Stephen Colbert, on the 1/8/07 episode of The Colbert Report:
Children are just lobbyists who get political favors in exchange for being adorable. I’ve said it before: They’re here to replace us, and if we don’t do something soon, they will.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has agreed to personally pay $15,000 per month to his former campaign manager, who abruptly quit last week after learning his wife had had an affair with Newsom.
Hey, Mayor Newsom, wanna have an illicit affair with my partner, too?
Saturday night, Dave and Terry and I saw Farm Boys at the New Conservatory Theater, and then Sunday night Dave and I saw The Birthday Party at the Aurora.
Farm Boys is an affecting play despite what I think are some weaknesses in the writing. A gay man inherits a midwestern farm from an older man with whom he had a love affair many years ago — the older man’s first. The younger man moved out of the Midwest, though, years ago and is uneasy about the idea of moving back and taking over the place. And he’s clearly troubled by his memories of his relationship with the older man — some of which we see acted out as flashbacks.
I especially liked Brian Levy as the ghost/flashback of the older man and Scarlett Hepworth as his ex-wife — very warm and loving portrayals of their characters. I thought the writing of the play was not everything it could be, though — I felt that a fair amount of the dialogue was just a bit too formal to sound completely natural, and in the second act I really wanted to see more of the relationship between the two men — what happened after they became lovers and before they separated. I think I’d have come away with a more vivid sense of what the relationship meant to them in their memories if I’d had seen more of what it was at the time, and I came away wishing that more time in the second act could have spent with the flashbacks, which seem to me to be the emotional core of the story.
For all that, it’s a very moving play, and I might try to go see it one more time before it closes weekend after next.
The Birthday Party is not a play I’m wild about, and the Aurora’s production didn’t make me a convert. I think I understand and appreciate what Pinter is doing technically in his plays, I just never seem to be able to care much that he’s doing it. I can see that there are some interesting ideas in the play, but they seem few and thin to me, nowhere near substantial enough to sustain my attention for three acts. But the whole cast is terrific and it was a good evening. Dave and I mostly went because we’re fans of James Carpenter and Julian Lopez-Morillas, who — lucky us — are in the two most important roles and doing a compelling job of it. But whole ensemble is excellent. Phoebe Moyer is wonderful and funny as the landlady whose name I’m forgetting, the one who keeps asking if the corn flakes are nice.
I’ve enjoyed James Carpenter’s work for some 15 years or more now, but he’s always seemed to me to be the sort of actor who is really good as long as he stays within a fairly limited range of what he can do very well — now between this and last season’s The Master Builder, I’m not so sure about that any more. Both that performance and this one had a breadth and depth of feeling to them that I don’t remember seeing before. I won’t mind, though, if he gets more upcoming opportunities to display it in Ibsen than Pinter.
Dave says that The Birthday Party has exactly the same structure as a typical episode of The Goon Show. I don’t know enough about The Goon Show to repeat his explanation, but I pass it along here in case it’s an enlightening insight for anyone. And it does occur to me that I’d probably like The Birthday Party much better if it had been a short one-act.
Maeterlinck, the older of our two parakeets, died last Friday, probably sometime during the night. I was heading out the door to work in the morning, and Dave was following me out, and he looked in the cage as he walked by and saw him on the floor of the cage.
We buried Maeterlinck in the yard on Saturday, and Sunday after brunch with Terry the three of us went to Lucky Dog on San Pablo Avenue to look for a new mate for Rossetti, our other ‘keet. We came home, though, with two, a light blue male and a green and yellow female. Rossetti (after Christina, not Gabriel) is a female. (Do you know how to tell a parakeet’s sex? Look at the little area right above its beak, around the nostrils. On males this is blue and on females this is pink. No, seriously.) We wanted to avoid getting two males out of the vague notion that the two males might quarrel for dominance and poor Rossetti would get the worst of it.
But we’ve been glad to see that so far the three of them have been getting along very contentedly. No sign of friction as yet, just a lot of friendly behavior.
The Washington Post is maintaining an archive of evidence submitted in the Libby trail.
After seeing 16×16 and even 25×25 sudoku grids, Dave and I have joked about the next logical step being three-dimensional sudoku puzzles — a series of nine 9×9 grids that would represent the layers of a 9×9×9 cube, creating 27 intersecting arrays. It would be difficult just to visualize clearly what was going on, of course, which is what made the idea so silly.
