that he burst
onto the play-writing scene
like a phrase-coining machine.

Killed on Camera

This is a video, with commentary, of a police shooting which ocurred in 2003, several miles from where I live. A man dies on the video, so be warned that you may not want to watch it.



The family of the slain man sued, and the city may pay them soon:

The City of Chicago is poised to pay out $3 million to the family of a man fatally shot by a Chicago police officer, bringing an end to an eight-year dispute over why the unarmed man was gunned down on a South Side CTA platform.

As with all these incidents, you wish you had a few more camera angles on the actual shooting, and you wish you had audio. When the officer shoots, the other 2 men each have an arm raised - but not toward the officer.

The officer at first claimed the shooting occurred because he feared he was in immediate danger. But after the video became public, that story changed:

Then, in a December 2006 deposition, Weems admitted he did not fear for his life when he shot Pleasance and did not believe the shooting was justified. But Weems also "contended the shooting was unintentional," according to a city Law Department news release about the proposed settlement.

Well, accidents do happen. And when your friend is resisting arrest, you should think twice about waving your arms around a nervous officer with a gun in his hand.

Meanwhile, an old question is being raised again:

A South Side alderman on Friday demanded to know why a Chicago Police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man at a CTA station in 2003 — and later admitted he misled investigators about it — was not only allowed to keep his job, but promoted to detective.

Maybe he has been a good detective,
even if his story that day was defective.

Moral Seriousness

I was looking at a website called Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and found this:

Our friend David Sobel, over at PEA Soup, has a very nice post discussing what he takes to be a serious problem with the Nozickian approach to property rights (one that probably applies to the Randian or Rothbardian approach as well). The problem is that "such libertarian views cannot adequately distinguish the moral seriousness of the wide variety of kinds of actions that violate our property-rights."

I was very surprised to see Rand mentioned as possibly open to the same charge.

I went to Sobel's post and found this opening:

I want to try to develop an argument against deontological libertarian moral principles that treat a wide range of our basic rights as flowing from morally powerful rights of self-ownership.

Well, that pretty much lets Rand off the hook.

A) She is explicitly opposed to the deontological approach in ethics.

B) She doesn't take the self-ownership tack in justifying fundamental rights. Rothbard does.

Somehow Sobel puzzles over pollution and arrives at the conclusion that libertarians may not have a consistent argument against "redistributive taxation".

And if the social good that accompanies such pollution is sufficient to justify a fair amount of pollution (even if not as nearly as much as we currently put out) despite it violating the rights of just about all humans, then surely the social good involved in progressive taxation may well be permissible as well so long as it produces great social good (and violates the property rights of far fewer people than pollution).

That's a lot of convolution,
and maybe a bit of stealth,
moving from air pollution
to justify redistribution
of other people's wealth.

One Door Closes...

I saw No Sex Please, We're British, a funny show in which I especially appreciated Stephanie Rohr as the young wife and Denise Smolarek as her troublesome but well-meaning mother in law.

It's set in the 70's, and concerns a British couple who receive a big stash of porn in the mail - back when porn was somewhat more shocking than it is today. Complications arise as they try to figure out how to get rid of it anonymously.

It's an all-out door-slamming farce, which is hard to perform, partly because the timing should be done just right.

The final exam
is to make door one slam
just as door two
opens up to view.

Fat Pig

I read a play by Neal LaBute today: Fat Pig.

I've been avoiding LaBute, because even the positive reviews put me off.

Spoiler Alert.

It's about a young man who falls in love with a distinctly overweight young woman. His co-workers are very disapproving. So he breaks up with her, telling her that he is too weak to withstand the social pressure.

What a downer. It seemed like kind of an afternoon-special in reverse, designed to provoke.

Easy to follow,
and nicely paced,
but  leaves a hollow
aftertaste.

Chilling Effect

I came home and it was 60F (15C) degrees in the house... and it's not supposed to be quite that chilly!

So, I checked, and the natural gas pilot lights are out under the boiler. I try to light what seems to be the primary pilot light. By following the steps I can get it lit, but it won't stay lit when I ease my finger off the pilot-lighting button.

I've seen this before and recalled the diagnosis - the thermocouple has gone bad. Basically, it's a safety feature. You need safety features with natural gas, because without them you can literally blow your house to smithereens.

My wife called up the guy who put the boiler in, and he was busy on another job, but he offered me some advice on what kind of replacement thermocouple to buy. So we bought one, and I put it in, and we have central heat again. So I don't have to worry about the water pipes freezing tonight.

I got it working fine and dandy
even though I'm not that handy.

Feydeau and Absurdity

I was looking at a book on Feydeau, a master of French farces, who created very complicated but logically cohesive plots.

There was an attempt, on the part of the Theater of the Absurd theorists, to look to Feydeau as a forerunner. But I have trouble seeing it.

Mostly he begins with the principle enunciated by Walter Scott:

What a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.

He then throws in the principle that simple failures lead to complex messes:

Your striving can be your own undoing,
when you start by misconstruing.

I suppose the similarity is that Feydeau's characters often feel like they're in a world gone mad, even though the audience knows exactly why and wherefore.

In his defense
his crazy fun
somehow makes sense
when it's all done.

John V. Cody

I was sorry to learn today that John V. Cody passed away a few years ago. When my wife was an undergrad at Northwestern, he was a nontenured classics professor there. She took a class from him on Rand's novels, analyzed from a classicist's perspective. He was particularly keen on her classical allusions and her use, as he saw it, of literary ring structure. Some of his perspective ended up in his article, "Ayn Rand's Promethean Heroes", which appeared in Reason Magazine, in the November 1973 issue. She also took an independent study class with him on Aristotle's Metaphysics.

He was indirectly responsible for my marriage. In 1973 he arranged a showing of the film version of the Fountainhead at Northwestern. I was an undergrad at U of I Chicago, but took the "L" up to Evanston. I met Marsha at the open discussion afterwards in the cafeteria.

He had to leave Northwestern when they cut back their classics department. He worked at Cato for a while, then left, at which point we lost contact with him. But I see from the memorial article that he also went on to teach at University of San Francisco.

I offer his spirit continuing gratitude
for helping me meet this girl with attitude.

Prometheus, Authorship Unknown

I was re-reading an ancient Greek play, Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus. Afterwards, on Wikipedia, I found that its authorship is now in dispute.

