Archive for the ‘Plays’ Category
September 1, 2026
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
August 23, 2026
The ultimate topic here is my sleep patterns, which I will post about more systematically in a while. Here I’m trying to take some of the burden of background material off that posting by stashing it for easy reference later. Picking an item — the revival by Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros — that I also view, in desperation, as carrying an urgent message about today’s sociopolitical climate.
It will start with odd everyday routines of no consequence, but will end with contemplating literal dehumanization, staring evil in the face. I’m touchy on the point, having never fully recovered from the shock of seeing the Nazi death camps exposed when I was a child. And understanding that that could happen to me. (No, I don’t think children should be protected from such knowledge. They should be treasured and supported, as I was, but they should also see the dangers clearly, so that they can arm themselves against them.)
But first, the routines. (If you think I’m just a nutter or a pathetic neurotic in need of professional care, fuck off; it’s none of your business. I’m doing stuff that works for me; why should you care?)
(more…)
Posted in Education, Language and politics, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Plays, Pop culture, Princeton, Sleep, Surrealism, Writing | Leave a Comment »
August 22, 2026
My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
(more…)
Posted in Chemistry, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Music, My life, Myths, Physics, Play, Plays | 3 Comments »
June 3, 2026
On Facebook on 5/28, Bert Vaux reported on responses to a query of his on curtains vs. drapes. On that posting, an incidental comment by Heidi Harley:
Did anyone [among BV’s respondents] mention that you can’t threaten anyone with the utterance, It’s drapes for you! But you can with curtains!
Eliciting a series of responses from me:
(more…)
Posted in Argument structure, Complementation, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language and the body, Metaphor, Plays, Sociolinguistics, Style and register, Syntax | 2 Comments »
October 30, 2025
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.
(more…)
Posted in Books, Music, Plays | 2 Comments »
October 9, 2025
Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:
Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”
If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.
BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.
I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).
But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.
(more…)
Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »
June 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit — the trois lapins inaugurating the month of June, and in the northern temperate zone, devastating young gardens; meanwhile, summer rushes in, as chronicled in a modest way in my posting yesterday, “Withering away, or not” (the cymbidium orchids are rapidly withering away, with only 5 flower stalks still standing at the end of yesterday’s garden work; in contrast, I was thriving)
This morning’s update (I was up at 3:40 and labored steadily on house and garden from 4 to 9, when I started work on this posting): only 2 flower stalks remain (the withered flowers and the long thick stalks have been cut into compostable bits); while I continue to thrive, despite seasonal allergies (one more day of stunningly good morning vitals — blood pressure and pulse rate). Meanwhile, in a kind of compensatory bloom, the big-leaved hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) has three flower heads opening up into bright pinkish-red panicles, the tallest (and reddest) on a stem that now looms over 4 ft from the ground (since the plant’s in a big pot, that flower-ball is now right at my eye level).
And then I got the sweetest compliment from Robert Coren this morning, in a comment on yesterday’s posting that took off from the verb wither in the posting. To which I had a complex response.
(more…)
Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and plants, Metaphor, My life, Plays, Pragmatics, Quotations | 3 Comments »
April 5, 2025
From 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.
(more…)
Posted in Jokes, Language and poitics, Naming, Nicknames, Plays, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
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?).
(more…)
Posted in Language and culture, Language and food, Language and geography, Music, My life, Plays, Translation | 2 Comments »
October 25, 2024
Posted 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)
(more…)
Posted in Figurative language, History, Language and politics, Names, Nicknames, Plays | Leave a Comment »
