A tale blogged by an idiot

I knew we didn't know much about William Shakespeare's life, but before reading Bill Bryson's Shakespeare, I didn't realize just how miraculous it is that we know much of anything at all. 
The things we know for sure about the Bard are few and mundane. We know when he was baptized (though not when he was born). We know that he married Anne Hathaway, although it's possible her name was actually Agnes. We know that his theatre was called The Globe, but we have no drawings or illustrations of the inside, and we only glimpse the outside in drawings that may or may not have been made by people who had ever seen the place in person.
We don't even have much of an idea of what the man himself looked like. The engraving from his first folio was created after his death by an artist who had never met him and was probably working from a now-lost painting.

We have two portraits that probably were painted during Shakespeare's life, but only might be him - the clothing and facial hair would have been quite common among men of Shakespeare's station. And don't hold out for a forensic reconstruction - although we do know where the old guy's bones lie, archaeologists recently scanned his grave and discovered his head is kind of missing, probably the work of 18th century grave robbers. Or somebody looking to do a epic rendition of Hamlet. 
At yet, according to scholars, we know more about William Shakespeare than almost any other non-royal of the era. Amateur and scholar alike have searched through mountains of barely legible public records to find a handful of signatures (all in the same hand, but each spelled a different way), some passing mentions in legal disputes, birth and baptism and death records of a few of his family members. 
Yet these glimpses of the man's public life offer us no insight into the man he was. We don't know if his marriage was happy; if he was a loving father or a faithful son. We don't know if he was as witty in person as he was on paper. We don't know whether he believed in God, was kind to animals, or respected his conquests in the morning. And yet, we have his plays. And maybe it is unreasonable to ask for more than that.   

What does the fox say?

Do you know the origin of the expression sour grapes? It was hot and Fox was hungry. Hanging from a vine high overhead was a cluster of the juiciest of grapes Fox had ever seen glistening in the afternoon sun. Fox stood on his hind legs and grasped for the grapes, but they were out of reach. Fox jumped, but the grapes again eluded him. Finally Fox trotted away then took a running leap, but fell just short. Fox gave up with his nose in the air, griping, "I'm sure they were sour anyway."
Today, those who do not reach the grapes they want might declare them the fruits of political correctness instead.
Folks who -definitely- aren't racist are super livid about the Treasury's decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. It's just that they're sick of the culture of political correctness that drives these decisions. They don't realize that what they're really saying is that no woman, no African American in the 240 year history of our nation has ever done anything to be worthy to appear on money. 
When you claim that political correctness is the only way for a black woman to earn her way onto the $20 bill, you must also be saying that no woman, no person of color, has ever contributed enough to our nation to be recognized in this way.

By the way, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, forcing tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands along the Trail of Tears, on which ten thousand Native Americans died from exposure, disease, and hunger. Jackson owned over a hundred slaves and straight up murdered a dude for talking smack about Jackson's wife. Really, this guy is more worthy of being on money than Harriet Tubman? Really? 

Pluck Yew

Mr. Rogers cracking up as he leads
some kids in Where Is Thumbkin

Many years ago, I was shoveling my folks' driveway after a big juicy snowstorm. As I stood near the end of the driveway, a car came careening down the street far too fast, considering, and nearly hit me. Enraged, I flipped him the bird, a gesture that would have had more impact had I not been wearing mittens.
The one-finger salute, a favorite among punk rockers and driving enthusiasts, is an obscene gesture meant to represent... penetrating someone with a teeny tiny weenie or something. According to Snopes and Mental Floss, no one is exactly sure where the gesture was born, but it's way older than I would have thought. According to Mental Floss, the gesture was a favorite of Caligula, who liked to make his enemies kiss his middle finger, but considering Caligula's proclivities, having to kiss dude's middle finger was getting off easy. 