I hadn't kept up. I didn't even know there was a controversy!

I've never really cared for it as a play - it seems incredibly slow-moving. It's more interesting for the ideas it puts forth - including the brazen defiance which Prometheus offers to Zeus.

It turns out this impiety is one of the reasons that some scholars doubt that Aeschylus really wrote it. In other plays, Aeschylus exhibited a pious attitude toward Zeus. Well, that's one reason, and there are perceived stylistic differences, and finally I take it that we have no contemporaneous attribution to Aeschylus.

Scholars have reconstructed an outline of the trilogy which this play began. The trilogy has a sort of happy ending for the much-punished Prometheus.

Prometheus is bound,
but eventually cut loose,
once it's finally found
that his help is needed by Zeus.

Do More People Own Ferrets Than Watch Fox News?

David Brooks, NYT columnist, on TV:

"We now have — here’s a fact from Morris Fiorina, Stanford political scientist: More people own ferrets than watch Fox News.”

Can that be true? Do more people own ferrets than watch Fox news?

Awakened from my slumbers,
I wondered about the numbers.

Ferrets are estimated to reside in 505,000 American households.

Of course, that's households. How many owners in a household? The average American household size is 2.59. Is that also true for ferret-owning households? Anyway, assuming every man, woman, and child in the house is an "owner", this gives us an estimate of about 1,313,000 ferret owners.

Onto Fox news. For February 24, Nielsen lists them as having 1,360,000 viewers over aged 12.

It's close, but it looks like Fox news technically wins.

I hate to say it, Mr. Brooks,
but give that data a second look.

UPDATE: Speaking of second looks, that Nielsen number I quoted isn't actually a peak viewers number. The same page lists O'Reilly's evening show as pulling in 3 million people. That's easily twice the ferret-owner count.

UPDATE 2: The blogger known as General Patterico has tracked down the source Brooks cited, and it turns out Brooks has mis-remembered what was being said in the first place.

Peabody's Place

We saw Blithe Spirit at the Peabody Estate. The play was well-done and quite funny.

Mr. Peabody made vast sums in coal, and his estate was voluminous:

Although Peabody always maintained various residences in Chicago, it was in the western suburbs that he chose to build his retirement home. Peabody purchased over 800 acres from several landowners in DuPage County, near Hinsdale. He selected the prominent Chicago architectural firm of Marshall & Fox to design a magnificent 39-room Tudor Revival mansion costing $750,000. It took two years to build and was completed in 1921.

When you visit, you see remnants of church stuff:

Following their acquisition of Mayslake, the Franciscans spent the next year converting the 39-room Tudor Revival mansion into a retreat house. The spacious living room was converted to a chapel, and its doors and eight windows were fitted with stained glass.

Preservationists intervened when the church people wanted to sell to developers:

A massive campaign to save the site resulted in passage of a referendum that enabled the DuPage County Forest Preserve District to acquire the site for $17.5 million in 1992.

Thus did the businessman's bounty
come into the hands of the county.

2 Meanings of Dramatic Climax

In Freytag's theory of dramatic structure, the "climax" is the "turning point" which occurs in the middle of the play. A lot of people are taught this chart in school:

But this isn't actually how the word is used nowadays. Nowadays a "climax" comes right before the end - it's the "final showdown". The visual diagram for a 2-act play is drawn more like this:

Partly, this is semantics. Partly, it's a different idea of what is important in analyzing a story. I had a professor in college who was very keen on finding the middle-of-the-story turning point, where events subtly began to change direction.

I'm not sure how you apply Freytag's diagram to a standard contemporary 2-act play, because it seems like it would land around the end of Act I or beginning of Act II.

Trying to agree on terms
can be like herding worms.

Untragic Tragedy

I've been reading Ion, by Euripides, one of the ancient Greek tragedies that has a happy ending. 

You might wonder how it can be called a tragedy. The Greeks meant something a bit different than we mean by tragedy.

Here's Aristotle's definition with bolding from me:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

So... serious, evoking pity and fear... but possibly having a happy ending.

To us it's not "tragedy" at all,
if it lacks a final fall.

Has It Coming

I have no confidence about what will happen to Libya if Gaddafi is unseated.

But if they hang him by his ears
I'll shed no tears.

Election Results

We have a new mayor, although he won't be sworn in for a while. A lot of my Republican friends are wondering how he could have been elected. Well, remember, this is a Democratic town, and the people running were ALL Democrats. This was a "non-partisan election", but the GOP didn't even bother fielding anyone. Also, I think it's true that the winner came off as the smartest of the candidates. None of the leading candidates was super specific about their proposals, but all gave speeches about hard choices ahead. I think it's fair to say that the winner was perceived as taking the toughest line with the city unions, particularly in regard to increasing employee pension contributions. The city's business leaders backed him, the city's unions were not so enthusiastic.

Thus ends my note
about today's vote.

Wild Weekend

I had today off for George Washington's birthday. I spent this long weekend, starting Friday night, rewriting my play, especially the last 15 pages, the final scene where the pace and impact seemed to flag during our public reading. My wife has been out of town, so I had plenty of time to myself to write. I also took a yoga class each morning. I find it helps settle my mind for writing.

That's a photo from the discussion after the reading, with the actors, me, and the director, 6 days ago.

A number of people I trust thought the final scene alone was weak. But some people were not bothered by it at all. One very analytical friend actually thought the final scene was great, and listed the reasons she liked it, particularly the fact that it explained everything so clearly. So I decided to find what was weak and keep what was strong.

I tore the scene up into sub-scenes, considered reordering them, wrote a lot of new lines, sharpened a lot of existing lines, and got a better sense of what was motivating the 2 characters in the scene.

I think I've done it. It has the same basic skeleton, but I think it has a driving sense of purpose and clash of wills now. And it certainly has a more startling and bold way of achieving resolution. Startling but sufficiently prepared for, I believe.

There's a David Mamet dictum to the effect that the play isn't over till the Truth comes out - then it's over. I think I've done a better job of meeting that standard.

I'm hoping this is the last MAJOR surgery before production. Well we'll see. It's been through a lot. It's had 15 serious revisions since I first wrote "end of play" in the script back in July 2010. As with my first play, the last scene has proved to be the most re-worked.

