Scratchings

Tucker Carlson on FOX: “There’s something what went basically unnoticed by the press and that was the Obama campaign making a push of social issues, particularly abortion, and that seems to have worked. … If you were a voter in a white, working-class state, you had no idea that they were running a campaign based on abortion!”

First, since when is a president not supposed to be campaigning on social issues? And second, what the fuck is a “white, working-class state”? Iowa in 1903?

If God really sent Hurricane Sandy to punish America for its growing tolerance of gays, I have to wonder why He made it stop just in time for Halloween.

Two good quotes about editing from the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A column for October:

The decision, like so many others in writing and editing, should not be made according to some idea of what is “correct”. Rather, it must be made according to what is logical and helpful.

And:

It’s good to remember that even nonsense can be grammatically correct.

Both old truths, but easy to lose sight of.

I’ve been so tired and busy I haven’t even posted about Dave and I seeing Hamlet at Cal Shakes on opening night Friday before last. In spite of the fact that it is a totally kickass production. There are a number of rather bewildering things about this production, first and foremost being the fact that the set seems to be an abandoned urban public swimming pool, empty and littered with discarded pieces of furniture and other items. However, it isn’t long after the play began that I was so blown away by the force and clarity of the performances that I didn’t care much any more about the inscrutable parts.

LeRoy McClain as Hamlet and Zainab Jah as Ophelia as just amazingly good. Liesl Tommy’s direction — once you accept and get past the fact that it’s a swimming pool and you have no idea why — is sharp and full of inventive choices, and it keeps the story intense and clear.

If you only read one article about the sale of The WELL all year, make it this one!

“The WELL welcomes the chance to encouragement its existing bottom and extends an call in to like-minded people seeking for a amicable network that puts the giveaway swap of ideas at the forefront,” explained Earl Crabb, CEO of The Well Group, Inc.

Nobody seems to be talking about the real reason you can’t open the windows on an airplane: so kids can’t spit on people below.

I just heard yesterday about the suicide of a friend of mine a week earlier. He wasn’t a particularly close friend, but someone I saw at retreats several times a year for the last seven or eight years. I knew he’d been in iffy health and increasing pain for some years. But he always seemed to me to be a delightful, whimsical, prankish spirit — he was a dancer in younger days (which unfortunately sometimes leads to painful and disabling joint problems in later life, and I gather that this was part of his struggle), and there was always something about his personality that was leaping and frolicking around just for the fun of it. He was also a wise, kind, gentle soul. I’m sorry I won’t be seeing him again, and I hope whatever part of him rubbed off on me over the years continues to be part of my life. Godspeed, John.

From the PBS Newshour:

Final Stretch Marks Shift in Money Race

I passed a guy on the sidewalk today who had several prominent tattoos, as indeed so many people do these days. I was thinking idly about how much things have changed, and how 25 or 30 years ago I knew very few people with even one tat on a shoulder, and now I know people with full-sleeve and even in a few cases full-body tattoos.

And I suddenly flashed on a stage direction from some play from at least a couple decades ago, about being wary of a man with two tattoos. The stage direction seemed so striking and funny to me at the time that I could remember just about the whole thing, except for what play it was from and what the character’s name was. Thinking back on it now, though, the stage direction seems rather quaint and small-minded. But the sharp way it’s phrased still made me chuckle to think back on it.

Yay for the Internet. Took me fifteen seconds to discover that it’s from Larry Shue’s brilliantly funny farce The Foreigner, which I saw the premiere of in New York City in the late 1980s. I remember it got poor reviews, but it was playing at a small off-Broadway theater (at the Astor Place Theatre I’m pretty sure), and thanks to some extra capital it could afford to run for a month or so to poor houses while hoping for good word of mouth to spread. Which it did and became a nice success, running for over a year if I’m remembering.

I saw the play twice, the first time when the houses were still poor and then again several months later. I bought a copy to read a few years later, which is when I found out the play had funny stage directions, too. Here’s the stage direction that accompanies the entrance of the creepy thug Owen Musser:

(Psychologists tell us to beware the man with two tattoos. One, he may have gotten on a drunk or a dare. But two means he went back. Owen is a two-tattoo man.)

Given that the course under investigation for academic misconduct at Harvard was “Introduction to Congress”, how sure are we that having to deal with the media fallout over a cheating scandal isn’t just the midterm assignment?