If you're ever in Turkey, it would be best not to play I've Got Your Nose with the locals - the gesture, known as the fig, is only "mildly obscene," according to Wikipedia, and generally means bugger off. Fig in this sense appears to be etymologically unrelated to the sex act known as figging, which I'm neither going to describe nor present the etymology of. Oh, I know the etymology, but, you know, my mom's reading this. Hi Mom.
In American sign language, this gesture isn't rude at all - it's the letter T. Twist your fist and it means toilet. Dante wants you to know that it is not acceptable to give God a fig. When a dude did so in The Inferno, he got strangled and gagged by some snakes. Been there done that, I tell ya. In ancient Greece, the gesture was used to ward off the evil eye.
And speaking of the evil eye, let's talk about throwing the horns, a gesture once synonymous with heavy metal and now, well...

During the Satanic panic, it was thought to represent devil horns, or the number 666... somehow. However, to the metal singer who popularized the gesture, Ronnie James Dio, it meant no such thing. He picked up the gesture from his Italian grandma who used it to ward off the evil eye. (Special thanks to Tony for bringing this to my attention).
The evil eye, by the way, is when someone curses you by looking at you funny. According to Wikipedia, a ton of cultures all over the world believe or believed in the evil eye. Different cultures have different names for it, but my favorite is the Hawaiian maka pilau, which translates loosely to stink eye. 

But let's wander back to the old devil horn gesture. This, too, has lots of different meanings. It wards off the evil eye, of course. It can mean bullshit, I guess because bulls have finger horns? Another creature with finger horns: a guy who's been cheated on, of course. In old timey Europe and current timey Italy, the gesture is used to indicate a guy's wife has been unfaithful. Wikipedia says that it's a reference to the mating habits of stags. The term cuckold, by the way, comes from the child-rearing habits of cuckoo birds (or lack thereof). Many types of cuckoo birds will sneak into other species of bird's nests and lay their own eggs. The other bird comes back to her nest and doesn't notice a thing... until the cuckoo hatches and systematically murders all the other birdies because seriously, nature? Seriously? So a cuckold is a dude whose wife has someone else's bun in the oven, so to speak. 

Shh

As long as we're talking about folks we never see, we might as well talk about folks we never hear. Well, whose voices we never hear, anyway. And what better place than a blog about words for tales of characters who don’t say any? 
So, silent characters go way back to the mimes of ancient Greece, though silent characters have always played a large role in traditional Japanese theater. Silent characters were often featured in the Commedia dell’arte of the 16th through 18th century, in which acting troupes rolled around the countryside, putting on shows in town squares – heavy on the action, light on the dialogue. 
In the early days of Hollywood, Buster Keaton carried out this proud tradition, albeit by necessity. Buster Keaton plays the bungling oaf so well that it’s easy not to notice the way that each stumble and bungle is performed with perfect precision. Watch enough of his films and you’ll notice that the world around him seems to conspire to keep him safe – that he defies death poker faced because he simply knows that the universe will look after him. His childhood may have had a lot to do with that. According to busterkeaton.com, Keaton nearly suffocated to death when he was only a few months old – his parents, Vaudevillian performers, had left him back stage at a show and he’d gotten locked in a costume trunk. A few years later, according to a story that may well be too perfect to be true, a cyclone sucked him out of the open window he was sitting near and deposited him, perfectly unharmed, in the yard of a neighbor several feet away. 

In real life, sorta, there's the mononymous Teller, half of the duo Penn & Teller. He started performing in silence, according to Wikipedia, because it made for less heckling early in his career. The no talking thing eventually became his thing, and now he rarely speaks in public (though there are those who would suggest that Teller just hasn't let him get a word in for the past 40 years).
Which is kind of too bad. The guy’s a freaking genius – literally. He’s one of the world’s foremost authorities on Harry Houdini, and he’s even appeared in documentaries about the guy, albeit with his features obscured like he’s in the witness protection program. Teller’s also a fellow at the Cato institute and has been co-author on a study in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience.
 They say everybody hates a mime, but that’s not really true. What’s Snoopy if not a mime? Or Harpo Marx (who – fun fact - didn’t actually learn how to play the harp until pretty late in his career). There’s Mr. Bean, Daryl, Daryl, the Stig, and so on. Maybe it's the makeup. 