Bringing out the truth is hard,
leaves me feeling battle-scarred.

String Theory of Romantic Comedy

I saw No Strings Attached, a romantic comedy, tonight.

The premise is that medical-resident Natalie Portman is looking for a bed-buddies-only relationship with TV production assistant Ashton Kutcher.

Of course, the strings attach
to make a match.

Speeding to Conviction

A guy in a BMW was zooming down an Oregon interstate. The police clocked him at 118 mph. So a cop pulled him over, and found that the driver was videorecording the whole thing.

When Postlewait asked why he was videotaping, Bakanov said he was filming his speedometer, and his arrest, to post on Youtube. The video later revealed that Bakanov had attained speeds in excess of 140 mph.

Unfortunately, the police confiscated the video, so we can't see the look on the cop's face when all this is explained to him.

Think twice before making a vid
of things that are better off hid.

Mad City

The situation north of here - in Madison, WI - is impressive. Ann Althouse has been all over it lately.

The Republicans are trying to curb the state unions, and the unions are having none of it. The school teachers called in sick in huge numbers and joined massive, messy, but peaceful protests at the state capitol. The state had to close down a lot of public schools because of the teacher sick-in.

Meanwhile, the senate Democrats fled the state - in order to deprive the state senate of a quorum, apparently.

They came down here, to Illinois,
hoping their absence would annoy
and maybe delay
reckoning day.

Aha

As I mentioned, I felt I had some changes to make in my play, especially in the last 10 minutes or so. I think I've got it. I mulled over a lot of the comments, and a dictum of David Mamet's, and something new emerged. Sorry to be so cryptic.

Sometimes ideas come in a flood
midst the roaring of the blood.

Boycott Wal-Mart

Not for the usual reasons. And I don't shop there much, anyway - mostly because I hardly shop anywhere!

Four Wal-Mart employees have been fired after management said they violated company policy by disarming an alleged shoplifter who had pulled a gun inside the store.

That lead paragraph actually understates the reported danger posed by the suspect, a man named Longton.

Longton then allegedly grabbed Stewart and shoved the gun into his back.

Why would a big corporation like Wal-Mart fire a bunch of heroes?
I bet they're worried about liability awards with lots of trailing zeroes.

But there's got to be a way to avoid
making these guys unemployed.

Meditations

For book club we read Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome. It's a book of Stoic rumination on right behavior, addressed to himself, apparently intended for his eyes only.

I didn't really like the book. It emphasizes thinking about death a lot, so one can face it calmly when it comes. To me it sounds like self-inducing depression so you can face death without caring.

It doesn't make sense
to live your days under a cloud
just to suppress
your fear of the funeral shroud.

Reading Can Be Fun

We had the reading of my new play, Wild Flowers. It went very well. There are some things I want to change, but they are of the non-catastrophic variety, and the audience seemed to have a great time, so I'm very happy. We identified a stretch that dragged a bit. I want to clarify some motivation a bit, too.

Thank you to the cast: Amanda June Bracklein as Maggie, Linus Lee as Jason, Bil Gaines as Trent, and Rachel Martindale as Yuliana. Thank you to Lance Brett Hall for casting 3 of those actors, and for facilitating the discussion afterward. Thank you to Dream Theatre Company for hosting the event and for participating in it!

There's this funny psychological effect, I find, of listening to a play - and listening to it with an audience. It's not ESP, of course, but there's a natural awareness of the audience that somehow tells you a lot - even before they speak a word afterwards.

I don't know how, but it's real:
you sense what they feel.

On A Proposal To Wipe Out V Day

Over on Livejournal, they asked: If you had the power, would you permanently eliminate Valentine's Day?

I think it would be phenomenally stupid
to try to eliminate Cupid.

Even if at first I seemed to achieve success,
before long I'd face the return of the repressed.

People would be sneaking cards and flowers
in defiance of my dictatorial powers.

Green Meets Snow

Nice photo at the link:

A roof used to display innovative landscaping techniques collapsed over a parking area at Aquascape Corporation in St. Charles on Monday.

Yes, they were growing stuff on the roof over a parking lot. From the photo, they had dirt and grass and snow on the roof. They suspect the accident had something to do with snow melting and refreezing to form an "ice dam".

There are bugs in lots of the green
technology I've seen.

Spoiler Alert at Second City

Tonight we went to see the current Second City show:

Spoiler Alert: Everyone Dies

It was very funny sketch comedy without an overarching theme.

As usual, some of the humor was local. The show attracts tourists, but I always wonder what they make of the local stuff, such as tonight's very funny skit about the Cubs/Sox rivalry - as viewed through the lens of the racial divide.

I especially enjoyed the part where the north sider is trying to explain that he has never gone to the south side because he doesn't know how to get there.

The only thing I don't like about Second City is the lack of leg room. You get scrunched in that place!

There's not a lot of room,
but the comedy goes boom!

Atlas Trailer Already Controversial

A couple of bloggers I read regularly don't like the Atlas Shrugged Part 1 Trailer.

Tyler Cowen:

Hank Rearden's line about only wanting to earn money comes across as either a parody of Gordon Gecko or as something worthy of Gecko's parody. To be properly post-Wall Street, Rearden must somehow contain and yet leapfrog over Oliver Stone's vision; a pretty boy look will not suffice.

Ann Althouse:

People are supposed to put up with more than one movie full of that stuff?! It was all I could do to look at 2 and a half minutes of that sloshy melodrama.

Is that opus really the rich repository of conservative values it purports to be? Quite aside from the flabby aesthetics, we're supposed to get all righteous about — of all things — building railroads?

Prof. Cowen has read the novel, and has some sympathy with its import. He has his own idea about the right way to film it. He wants it in black and white, to start with. I think he has in mind to do it as an alternate history piece about the 1950's, which might be an aesthetic success, although I fear it would be more costly and less likely to draw an audience.

Prof. Althouse has not read the novel. The idea that the novel purports to be conservative is a confession of ignorance. It certainly defends some key traditional values of Western civilization, but by no means all of them, and the defense is pro-reason, not pro-tradition.

Althouse is all about nuance in her art appreciation. Rand could display considerable nuance, but it was in the details, not in the outline. In the outline she went for epic.

I wasn't surprised they didn't like it. But I liked it well enough that I'm looking forward to seeing it on its ironic opening day: April 15.

