In my posting yesterday “Penultimate October”, 10/30 was billed simply as Halloween Eve (with two, more eventful, days to follow). In fact it’s two — two! — occasions in one: Grace Slick’s birthday (1939), and the War of the Worlds broadcast anniversary (1938), 86 and 87 years ago (so GS is just a year older than I am). Very brief notes.
Archive for the ‘Plays’ Category
10/30: not just Halloween Eve
October 30, 2025Foxes, camels, and Jeff the Tongue
April 5, 2025From Jeffrey Golderg the Linguist (not Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist — Jeff the Tongue, not Jeff the Pen) on April 3, passing on a Facebook posting with an old Soviet joke, along with monitory commentary from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder the Historian:
(News note: Snyder, his historian wife Marci Shore, and his philosophy colleague Jason Stanley are all leaving Yale to move to the University of Toronto in the fall)
I’ll comment here briefly on two things: old Soviet jokes, some of them now startlingly applicable to life in the Soviet States of America under President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon; and the naming convention in Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist and Jeff the Tongue.
Goulash, couscous, and herring, oh my!
January 10, 2025(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)
In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:
[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).
Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).
Briefly noted: the new Caligula
October 25, 2024Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.
and then to write on FB:
Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you
the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula
(there are probably more)
Hunky Halloween Hamlet
October 15, 2024From Tim Evanson, on Facebook this morning, his image for 16 days to Halloween:
(#1) Hunky Halloween Hamlet, let’s call him Hunklet, contemplating Peter Pumpkin (who really should have a grinning face carved in him) instead of Yorick’s grinning skull
The Shakespearean context (written as connected text rather than as poetic lines):
(#2) “Here hung those lips that I have kissed” — so Hamlet cries in iambs dread
(though I note that #1 could be read as God — or Zeus / Jupiter — surveying the Earth; everybody sing: “He’s got the whole world in His hands”)
The cartoon glory that was Rome
September 4, 2024In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
Samuel Beckett’s sitcoms
April 23, 2018A literary cartoon by Tom Gauld that came to me (unsourced, but I recognized the style) on Facebook today:
Hybrids between the plays of Samuel Beckett and American tv sitcoms.