Conspicuously absent

My husband, as you may know, is not such a fan of social interaction. Or leaving the house. Or really anything involving other human beings. So it's no wonder that some folks accuse him of being a figment of my imagination.
My husband's an example of an unseen character, and such characters abound on stage and screen.
There's Godot, of course, the never-seen subject of the play Waiting for Godot. I managed to major in theater and then later in English without reading, or being assigned to read this play, so I'm taking that as a sign. I did, however, see Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman, though, which my gut tells me is probably just as good.

One real-life Godot is street artist and subtlety eschewer Banksy.

Girl seized by an ATM, attributed to Banksy,
Rosebery Avenue, London. Photo: Bengt Oberger

Banksy has, at various times, claimed that he remains anonymous because graffiti is illegal, because "the art world is the biggest joke going," and has said of his work that he can't believe the morons who would pay money for-- hang on a sec - George Lucas, is that you?

Lucas hates this, but is sure the fans will love it.

Returning to the land of make-believe, television's littered with women who aren't there. On Cheers, Norm's wife Vera was the subject of many jokes, but was never seen. Niles' wife Maris on Frasier was perpetually just out of frame. Colombo's wife rounds out the Missing Spouses Club. In one episode, Columbo's wife couldn't attend a social event because she was under the weather. In another, she was caring for her skateboarding mother. The closest we ever come to meeting her is a 1991 episode in which "she was here a minute ago." 
In cartoons, adults are often conspicuously absent, like the parents in most of the Charlie Brown cartoons. The humans in the Tom and Jerry cartoons are only shown from behind, I'm assuming because their psychotic pets ripped their faces off in an effort to murder one another. But perhaps most disturbing of all is Nanny from The Muppet Babies. We only see Nanny from her stripe-stocking-clad knees down, and only in a few episodes. And you have to wonder, how did she come to be in charge of all those Muppets? Surely she didn't give birth to them all, leading one to wonder where in the hell she got them. And why would she adopt a litter of puppet people only to leave them all unattended for hours at a time in a giant nursery that inexplicably had only two cribs? And why weren't we allowed to see her face, exactly? The eighties were troubling times.

If you think this is terribly done
you should see what it
looked like when I tried
to shop his head onto her body.

Gifted

A couple of weeks ago, Great Britain made the worst taxonimic decision since the invention of spotted dick: they let the Internet name a boat. A British government agency is building a massive polar research ship and thought hey, we should let the Internet name it. 

As you have probably heard, netizens crashed the agency's website in their rush to cast their vote for the name Boaty McBoatface. 

They really walked into that one. Just the other day I said to Jeremy, "They're lucky they're not trying to name it HMS Hitler Did Nothing Wrong."

Enter Tay, Microsoft's latest disaster. Tay is an online bot designed to learn how to converse with people through online interaction. But Microsoft's efforts backfired - after just 24 hours Tay had turned into a violent, genocidal racist. One of her tweets: "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong."

Editorials worried about the state of the world and all of that. But it's not so much the state of the world as the state of a relatively small group of very dedicated assholes. And Microsoft should have seen it coming.

So there's this website called 4chan. I am not including a link because you should never ever go there. Back in 2003, 4chan founder Christopher Poole wanted to see what would happen if there were an online forum with no rules at all where everyone could post anonymously. Turns out, what you get is what the comic Penny Arcade calls the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or GIFT. The theory is this: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad. Some kind of cool things have come out of 4chan, like most of your favorite memes. But a whole lot of unholy has come out of there too.

There are plenty of perfectly lovely people on 4Chan. Users have tracked down and reported criminals, especially animal abusers. It's also where Anonymous was formed - they're kind of like a mob of chimps with flamethrowers that are occasionally pointed in the right direction, so that's a mixed blessing, I guess. 

Many of the people on 4chan are obnoxious adolescents, either literally or figuratively. And they enjoy playing infantile pranks. At first, the pranks were innocent and mostly pulled on each other - Rickrolling for example. Then there were the prank phone calls - like getting everybody to call a specific Game Stop asking for the game Battle Toads, because that's entertaining for some reason. This naturally lead to people Battle-Toading individuals by posting the phone number of a person they didn't like and claiming it was a Game Stop. 