Will it be perfect? Of course not. It's a low-budget quickly-produced indie film! On the other hand, they've actually succeeded - after decades of failure - at putting the story on the screen.

The trailer seems to be aimed at fans of the novel, not at people unfamiliar with the material. As with Lord of the Rings, there's a big fan base. I'm guessing the marketing strategy is to get the fans into the theater seats, in hopes they will generate enough positive buzz to get other people to come see it.

As with the Serenity movie, I'm too much of a pre-existing fan to judge how other movie-goers might like it. They've obviously kept it politically controversial, so I'm sure some people will just hate it.

I certainly plan to watch it.
I hope they didn't botch it.

Privileged Haunts

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Higher education has no special immunity from the angri-culture. On the contrary, it is a privileged haunt for those who delight in scorn, derision, and wrathful dislike of mainstream American culture. We cite academic freedom as guaranteeing our right to be vitriolic.

It's from an article about the Beck vs. Cloward controversy.

The academic left prizes anger as a sign of caring about the oppressed.
But when anger comes at them, they are oh-so-deeply distressed.

National Department of Confusion

You might think that a group called "The Muslim Brotherhood" has a religious intent.

But, no...

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is a secular organization.

Then again, yes:

The Obama administration took the rare step Thursday of correcting its own intelligence chief after the official claimed Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular."

Get your ducks in a row
before you go
and talk like a rube
on the tube.

Back on the Calendar

We've finally got my play reading rescheduled - for this coming Tuesday.

We had to switch actors for 2 of the 4 roles, due to the date change. Actors tend to be busy people, with day jobs, readings, rehearsals, performances, classes, and, oh yes, having lives.

I suppose I will have something to rewrite after the reading. Probably some character's actions will appear inconsistent, in a way that requires either revision or explication. Hopefully I won't have any major logical blunders in the story line.

I'm technically on something like 27 rewrites already.

Lucky me, I find rewriting
exciting.

Faulty

My old XP laptop started misbehaving all of a sudden by presenting me with blank screens and blue screens of death and what not.

I couldn't figure it out. The symptoms seemed so random. Then I ran a memory test from a self-booting utility CD. Looks like one of the chips went kablooie. Which explains a lot.

When your memory chip is no good,
nothing works quite like it should.

127 Hours

We saw 127 Hours at the theater. It's the movie about the climber who had a boulder fall on his hand in the middle of Nowhere, Utah - and who had to cut off his hand and most of his forearm to free himself before he died of dehydration.

It's not the most comfortable movie to sit through. If you happen to have any claustrophobia, it's not easy watching this guy stay wedged in one spot in a crevice for 5 days while he tries to survive. Also, if you're squeamish about self-executed dismemberment, you might be tempted to look away at a certain point.

With those little caveats, let me add that it is beautifully filmed, and quite inspirational.

In a choice between life and limb,
it all came down to him.

Contortionists

I just found out that contortionists are classified as "front-benders" or "back-benders"

Relatively few performers are equally adept at bending both frontwards and backwards.

When it comes to extremes of flex,
people run concave or convex.

Maybe Should Buy Some Snowshoes

For a couple of months I've been running a loop that goes through the forest preserve nearby. I've been running along the snowy paths.

I tried it today.

Well, there is all the difference in the world between running on 3 inches of snow and running on 12-18 inches of snow.

A lot more OOF is required.
I feel tired.

Cultural Interplay

I saw Downward Facing again, and mused on the fact that Mishelle's play, and my upcoming play, both grapple a bit with yoga's spiritual message.

The yoga-influenced woman in her play is focused on the redemptive experience of being filled with light and goodness. She is paired with a person who makes fun of this goody-two-shoes attitude.

The yoga-influenced woman in my play is focused on limiting attachment as a way of achieving serenity. She is paired with a person who believes that attachments must be treasured.

Neither of these ideas is really particularly East Indian. And the way yoga is influencing American culture is extremely "watered down" compared to born-and-bred caste-based Hinduism. Of course, American culture has long displayed an ability to extract desirable features from other cultures. Right now, we seem to be going through a major and prolonged "encounter" of this sort with Asian culture. I don't mean to overestimate its role, but it's real enough.

Stepping back and looking at the big picture, globalization does not really present us with full homogenization of culture, but it does present us with exposure to more cultures. Which gives you choices. You can attempt to sift through some of what the other cultures present, seeing if there is anything you would like. Or you can just refuse to do so.

The upheavals in the Muslim world seem to be partly a virulent reaction to this experience. Western and East Asian cultures, piped in by TV and the Net and cheap air travel, present ways of being that are very different than traditional Muslim ways of being. Some of our ways, in point of fact, work better than their ways. Ironically, those who wish to assert Muslim superiority often themselves adopt doctrines from the West. You see this with the adoption of Marxist rhetoric, or fascist rhetoric, or democratic rhetoric, for example.

What curious things there are
in the cultural bazaar.

Dibs

I drove around the city a bit tonight. On the expressways there are no shoulders anymore. What formerly were shoulders are now massive snow walls. So when a car stalls - and I saw at least 4 of them stalled - it ends up blocking much of a lane.

On the city streets, parking remains messy. A lot of cars are still "snowed in" as we say. Many of those are "plowed in", because when the plow came by and pushed the snow away from the center of the street, the snow went onto the parked cars.

Some of the people who have dug out are using the "dibs" system. That's where you claim temporary ownership of the space you dug out. You put a plastic lawn chair or something in your "spot" that you have "dibs on". If anyone else parks in that spot, bad things may happen to their car. It's street justice of a cold variety.

This system creates increased incentive to dig your car out. The city tolerates it. Up to a point. One day the mayor will announce "no more dibs," and the garbage trucks will start hauling away any remaining plastic chairs. As a sort of property right that expires, I suppose this resembles patents and copyrights.

But unlike patent law,
dibs disappear with the thaw.

The Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen, blogger, columnist at the NY Times, and professor of economics at George Mason, has written a little e-book called: The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

His thesis is that economic progress is slowing down, and that this is bad. Kelly Evans, at the Wall St. Journal, writes:

Part of this, Mr. Cowen observes, stems from well-meaning efforts to do more with education, government, and health care that instead seem to have backfired and left us with noncompetitive institutions closer to failing us than to serving us well.

