evanevanevan

...while we're still waiting on that 1,000-year reign.

Problem:

"So far, the course charted by Mr. Cameron and his deputy prime minister, Mr. Clegg, remains largely visionary...The main hallmark of the coalition’s program is a plan to halve the annual budget deficit of $235 billion within five years, and to achieve that by across-the-board cuts in almost all government ministries. All the departments involved have been told to prepare a plan for cuts as high as 40 percent."

[new york times]

Solution:

"Jim Hacker is meeting with his department's expenditure committee. They cannot find any ways of cutting expenditures, except for overseas students that will start paying full tuition. After the meeting is over Bernard Woolley reminds the Minister that he still needs to approve the department's honours recommendations. Jim Hacker asks in despair how he can make civil servants want economies as much as they want honours. Then Bernard proposes only to award the honours to those civil servants that have cut their budgets by 5%."

[yes, minister episode guide]

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010)

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)

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The Fugs - Nothing

I recently read The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh legends from the 12th through 15th centuries recommended to me by Alexis, my favorite medievalist. The book's first tale includes a description of a game that was apparently quite popular at one time. In the story, a prince named Pwyll captures his enemy Gwawl in a magic bag:

As each of Pwyll's men entered, he struck the bag a blow and asked, 'What's in here?'

'A badger,' the others said.

This is how they played: each one would strike the bag a blow either with his foot or with a stick; and that is how they played with the bag. Each one as he entered would ask, 'So what game are you playing?' 'Badger in the Bag', the others would say. And that was the first time that Badger in the Bag was played.

The translator Sioned Davies's footnote doesn't elaborate too much on the rules, explaining it only as "a game which involves tying a man in a bag or sack, then beating and kicking him."

I think we've found the perfect winter sport to play when my summer buck buck league is in its offseason.

Skyler in Alsip writes:
The octodog diagram is somewhat unclear on this: should you cook the hot dog before or after you turn it into an octodog?

We performed an experiment to figure out the solution to this age-old question at my cookout this Fourth of July. The results are below.

Octodogged first and then cooked:

Cooked first and then octodogged:

So, in conclusion, it's simply a matter of personal preference.

"-But ouf! So much esprit has left us quite
Parched for a double shot of corps."

--

"Upstairs, DJ's already at the simmer
Phoning the company. He gets one pair
Of words wrong—means to say "kalorifér"
(Furnace) but out comes "kalokéri" (summer):
Our summer doesn't work, he keeps complaining
While, outside, cats and dogs just keep on raining."

- James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover

(Yeah, the first one's not really a couplet. So sue me!)

On Monday, I caught the opening performance of the Goodman's new production of Karen Zacarías's The Sins of Sor Juana, a fictionalized take on the life of the fascinating 17th century Mexican poet and nun Juana Inés de la Cruz. Juana was a precociously brilliant child, composing poetry by the age of 8 and mastering Latin soon after. As a teenager she entered the court of the viceroy of Mexico City and became highly regarded for both her intellect and her beauty. Juana joined a convent at age 16, presumably to enjoy greater freedom to write than would otherwise be allowed a woman, and produced a significant output of prose and poetry. She kept her cell essentially as a salon, with many frequent visits from leading thinkers in colonial Mexico. She was ultimately punished for writing a letter to a bishop in defense of a woman's right to an education, keeping her from writing again before she died from cholera.

Unfortunately, the character in Zacarías's play is drawn less from the historical Sor Juana and more from a composite of several Disney princesses. She is strong-willed, quick-witted, and endowed with beauty that's just ethnic enough to be appealingly exotic, and is otherwise entirely vapid. From the very beginning, Juana glows in that princessly manner in her white habit and pure American English, surrounded by side characters sporting black clothing and Mexican accents peppering their dialog with plenty of "¡Ay Dios Mio!"s.

Indeed, Zacarías, who has a long résumé of writing for children's theatre, dips into the well of Disney stock characters throughout: the evil, conniving viceroy; his inept sidekick with unrequited love for Juana; the handsome and clever scoundrel who is surprised to find himself falling for the woman he is meant to deceive; the dim-witted but lovable novice; the irreverent but infinitely wise nursemaid, etc. The only real surprise is that none of them are talking animals, which is a shame cause I like animals.

Like a typical children's play, the narrative is frustratingly linear, with hardly a sentence devoted to anything that does not directly facilitate the extremely familiar plot. The Sins of Sor Juana focuses mainly on the poet's days in the court before becoming a nun, feebly attempting to explain why she entered the convent. Zacarías's version involves the viceroy scheming to destroy Juana's reputation by hiring a charming rogue to pose as an aristocrat to seduce her, with the usual results. Considering Juana's radical writing in defense of the rights of women, the suggestion that she needed the lost love of a man as her poetic inspiration becomes borderline offensive.

Despite her rich historical subject matter, Zacarías fails to portray any particular brilliance in Juana, save for her explicit declarations of her own talent, as well as her incredible knack to quote herself in order to win arguments. I find it remarkable that someone like Zacarías can actually devote her life to writing yet find no other way to telegraph a character's artistic passion than through clichéd exclamations of images suddenly flowing through her head in streams that just cannot be stopped, with Juana comically scribbling as quickly as possible for days straight, the poetry being the only thing keeping her alive. It takes just a few minutes of limp seduction before she is head over heels, and she needs only a single compliment about her writing to win her over into becoming a nun. Zacarías magically transforms a fascinating icon of Mexican literature into the worst kind of self-important and vain "poet" this side of undergraduate art school.

The Goodman also continues its baffling practice of importing television actors from New York and Los Angeles at the expense of local talent for the leads, including Tony Plana of Ugly Betty. Though some of the supporting cast performs admirably, particularly Laura Crotte and Joe Miñoso, the lack of chemistry in the out-of-towners doesn't help to justify their casting, though admittedly they have little in the script to work with. It's a frustrating production, as the director Henry Godinez was also behind Boleros for the Disenchanted, the most satisfying production I've seen in years at the Goodman. Instead, it's just another in the list of duds from the biggest and most consistently disappointing theatre in Chicago.

[new york times]