The pranks kept getting uglier and affecting more people. They started a Steve Jobs death hoax that caused Apple stock to plummet. They doxed and so severely harassed an 11-year-old that she had to be placed under police protection. They hacked a bunch of celebrities' phones and shared their private photos. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. 

So their hijacking of online polls is actually fairly mild by comparison. A few years back Mountain Dew asked Internet users to propose and vote for names for a new flavor they were unrolling. Top results included Diabeetus, Fapple (don't ask) and of course, Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.

What's weird is that few of the kids who participate in these pranks are actually Neo-Nazis or Hitler fans. They do it for the shock value and because they think it's funny. I actually know 4Chan users who are minorities and actually participate in this awfulness. 

None of which makes it any better. But it is a little reassuring to know that Tay didn't turn into Donald Trump because the Internet in general is racist, but because of the concentrated efforts of a bunch of losers with a really messed up understanding of comedy. 

What really distrubs me is that Microsoft failed to foresee this. I mean, aren't they supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful? How could they not build in a filter that makes Tay unable to use racial slurs or talk about Hitler? It's baffling. 

Rosebud

It feels like I've been seeing more than the usual amount of editorials about how horrible Millennials are, what with the texting and the emailing and the bringing about of the downfall of western civilization and stuff. Millennials are spoiled and vain and overdependent on their parents and probably behead kittens in their free time. Why, they bring their parents along on job interviews! according to a much-cited but little-scrutinized study.*
I have never understood how anyone with a mind can think it's possible to paint an entire generation with the same broad brush. But let's back up and talk a bit about what folks mean when they say Millennial. A Millennial, depending on who you ask, is a person born between 1980 and 2000. Making my husband indistinguishable from a teenager, apparently (so that's why he keeps refusing to do his chores!). Before Millennials came Generation X (1960s-1980), Baby Boomers (1946-1960s), the Silent Generation (1925-1942), and the Greatest Generation (1900-1925 or so). 
Now, according to a billion op-ed pieces, Millennials are officially The Worst. Sometimes called the selfie generation, these young hooligans are entitled and spoiled, made to think they're special snowflakes by their helicopter parents. The first bit of irony here is that most of these pieces are penned by Boomers and Gen-Xers, the folks who produced and raised these monsters, but apparently bear no responsibility for them. But it gets even less rational from there.
See, over half of our military - you know, the people fighting and dying for our country, are selfish, shallow Millennials. Millennials comprise well more than half our military casualties. Agree with US military actions or not, those impudent children risk their lives for their country every day, which is a hell of a lot more than this aging Gen-Xer has done.

And then there are those dreadful snots at the University of Central Florida who designed a robotic arm using $350 worth of supplies and a 3D printer. And gave it to a six-year-old for free. Proving that they live their entire lives on that blasted Internet, they made the plans available online for free. Now, like mindless sheep, Millennials all over the country are making free prosthetic limbs for kids from their dorm rooms or their parents' basements. Leave it to a generation of freeloaders to give limbs to a bunch of freeloading kids. 
I get that some Millennials really are The Worst, just like some Gen Xers are and some Boomers are and even some of the Greatest Generation are (Bugsy Siegal springs to mind). And the duck face selfies are beyond annoying. And don't even get me started on man buns. Seriously.

I wonder whether folks' disdain for Millennials, like old folks' disdain for young folks since forever, isn't just envy. I mean, I know I'm jealous of those kids, with their working digestive systems and discernible waistlines their dazzling futures. Maybe Boomers trash Millennials' relationships with their folks because it's easier than admitting they should have mended fences with their dads before it was too late, or that they'd give anything in the world just to hear their moms' voices one more time. Maybe Gen Xers hate Millennials because we hate that they aren't drowning in regret over what they could have been and what they'll never be. Maybe the Silent Generation's pissed off because Millennials' toy collections are way cooler than their own collections of mid-century milk glass. Maybe these diatribes are nothing more than really wordy ways to say that youth is wasted on the young. 