I'm not at all sure he's right that we've eaten "all the low-hanging fruit". That sounds a bit exaggerated - purposely provocative. But I'm sure he's correct that a massive welfare state is no way to encourage deep research or entrepreneurial risk taking.

The lovely peach at the top of the tree -
just out of reach - looks tasty to me.

One Advantage of Owning a Red Car

One of my sisters emailed this story about her husband's blizzard adventure:

He got caught in a white-out driving home from work last night at 6:30p on Route 52. He ended up on the wrong side of the road nose down in a deep ditch. Had to abandon his car or else freeze to death! They ended up closing that road and so his car lay buried until 4p today.The tow truck driver found it because it is bright red. A few scratches, but otherwise okay! When he called work to tell them he could not come in this morning because his car was buried on a closed road they told him they could not put that in as a "reason".

All too often, real-life wild stories
don't fit well in standard categories.

Snowmageddon Day Two

Spent the day shoveling snow, including assisting my dad with his driveway. What a great whole-body endurance workout!

I think that yoga actually helps with snow-shoveling. My lower back isn't sore yet the way it would have been years ago.

If only I had bought a snow blower! But I was reliably informed by a scientific consensus that that snowfall would be a thing of the past, that the world was going to get nothing but warmer, that the Windy City would become a tropical paradise!

Alas, the facts have destroyed

a theory I truly enjoyed.

Snowmageddon Day One

It's not the most snow I've ever seen here, so far, but it seems like the most sustained wind/snow combination. Apparently the wind/snow combo is what defines a blizzard. Even though we're called the windy city, we don't normally have true blizzards. It's kind of fun to watch from inside the house. I've got a great view of it out the window as I write.

I'll be fine,
calm and collected,
as long as our power line
stays connected.

Wild Flowers Buried In Snow

Forecasters are promising a Snowmaggedon event here, starting just about when my play reading was supposed to start.

The theater people were all resolute and hardy folk, willing to brave the blizzard for the sake of their art.

But the audience envisioned being stuck in the snow in the dark, and felt fear in their hearts.

So we'll reschedule.

Instead of the show
I'll be at my hovel
cleaning up snow
with shoulders and shovel.

BroccoliCare

A federal judge today ruled that the Health Care bill is void, on constitutional grounds. Of course, others have ruled it A-ok, so this is headed higher on the judicial food chain.

But speaking of food chains, the judge touched on food in oral argument:

"If (the federal government) decided everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli makes us healthy," Vinson asked, "they could mandate that everybody has to eat broccoli each week?"

A mandate in favor of broccoli?
It wouldn't really shock me.

200 Dead Cows

It had somehow escaped my notice, but 200 dead cows showed up in a Wisconsin pasture 2 weeks ago. I believe it was aliens. But scientists have their own opinions:

Investigators from the University of Wisconsin have determined that the animals were killed by a poison found in spoiled sweet potatoes that were part of the cattle's feed.

The researcher mentioned a "mycotoxin" from the moldy vegetables.

Do not feed your oxen
deadly mycotoxin!

Funding the Stage

The chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts said something controversial about "struggling theaters":

“You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” he said. “Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.”

Theaters which are recipients of NEA grants were not so happy to hear this.

“What does he mean there’s too much supply?!?” wrote Trisha Mead, the public relations and publications manager at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. “What does he mean we can’t increase demand?!?

I suppose he means that *so far - for decades* the efforts to increase demand have been a net failure, despite all the attempts to "outreach to neglected communities" that grant committees love.

Personally, I'm inclined to think that the strings attached to a lot of grant money are strings that tend to trip up theater companies. They get diverted from their primary missions of making art or entertainment, and veer off into "outreach" efforts and policy statements and grant application writing.

Live theater has to compete with TV and movies. That's tough competition. But some people still like to go to plays. There's something about seeing a real live person in front of you, acting, that carries a charm of its own. Plays also run more talky and idea-oriented than movies and TV, so the intellectually-minded and the artsy are often drawn to them.

I think theater
might be sweeter
if the Feds didn't play this part
of "supporting" the art.

Shaky Foundations

My friend asked me this morning what was going on in Egypt and I said "Revolution." Of course, it may fail. And if it succeeds in overthrowing Mubarak, the Egyptians may jump out of the frying pan and into the fire of strict sharia law. It happened like that with the Iranian revolution.

The army and police are of limited usefulness at holding a country down. At some point the uniformed forces may decide to side with the rebels, especially if the rebels appear to have a good chance of winning. There are reports of that sort of incident:

A number of police members removed their suits and joined protests against the regime, according to Al Arabiya.

If your army treats you like royalty,
salute their contribution.

But don't rely on their loyalty,
come the revolution.

Downward Facing

I saw a very charming play tonight - Downward Facing, by Mishelle Apalategui. The title refers on the surface to "downward facing dog," the very popular yoga pose, and perhaps also alludes to the difficulty that people can have in accepting love and warmth into their lives.

The play follows 2 parallel stories, which seem at first to be connected only by theme. Courtney Blomquist is captivating as a young woman who is trying to make of go of opening a yoga studio in a "gentrifying" but still run-down neighborhood. Katharine Swan slowly grows on you as the homeless woman who seems to be permanently camped out on the steps of the yoga studio. Nick Bonges is rather dashing, indeed, as the homeless woman's hobo love interest.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, a pair of young women are meeting at a bus stop, and a rapid attraction develops between them...



Natalie Breitmeyer brings great energy and artful awkwardness to her role as the somewhat butchy Janna. Emily Tate brings a steady aura of groundedness to her role as the more femme Jenna.

And, eventually, the plots come together.

I saw this play in its earlier, 10-minute version, when it appeared at the Theatre of Women festival. I felt that version was loaded with a lot of material, so that it strained your brain a bit to follow the relationships. Now it has been given an hour or so to unfold itself, and it has taken flight like a butterfly.

I suppose Giau Truong, who directed, deserves some of the credit for that too!

Accepting love is not always easy.
When you're a cynic, you get kind of queasy
at even the thought of falling prey
to feeling in such a predictable way.

Emanuel In Again

The ruling is in, and it's unanimous, 7-0. The Illinois supreme court says Rahm Emanuel is eligible to be mayor of Chicago.