It didn’t occur to me, though, that on a computer you could make the intersecting arrays easier to visualize. Someone has gone and created a very attractive three-dimensional sudoku game called 3Doku, and the interface does make it relatively effortless to see what’s going on. You can look at three mutually intersecting cross-sectional views at a time. Double-clicking on a cell instantly brings up the three cross sections that contain that cell, and highlights all the other cells that are in the same line or 3×3 box with that cell (that is, all the cells that cannot contain the same digit). A fourth view shows the entire cube from an angle, and indicates the location of the cross sections you’re looking at in the other three views.
I played it for a while on my commute this morning. It’s kind of pleasant to wander through the grid looking for places where you can make a deduction, but even at the medium difficulty level I think I was averaging maybe one deduction per three to five minutes of searching. With 729 cells to fill instead of the usual 27, and two more difficulty levels above that one, I have the feeling this is the sort of problem you shouldn’t get too wrapped up in without a government grant.
It’s a lovely thing to contemplate, though.
Later: I’ve played more with this, and it turns out it’s not nearly as impossibly time-consuming as I thought it would be. After you get to a certain tipping point, there are enough numbers filled in that there are easy deductions to be made all over the place.
Even after you get to that point, though, there are hundreds of cells yet to be filled in, which is an awful lot of tedious mopping up to do.
Last night I could not get my desktop computer to talk to our new printer over the wireless network, even though my old laptop was talking to it just fine. After some poking around in the settings and finding nothing obviously wrong, Dave suggested that I use the setup disc to uninstall the printer driver and then reinstall the very same driver. (Note: The. Very. Same. Driver.)
I was skeptical but complied, and immediately thereafter was able to print from my desktop computer.
I have to wonder how people who deal with this sort of thing all the time can turn around and say that astrology is far-fetched.
Rush Limbaugh on global warming:
Now, I’m just telling you that this picture is a total misrepresentation of the current state of circumstances for polar bears. It’s as though they wandered out on this ice floe, and it broke off, and it’s fading off now toward the equator and the polar bears cannot do anything about it and they’re going to melt and they’re going to die.
Or, if they do jump off they may have to swim hundreds of miles and expend lots of energy because ice is all melting around them. Of course, this picture has all the ingredients of the fraud and the deception. We just went through what we went through with Barbaro. Now we’ve got polar bears, stranded polar bears, animals, essence of innocence, so cute, so lonely, so frightened, so panicked, bellowing out for hope from the nearest human. Meanwhile, the Canadian film crew is just content to let them float off to their deaths for the sake of grabbing the photo to mislead you and your kids, who will no doubt be shown this by a bunch of worthless teachers who are promoting a political agenda.
This whole thing is totally misleading. They’re not even stranded on an ice floe that’s broken apart. They’re just out there just playing around. They’re just out there. You know, just like your cat goes to its litter box. When’s the last time your cat got stranded in its litter box? Just like your pit bull attacks and kills the neighbor’s baby horse, whatever, I mean these things happen. It’s called nature.
Um, yeah. Pit bull kills baby horse. Whatever.
The Rev. Ted Haggard has gone through three weeks of “intensive counseling” and as a result he has come to the realization that he is “completely heterosexual”.
Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master’s degrees in psychology. The e-mail said the family hasn’t decided where to move but that they were considering Missouri and Iowa.
Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town and the Haggards agreed.
“This is a good place for Ted,” Ware said. “It’s hard to heal in Colorado Springs right now. It’s like an open wound. He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.”
It was also the oversight board that strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work.
From the 1/31/07 installment of The Daily Show, after a montage of clips of Bush and other Republican officials reciting what is evidently a new Talking Point, that any disagreement with how Bush is handling the war only serves to “embolden” the terrorists:
JON STEWART: It seems that critics of the war have no recourse that does not embolden al-Qaida or our enemies.
JOHN OLIVER: Yes, they are an emboldenable bunch.
JON: But the word “embolden” — such an odd word, such an unconventional word.
JOHN: Well, this is an odd, unconventional war. This isn’t like World War Two where there were winners and losers. It’s a new kind of war, where enemies can either be emboldened or beweakened. So we have to enscare them to the point where they rebecave themselves. We must disimagine the very thinkment of misunsuccessiveness. That is what we have to bedo.
Scratchings 