*Addecco, a consulting company, released a press release proclaiming this, but have denied requests to share their research methods. The company claims that 3% of Millennials bring their folks into the interview room, but admit the study's margin-of-error is 4%, making the number basically indistinguishable from zero.

Out of context

So a lot of famous quotations take on a completely different meaning when you look at them in context. Take the famous quotation from the book of Ruth - you know, the one read at every wedding ever:

Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, but death part thee and me.

 This is sort of an ironic selection for weddings, as these words are spoken right after Ruth's marriage has been by death parted. They're actually spoken from Ruth to Naomi, her mother-in-law. Jeremy and I still used it at our wedding, mind you. We kind of figured we'd already decided to spend our lives together long before, and getting married was really about joining each other's families. Or I figured that, really, and Jeremy went along because he was done with planning a wedding.
When it comes to having quotations taken out of context, Shakespeare's probably the king. I always find it so weird when people equate romance with Romeo and Juliet. Mutual suicide isn't many people's idea of a great date night. 
You've probably seen the inspirational Shakespeare quotation "Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them." This comes from Twelfth Night, and it's meant as a joke. See, Malvolio is a servant in the house of Olivia, and he has a crush on the boss lady almost as big as the giant stick up his ass. A couple of members of Olivia's household decide to play a prank on Malvolio, counterfeiting a love letter from Olivia to Malvolio. The words are meant to puff up his ego, the better to humiliate him later. And the "greatness thrust upon them" bit was meant as a double entendre.
Some of Shakespeare's most famous words of wisdom come from Hamlet. "Neither a borrower or a lender be," and "the apparel oft claims the man," and of course "This above all else: to thine own self be true." But the guy who speaks those words, Polonius, is kind of a weenie. Though Polonius is an adviser to the king, most characters see him as, in Hamlet's words, a "tedious old fool." He's always going about spewing his canned wisdom and generally being a busybody. The poor guy gets maybe the most undignified death in all of Shakespeare - he gets stabbed when caught creeping on the queen and Hamlet in her bedroom.
Finally, let's talk Ben Franklin. Most of the time, when people quote Ben Franklin, they quote the little aphorisms found in Poor Richard's Almanac. The advice is staid and puritan - "early to be and early to rise," and "Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today," and "A penny saved is a penny earned." But Franklin's life was anything but staid and puritan. He had affairs, wrote a letter to a friend about how to choose a mistress (which included a suggestion to woo an older woman so you don't have to worry about getting her knocked up), and exhorted his friends to "fart proudly."
Turns out, what many don't know is that the views in Poor Richard's Almanac don't necessarily reflect the views of the author. When Franklin laid out a page of the almanac and found he had a little space left over, he'd fill that space with some little saying or witticism. He made some of those nuggets up himself, but many were proverbs that were already in popular use when he wrote them. These quotations, then, aren't so much Franklin's words of wisdom as Franklin's words to fill white space.

Excerpt from a commencement address by Alan Alda at
Connecticut College, on the day of her graduation.

The one that got away

Peter Segal is a writer, director, and NPR personality. Back in the 90s, Peter Segal wrote a screenplay called Cuba Mine, a love story set against the backdrop of the revolution. A studio purchased the script, but thought, according to Segal "Well, you know, today's audience doesn't want to see a lot of politics and an elaborate discussion of the flaws of the Batista regime. They want dancing and sexy fun." So the studio cut out all bits about politics and replaced them with dancing, and called the film Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Segal's pretty good-natured about the whole thing.

George Lucas, not so much. Lucas managed to squeeze out three amazing Star Wars movies before it all collapsed under the crushing weight of his massive ego. Lucas was openly disdainful of fans who hated his re-releases of the original films and flat-out refused to allow the unedited originals to be released on DVD. And when fans hated the prequels, he blamed the fans for their lack of taste. So it should come as no surprise that when Disney and JJ Abrams resurrected the series with a wildly popular 7th installment, George Lucas hated it. In an interview, Lucas complained he'd sold the film to "white slavers" but conceded, disdainfully, that fans were sure to love it. Then he blew his nose with a wad of $1,000 bills courtesy of said fans and was carried, sobbing, out of the room in his titanium sedan chair.