They cite an 1869 Illinois supreme court ruling that says:

"residence is lost by a union of intention and acts" and that "intention in may cases will be inferred from the surrounding circumstances"

Not a bright line definition, I suppose, but it's true that Emanuel gave no clear sign of abandoning his affiliation with Illinois.

He's at 52 percent in someone's poll.
He cleared a speed bump, and now he's on a roll.

Orange You Glad?

Homeland Security is finally getting rid of the color codes!

“The old color coded system taught Americans to be scared, not prepared,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) in a statement.

Wait. "Scared not prepared"?

Is Thompson running his own rhyme-of-the-day routine?

...the system, which has largely remained at yellow for domestic travel and orange for national security, has been widely criticized as ineffective.

I have to admit, this decision will make no difference to me at all, because I was already ignoring the color levels.

The meanings were never sufficiently clear
to fill me with reassurance or fear.

Stop the Violence

In local news:

A 40-year-old Chicago man, who works as a motivational speaker for the anti-violence group We Stop the Killings, is scheduled to appear in court Feb. 8 after he was charged with hitting a woman in his car, police said.

Sometimes the people who shout that violence is wrong,

are the very same people for whom the temptation is strong.

Mayoral Race Upheaval - For Now

An appeals court has dealt Rahm Emanuel's candidacy for mayor of Chicago a setback:

“We ... order that the candidate’s name be excluded (or if, necessary, be removed) from the ballot,” Judge Thomas Hoffman wrote in the opinion upholding the requirement under the state’s municipal code that candidates for mayor in Illinois must have “resided in” the town where they are running for a year before Election Day -- in this case Feb. 22. Hoffman was joined by Justice Shelvin Marie Louise Hall.

The appeals court vote was 2 out of 3. Emanuel will now ask the Illinois supreme court to hear his case. The situation is complicated by the fact that time is running out for printing the ballots.

I read through the decision (pdf) , which I found interesting. The court ruled that Emanuel was qualified to vote for mayor, but not to run for mayor. There's no exact precedent apparently, so the ruling makes much of principles of judicial interpretation. It's pretty darn technical.

The judge who wrote the decision is apparently a widely respected judge. Well, now we'll see if the Illinois supreme court will take the case - and maybe issue a stay in the meantime so the ballots include his name.

Ahead in the polls, and in dollars collected,
in this municipality -
but as of today, he's been ejected
on a technicality.

Explosive Development

20 miles from Boston, MA:

An Abington man is being charged with creating bombs at his former address in Abington after police had been told the man was blowing up snow banks to avoid shoveling the snow.

If you're a bomb-thrower,
you don't need a snow-blower.

Thomas Friedman on Autocracy

Here's Thomas Friedman, prominent author and NY Times columnist, saying nice things about autocracy:

There's only one thing worse, in my view, than one-party autocracy -- the Chinese system -- and that's one-party Democracy. Okay? See, one-party autocracy, at least if it has some vision of the future, can actually order the right things . . . collective action from the top down. But when you have one-party Democracy, that is, you have one party trying to do things and the other sticking a spoke in its wheels constantly, you can't get anything big done. And that to me seems to be our real dilemma today.

You may remember this picture:


That's the Goddess of Democracy statue which played a part in the Tianamen Square protests in 1989, protests which were soon crushed by the autocracy.

Does Friedman think he would be allowed to write freely under the Chinese system?

Friedman would soon be unfreed
due to compelling State need.

Italy and the American Death Penalty

Italian regulators have managed to interfere in American executions - by getting a company to stop making a drug that a lot of states use in their executions by injection.

Hospira, which never condoned the use of its Pentothal for executions, said it was unwilling to take on the liability risk after officials in Italy demanded the company “control the product all the way to the ultimate end user to prevent use in capital punishment.”

You might think states could just switch to whatever it is that vets use to put down animals. But, no... there will be court cases, and appeals, and those appeals will go to the highest court in the land.

The Supreme Court must certify
as perfectly painless
and legally stainless
the poisons they use to make people die.

Wildflower and Thunderbolt

I drew this while thinking of a certain play that has a reading coming up.

My central two
characters use
made-up names
in online games
that correspond
to what is drawn.

Peace, They Say

Funny line from Rush Limbaugh's site:

2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Hosts the Man Who Has Imprisoned the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner.

That's a funny way of putting it, even though I'm no longer impressed by the Peace Prize.

'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace.

It's here and it's there
but please tell me where
the current resident
of the office of president
has caused a massive increase
in peace.

Chambers and Nostalgia

For book club we read Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus. It's well-written, well-researched, and adopts an objective tone toward Chambers himself. Obviously the author likes Chambers, but he portrays him flaws and all. The book gives a lively inside look at Communism in America among the intellectual elite.

The book's strongest emotional component, for me, had to do with Chambers' time at Columbia College in New York. It brought back memories of my own time there, some five decades later. Chambers departed involuntarily, as did I, and his dissatisfaction with the place to a certain extent mirrored my own:

...he was searching for something his professors could not or would not give him. Columbia's expansive curriculum - the panoramic survey courses, the piles of great books - seemed feckless to him. He detected a vacuum in the catholicity of texts and in his instructors' dexterous glide from one system of ideas to the next. They offered a "higher hodgepodge" of worldviews. He crave the one right answer to which he could dedicate himself. (page 29)

My personal inclination is to look at a question from every angle. I like to explore a variety of views. But I do believe, now as then, that the whole point is to find the actual truth.

Not every view is valid.
Quite a few are pallid
vampiric things
with bat-like wings.

Soylent White

Some young burglars thought they had discovered containers of cocaine. But really they had discovered the urns of ashes.

Investigators learned what happened to the ashes after they arrested five teens in connection with another burglary attempt at a nearby home last week.

Instead of cocaine,
the remains
of Great Danes
and a human, to boot,
went up their snoots.

Don't Know Much About Critical Thinking

Someone did a big study of college students and what they learned:

The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

It didn't get much better by their senior years, either. Of course, that's just the lower 45 percent.

Would they have been better off just skipping the whole thing?

On the one hand, they wouldn't have a college degree. On the other hand, they wouldn't have a giant back-pack of tuition debt to carry with them as they venture out into the real world.

The costs have been skyrocketing. The benefits have not.

It think it's a bubble
headed for trouble.

