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The More You Know...

Making Shakespeare understandable with common household items, a tabletop, and good storytelling

Reading Shakespeare is torture. He wrote in verse, in 16th-century English, for a 16th-century audience whose only other entertainment options were bear-baiting and public executions.

Cover of CliffsNotes for MacbethThat’s why there’s an entire industry devoted to deciphering his Elizabethan gibberish. Having gone to high school in Toronto, my fellow students — which included Keanu Reeves, who was a couple of years ahead of me — relied on Coles Notes, the Canadian equivalent of CliffsNotes.

Today’s high school students have it a little easier. Each of his plays has at least a dozen performances on YouTube (an example: Titus Andronicus, performed by the Seoul Shakespeare Company — and yes, that’s Seoul as in South Korea) and dozens of explainer pages.

Because you are a reader of this blog, you are an erudite, sophisticated person, and recognized this scene immediately.

One of the newer Shakespeare resources to appear is ForcedEntertainment, a group of six artists based in Sheffield. They’ve decided to tell the stories in all of Shakepeare’s plays, aided only by household items on their tabletops.

So far, they’ve done:

One of the “Dating Game” scenes from this play.

The next plays in their series will be:

The closing scene.

I’ll be teaching programming for the rest of the year, and may have to steal a few tricks from these people.

Categories
funny The Current Situation

I call this a “butt and switch”

Sign on pylon: “COVID testing in the rear”, with caption “Wait a minute — You told me it was a nasal swab!”

Thanks to Ramon Grajo for the find!

Categories
Geek

The truth about “Dune”

Two-panel meme. Panel 1: The science station on the USS Enterprise-D bridge with Data, LaForge, and Riker asking “Computer, who are the good guys in Dune?” Panel 2: The Enterprise explodes.

[ Found via the Star Trek Shitposting Facebook group ]

Categories
America The Current Situation

65 years later [Updated]

Photo: 1. Emmett Till — September 23rd 1955: Emmett Till’s murderers are acquitted / 2. Breonna Taylor — September 23rd 2020: Emmett Till’s murderers are acquitted.

And in case you need a refresher, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Emmett Till.

Update

A lawyer friend informs me:

There was no acquittal in the Breonna Taylor situation: a refusal to charge for murder, yes, but there were charges that are going to trial. Yesterday was the Grand Jury’s charging decision. If it was a no knock warrant, executed lawfully, that may be the correct charging decision. But whether the no knock warrant should have been issued is a different question.

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The Current Situation

“Hippie cat / Hip — pie — cat / How are they dosing you?”

There’s one bag left at the Seminole Heights Publix clearance counter.

[ Don’t get the title? It’s a Friends reference, and yes, there’s a Wikipedia entry for Smelly Cat. ]

 

Categories
Tampa Bay The Current Situation

Scenes from this morning’s bike ride

The temperature at the END of the bike ride. It was a shade cooler than this when I was biking.

The weather must’ve been aware of the calendar, because it got autumn-like — well, what passes for autumn here in Tampa, anyway — all of a sudden.

It was also a nice day to try on the new UV-protective shirt that Anitra got for me:

I try to do a 10K ride as often as I can. I typically manage to do so five times a week on average.

I do this by using it as my podcast/audiobook listening time. I don’t listen via headphones; instead, I clip onto my backpack’s right shoulder strap (you can see the Otterbox clip in the photo above, complete with rubber band backup).

I do groceries on my bike trips, which gives me yet another reason to hop on the bike.

I also benefit from the scenery in Seminole Heights, which is surrounded on three sides by the Hillsborough River (it takes an upside-down U-shaped path through the neighbourhood, going north, then west, then south). There’s a number of pocket parks here, including this one:

And just to remind you that you’re in Florida, there’s a “Warning: Alligators” sign…

Categories
America Florida The Current Situation

It’s National Voter Registration Day in the U.S.!

Here in the U.S., it’s National Voter Registration Day. First observed in 2012, it’s a day designated for reminding U.S. citizens to register to vote.

In this blog entry, I’m going to point to a couple of people who are helping the democratic process.

BetterKnowABallot.com by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Voting in the U.S. can be confusing because the systems and rules aren’t organized federally, but by state. In order to help alleviate this problem and be interesting, late-night TV show host Stephen Colbert and his team have put together BetterKnowABallot.com, a site that explains how to register to vote, vote by mail and vote in person based on your state’s specific laws.

Here’s Colbert explaining what it’s all about:

Find out more at BetterKnowABallot.com.

If you’re in my home state of Florida, the deadline to register to vote is Monday, October 5.

You can also request a vote-by-mail ballot, the deadline for which is Saturday, October 24:

Michael Bloomberg and company pay Florida felons’ poll tax

If you’ve never seen John Oliver’s piece on felony disenfranchisement on Last Week Tonight back in September 2018, here it is:

The piece was focused on Florida (yup, where I live), where 1.5 million citizens — nearly 10% of the adult population — have completed sentences for felony convictions but still can’t vote.

Nearly 1 in 5 black adults is disenfranchised from voting.

In the 2018 midterm elections, Florida voters approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights in the state for people previously convicted of felonies, with the notable exception of those who were convicted of murder or sex crimes. It’s fair — if you’ve paid your debt to society, you should be able to vote.

Florida’s governor — Ron “DipShantis” DeSantis, who hews very closely to Trump — has been fighting this tooth and nail. His most effective action was to add on a requirement that felons could have their voting right restored if and only if they pay all fines, fees and restitution.

According to Politico:

Florida’s voter registration deadline is Oct. 5 and as many as 775,000 felons may have outstanding court debts — which include fines, fees and restitution — that preclude them from registering under the law passed last year by the Republican-controlled state Legislature.

This is nothing more than a poll tax, a trick that goes back to before the turn of the previous century, as a way of keeping black people from voting in southern states. Otherwise, there’d be laws that required you to pay off any outstanding taxes and traffic violation tickets in order to be able to vote.

To help right this wrong, Michael Bloomberg — for whom this is poker night money — and other people have raised $16 million to pay those outstanding fines and help restore those voting rights.