When it comes to film adaptations, Stephen King's work has seen some big winners and some spectacular losers.

The Langoliers
or Attack of the Flying Vaginas
or The Monster That Ate Bronson Pinchot's Career

Given that his Sometimes They Comeback... Again is the only film I've ever seen to score a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 0%, you may be surprised that there's only one movie he says he really hates: The Shining. For a young Stephen King, having the great Stanley Kubrick show an interest in adapting King's third novel must have seemed like a dream. But the happy haze didn't last long. Kubrick hated King's version of the screenplay and made sure King and everybody else knew it. He decided rewrite the screenplay himself, and rewrite he did, over and over and over again. Though the plot remained largely the same, the characters were drastically different, and that's King's beef. In a BBC interview, King said "Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she's basically just there to scream and be stupid and that's not the woman that I wrote about." And screaming stupidity was exactly what Kubrick had been going for. Kubrick was a horrible bully to Shelly Duvall, criticizing her harshly and forbidding the cast and crew from showing her kindness or sympathy. He made her film scenes over and over so that Duvall was overcome with exhaustion and had to drink tons of water because she was literally dehydrated from crying. By the time the film was over, Duvall was losing her hair in clumps and had become seriously ill. 

That's one upside to being a technical writer - you don't tend to get emotionally attached the the stuff you make. The downside, of course, is that you don't ever get to do anything worth feeling emotions over. 

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

I don't know what to tell people about Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The first few books of the 8 book series are great, and then the last few are just weird. Like, Salvador Dali's fever dream meets the last season of Lost meets that one John Ritter movie where he gets stuck in Satan's television weird.
And yet for me, and for millions of other Tower fans, it is so much more than the sum of its words. King has written things that are more clever, more entertaining, and more coherent; but he has never written anything more meaningful. 
I have serious misgivings about Sony's upcoming film adaptation. I can't even imagine how they're going to cram all eight crazy books into one 2-hour mainstream movie. What I do not have are grave misgivings about the film's star. Roland Deschain is a great character and epic badass Idris Elba is the perfect actor to play him.

On social media, a whole lot of Tower fans do have grave misgivings - about the color of Elba's skin. They're not racist, of course, it's just that having a black guy play a character who was originally written as white is blasphemy. Blasphemy is getting thrown around a lot. Filmmakers are "reverse racist" for taking a white man's job and giving it to a black man, and anybody who thinks different is just playing the "race card."

People who claim to love the books but are okay with this travesty aren't real fans at all (Stephen King must really hate these books since he's been on Team Elba since before the casting decision was final).
I wish I could understand these people on any level so I could explain to them why they're idiots. But I just don't. I get that they really, really believe they're not racist. But does any one of them throw a social media tantrum every time they cast another white guy as Jesus? Hell, people were mad that one time an Arab guy wrote a book about Jesus.

No fair! I'm not racist, I just hate Muslims!

And to think that giving a white character's role to a person of color is unfair requires you to pretty willfully ignore the fact that by every possible measure, actors of color are dramatically underrepresented in film and on TV. When the racial demographics on movie screens begin to approach the racial demographics of our nation, then we can start worrying about roles for white guys. 
I also don't get people who think that a film adaptation should, or even could be identical to the books. I got news for you, kiddies - 8 books ain't gonna fit in 2 hours and they're going to be changing a hell of a lot more than one character's skin color. Plus, nobody is complaining about Matthew McConaughey being cast as the man in black, even though McConaughey is clearly not a trans-dimensional warlock. They're probably going to have to scrap the battle with the Dr. Doom robots for copyright reasons, and it's almost certain Charlie the Choo Choo will not be played by an actual sentient evil train. You want an experience identical to reading the books, go read the books again.

Luckily, I have a solution for all the folks who just can't get past the skin thing. As you know, the books involve a lot of hopping between dimensions. So you can just pretend that this book is set in an alternate reality where Roland is black and you're not a racist crybaby. 

Quotation from The Gunslinger
Photo definitely not taken outside the Merry-Go-Round Museum.