Chamber of Errors

I just finished reading a very interesting biography of Whittaker Chambers, about which I shall probably post later, but it made me dredge up his "review" of Atlas Shrugged which appeared in William F. Buckley's National Review.

Mistakes in the review actually make you wonder if he read the book through. He clearly hated the book, so I can see where he wouldn't want to read it through, especially considering how long it is.

Consider this:

One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian dAntonio. This electrifying youth is the world's biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand's chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad).

So, he misspells d'Anconia, he mispells Danneskjöld, and falsely claims that Dagny is breathtakingly beautiful. All in one paragraph.

He found little to like,
and his fact checkers were on strike.

The Man With No Middle Name

It's MLK's birthday, and it's BF's birthday, by which I mean Benjamin Franklin. Did you ever notice that a lot of the Founding Fathers lacked middle names?

Wikipedia says:

Despite their relatively long existence in North America, the phrase "middle name" was not recorded until 1835 in Harvardiana, a periodical of the time.

But did they really have a "long existence" in North America"? You wouldn't know it from looking at the people involved in the American revolution.

Franklin's accomplishments were staggering. Not only was he smart, he had taken it upon himself to be energetic:

He said that, as a child, a proverb from King Solomon profoundly influenced his life: Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings. “I from thence considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction.”

Despite the lack of a middle name,
Benjamin won lasting fame.

The biggest bill that the Feds now print
has his face in a greenish tint.

Tug of War

Mr. Croc, do you know what you've chomped?
If you don't let go you may get stomped!

UPDATE: It's a baby elephant, and it got away.

Shades of Gray

That's the president on Wednesday and the president on Saturday. Go back to the videos (here & here) if you want.

Ann Althouse writes:

Gray for the memorial, signifying the wise elder, the father figure. Back to dark hair to signify the vigorous young man, ready to forge ahead, solving problems, and restoring his party's electoral fortunes.

Hey, it's his business if he wants to color his hair. I'm just going to use this opportunity to parody Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that grim gray,
Wage open war, by dyeing it away!

Price-Fixer in Private Education?

The Wall St. Journal recently ran a defense of for-profit colleges in its opinion section. The article, by Donald E. Graham, included this claim:

There is a price-fixer in private education—it's called the U.S. government. Long-existing regulations all but eliminate price competition. We are willing to cut prices on some programs and keep them low for years in return for relief from regulations that mandate our tuitions.

What regulations is he referring to? He doesn't say!

I wonder if it has to do with strings attached to the federal student loan program. Most of the students at these schools take federal loans to pay a big chunk of their tuitions.

Hillsdale College famously does not accept federal aid for its students, in order to avoid the attendant federal regulatory intrusion.

Who pays the piper
call the tune,
as colleges learned
all too soon.

Gadsden Reimagined

It's time to erase
that serpent's head
and place instead
a smiley face!

(From Chip Ahoy at Althouse's request)

Matrimonium Economicus

In today's Wall St. Journal there was an interesting review of The Price of Everything. The author of this book has an economic theory to explain the increased prevalence of monogamy over the past 2000 years. But the reviewer demurs:

There was, however, an important noneconomic event 2,000 years ago that spread the Jewish view—unusual at the time—of marriage as a monogamous institution: the birth of Christianity.

This gave me pause, for 2 reasons.

1) Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations viewed marriage as a monogamous institution.

2) Biblical Jewish civilization allowed for multiple wives.

It is even reported that:

Jewish polygamy clashed with Roman monogamy at the time of the early church

Thus, the idea that monogamy came into Western culture from Jewish civilization seems just wrong.

So is marriage a matter of body or spirit or economics? Yes!

Two shall become one flesh,
and their pocketbooks shall mesh.

Wild Flowers Reading

We're having a free reading of my new full-length play on February 1, at 7:30 pm, at Dream Theatre. It's called Wild Flowers, and it's about a young woman who finds out that she may not be an American citizen - that she may be deported shortly to Russia. As the play opens, she's doing yoga on her patio, trying to clear her mind, and a young man walks up, offering to help.

We're planning on a July 2011 production. Last time around, with Ready Or Not, I made some changes to the script, based on a reading or two. So I want to hear how it sounds. There will be some audience discussion afterwards.



This cartoon (which you can get on a shirt) isn't based on the play, but somehow it goes well with the play.

Wild flowers
have the power
to succeed
as weeds.

Pay Up Or Put Down

The town clerk of Reconvilier, Switzerland is threatening to kill dogs whose owners don't cough up the 50 buck annual dog tax.

Town clerk Pierre-Alain Nemitz has received death threats over the new approach to tax collection.

I think the clerk
sounds like a jerk.

He shouldn't make threats
against people's pets.

On Their Hands

I'm really not a Palin fan, but after this current attack on her I'm almost ready to give her a sympathy vote.

The claim that she has "blood on her hands" over the Arizona shooting is deeply disconnected from reality.

The people who spread it, for sure,
have stuff on their hands - manure.

There's a famous philosophy article by Harry Frankfurt, provocatively titled: "On Bullshit".

While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth. Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are"

They claim to have the scoop
but all they give you is poop.

Glass on a Hot Tin Roof

In our production of Cat, we use a fair amount of real glassware on stage. The script calls for the male lead - who always has a drink in his hand - to fall to the floor a couple of times. Tonight he broke a glass on the floor, for real.

He walks about on stage with one foot bare. So he cut his foot. Enough to make him limp.

And "Big Daddy" cut his hand, slightly.

And "Maggie" cut her leg when she knelt to the floor to admire Big Daddy's slippers.

Bloody hell!
Otherwise the show went well.

Scooby Did

A 14 year old Chicago girl was attacked by a man twice her age, in her own front yard:

He threw her down and tried pulling off her clothing. She struggled and screamed.

That's when a Great Dane named Scooby showed up. With owner in tow. No word on whether he declared "Ruh roh!"

Scooby and his owner chased the attacker into an alley - and cornered him until the cops showed up.

No word on whether Scooby was rewarded for this good deed with special snacks.

A dog who foils this sort of attack
always deserves a special snack.

Facial Expression Question

What is this facial expression? It strikes me as emotionally charged, oddly haunting. The lips are turning down a little. The eyes are wide. Is it controlled fear? That would make sense, given why her picture was taken. Is there something defiant about her expression?

Is her mug
somehow smug?

Arizona Monster

I see the murderous Arizona rampager was rambling on about "conscience dreaming". What? Did he dream that he had a conscience? Because he doesn't seem to have much of one. Or did he mean "conscious dreaming"? That would be kind of funny since he also was rambling on about people not being good at English grammar, and here he is getting his spelling wrong.

Meanwhile, there has been an eruption of ridiculous political blame-gaming. Have you ever noticed how crazed assassins usually fall outside the normal political party lines? There's a reason for that. It's because they're crazed.

I do have a question. This was in Arizona. Which, according to some, is full of gun-toters. Where were they? Why didn't anyone shoot this guy? Is the prevalence of gun-toters in AZ exaggerated? Was the Congresswoman's meeting a gun-free zone for some reason? Someone finally tackled the guy, but I'm guessing that was after he ran out of bullets in his 9mm pistol.

I suppose this case will be forgotten in a few years, except among the people who knew the victims, including the family of the 9 year old girl that this monster shot.

For them the pain will persist
as long as they exist.

Limerick for the Birds

There was a girl parrot so glamorous,
all the boy parrots grew clamorous.
She gave each a turn.
None did she spurn.
Her name was, of course, Polly Amorous.

Constitutional "Fetish"

I've been grimly amused by all the complaining about the reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives.

As Paul at PowerLine wrote:

...instead of good naturedly going along with the exercise, or suffering in silence, a number of leftists publicly displayed their lack of comfort with, if not contempt for, the Constitution. Thus, the public received its clearest indication to date that the left regards the words of the Constitution as an impediment to its agenda.

The left, under the Bush administration, actually took the opposite tack. They were always complaining that the Republican administration was violating the Constitution.

Of course, hypocrisy is nothing new in politics. But the philosophies of pragmatism and post-modernism both provide increased support to "saying what works" and not worrying about consistency or truth.

Under the system proposed in Plato's Republic, at least the rulers knew they were lying. They had to justify it as noble lying. But under some modern philosophies, there's no such thing as lying, because there's no such thing as unyielding truth.

American popular culture has long held a special place in its heart for our Constitution. It's not viewed simply as a legal document. It is revered as a sacred gift from inspired (though fallible) founders. This is a peculiarly American attitude. In terms of the postmodern left, we "fetishize" the document.

This special reverence for the Constitution was a major feature of the Tea Party phenomenon, and now it has leaked into the Republican Party.

Time magazine chirps in with an article on "the Cult of the Constitution" by Alex Altman, which includes this complaint:

But the notion that our governing document should never evolve has always struck me as mildly insane.

I suppose "evolve" is the key word. The document itself includes a process for amending the document. This process has been used. We're up to 27 amendments. We even have one amendment that specifically cancels out a previous amendment. But this isn't the kind of evolving he has in mind. He has in mind evolving understanding of what was already written. He has in mind reinterpretation.

Reinterpretation is the "fetish" of the post-modernists.

Every text
is seen as vexed -
in need of being re-read
until the meaning is dead.

It's their core trick,
and it makes me sick.

Cat Opens

We did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to an audience tonight. The show seemed to go well, with a few kinks which the audience probably did not detect. Here's a picture... I think from one of the dress rehearsals:



This is the beginning of the big moment for my part, where I deliver the really bad news.

One thing that's very clever about the play is that Brick has broken his leg the night before - which justifies all the play's action taking place in Brick and Maggie's bedroom, because Brick is confined to his room so Big Daddy's whole birthday party comes upstairs to the bedroom.

Brick being temporarily crippled - and dependent upon a crutch - is probably also a visual metaphor for his wretched alcohol dependence.

So his broken leg doubles as a symbol and a "keep it all in one room" staging gimmick.

Williams gives you a well-written earful
of frustrated souls who aren't very cheerful.

Oopsies

Oopsie 1:

A pilot's spilled coffee accidentally triggered a hijacking alert and caused a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, to make an unscheduled stop in Canada.

Let's give him a sippy cup
before he takes his next plane up.

Oopsie 2:

In a spectacular misunderstanding sparked by an accidental cell phone call, a worried wife caused SWAT teams to swarm the Winnetka school where her husband works, officials said Tuesday.

He was listening to a gangsta song,
but his wife thought something was really wrong.

Fortunately, these false alarms
led to no lasting harms.

Pointing a Finger at Feline Malingerers

It's an old argument. Which are smarter - dogs or cats? Lately, I had seen some articles trumpeting dogs' understanding of humans. But along comes a cat article that makes those mischievous kitties look pretty devious:

They don't talk, but when cats are upset about a change in their environment they let you know by acting sick – refusing to eat and vomiting excessively, even if they're healthy, a new study finds.

In other words, these kitties call in sick, and vomit like they've got it, even though they're fine.

That's not just smart,
that's almost art.

Nativity Scene, Bagged

In the building where I work, which is owned and partly occupied by a Catholic University, they have a nativity scene every Christmas in the ground floor hallway.

For the past week or so, the nativity scene figures - which are good-sized - have been wrapped up in dark plastic bags. Just sitting there. Awaiting pick-up for storage, I assume.

But it's a bit macabre, because it looks sort of like the wise men and the shepherds and the holy family are all in body bags.

It's gone from cheer
to drear.

If you must bag them all,
please take them out of the hall!

Crossed Lines

Many actors have a facility for making up lines that sound a lot like the playwright's lines - but aren't. It's a valuable skill.

When you're rehearsing
and someone forgets a line
you can't just start cursing.
You have to go on like it's fine.

Sometimes you even have to make something up. Suppose the dialog is like this:

A: Did you shoot him?
B: No.

Suppose A forgets his line. What is B to do? Probably something like this:

A: (uncomfortable pause)
B: I suppose you're wondering if I shot him. No!

It pays to be glib
when you need to ad lib.

The King's Speech

We went to see The King's Speech. I had no idea what the film was about, going in, except that it had something to do with British royalty in the 20th century, a subject that doesn't usually fascinate me.

But the film was fascinating after all, because it was about a man's struggle with a speech impediment.

He is helped - almost against his will - by a self-taught Australian speech therapist - played by Geoffrey Rush.

Colin Firth transformed himself for the role of George VI. I believed he had a speech impediment. It was painful to watch him in the early parts of the film.

It's a hard thing
to try to be king
when normal speech
is out of reach.