Issue 126

News: I have returned from the dead: my experience as a Shakespearean actor.
As you may have noticed, I have not been updating the blog at my usual thrice-monthly schedule. This is because of various factors, the largest of which being that I was on vacation in a place where I had minimal wi-fi, barely getting enough time each week to get caught up with my Adult Swim Video, email my assignments to my English teacher, and compile contemporary reviews of American Psycho for another assignment, and as a result of the 2-week vacation, I was caught up with several things, including doing two-plus weeks' worth of laundry in as little time as possible, and studying for my final for my American Lit course (a substantial portion of which I had to miss for vacation). By now, all these things are more or less finished. But what I want to tell you about now is an interesting experience I had on vacation. First, a bit of exposition: I was vacationing in Door County, and when my family and I visit there, we try to see as many theater shows as possible in the two week period. However, this marks the first time I was drafted into acting in one of them. This time, I was at Door Shakespeare, and the show was Midsummer Night's Dream. I believe that this play, of all of Shakespeare's, may have been the one which I had seen most times in its more or less complete form (versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet abbreviated almost to the point where it's more or less one scene notwithstanding). Indeed, this was the second time I had seen it in this location, but I didn't imagine what would happen. In the last act of the play, after Bottom had returned to human form and completely disregarded his affair with Titania as a dream, I was pulled from the audience and added as an impromptu member of the troupe within the troupe, as much as my attire of Woody Allen glasses, fisherman's cap, lumberjack shirt over Obama T-shirt, and Jeans would have been out of place with the cast who had apparently been trying to look historically accurate. All I had to do was follow the directions when I was told to, and I even was given one line: "Yes." Of course, this scene took some liberties with its original sources (notably, the Pyramus and Thisbee play-within-a-play ran much shorter than I had expected), and much of the action I did wasn't even in the original script version of the play. However, at least the director of the theatre troupe, after the end of the play, thanked me for helping with the performance. I told him that I only regretted that I wasn't drafted into the catfight scene in Act IV.

Band Name of the day: The Running of the Strange People. We were watching parts of the Wimbledon tournament in the bar, and at one point there were people running in slow-motion dragging the tarp, and not knowing what to make of it, my mother called it "The Running of the Strange People." For once I actually have a band name.

Film Idea of the Day: Nothing this week.

Film Review of the Day: The Dark Knight. The movie was quite possibly the best movie of Batman I've ever seen since the 1966 West/Ward film version. Of course, this certainly blows its predecessor Batman Begins out of the water, noticeably by using characters that the audience is likely to be familiar with (like the Joker and Two-Face) as opposed to characters who'll need to be researched on Wikipedia (like Ra's al Ghul or Scarecrow). Indeed, Heath Ledger's ACO-inspired Joker effectively blows every other past portrayal of the character out of the Water, including Cesar Romero, and the decision to cast Christian Bale as Batman (His version of Batman will hereafter referred to as Bat(e)man to me) felt unusual to me for reasons which can be inferred to by anybody who's read the article carefully enough, but he was more capable than Val Kilmer. The only real flaw with this movie is that it has apparently upset the balance of IMDb for reasons which become abundantly clear when you see the Top 250.

Quote of the Day: "That which does not kill me makes me stranger"
____________Joker, (Heath Ledger)

Link of the day: Just pick the genre, the decades, and your current mood, and get an interesting webplaylist.

Issue 125

News: From Judy to J.D.
My Name is Derekaxe and I am a Wikiholic. I have been using wikipedia for roughly four or five years, and currently spend a few hours every day surfing it from page to page. It is probably the only place where a person can go from reading about Martin Bohrmann to Winnie-the-Pooh in three easy steps, the only intervening pages being Argentina and Latin. Here is an example of this, as I logged a few days ago: Judy Garland is a widely-recognized gay idol, as was Julie Andrews. One of Julie's more obscure early roles (certainly in comparison to her roles as Maria Von Trapp, Mary Poppins, and Victor/Victoria) was as Gertrude Lawrence. One of Lawrence's most famous roles was in a musical by Kurt Weill, who wrote many musicals including the Threepenny Opera, and Johnny Johnson, based on The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk happened to be one of the earliest anti-war works of literature, preceded only by parts of The Red Badge of Courage. The Red Badge of Courage was later made into a film starring Audie Murphy, a famous soldier/actor who developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The change in names from "Shell Shock" to "PTSD" was chronicled in a comedy routine by George Carlin, whose comedy was often Misanthropic, a side effect of which is often reclusiveness, a quality which J.D. Salinger was infamous for.

Band Name of the Day: From Judy to J.D. sounds good again.

Film Idea of the Day: The Princess and the Powder. A princess from a small European monarchy visiting Chicago runs off with a journalist, and they tour the city, fall in love, and do every drug known to man and some of the larger primates.

Film Review of the Day: Blackboard Jungle. This film is about the trials and tribulations of a teacher trying to teach a bunch of unruly inner-city teacher, starting up an entire subgenre of films with varying degrees of schmaltziness and much of the same plot. Of course, despite this, this film is very gritty even today, and one can only imagine what it must have been like for audiences in 1955.

Quote of the Day: "He was a revolutionary, and a black man!" (unnecessary comma, apparently spoken by Ray Charles)
"I believe he was Buddha's Cousin"
"Jesus, the guy who was in a lot of movies"
"Didn't they cut off His head at a party? No Stupid! that was Jonah. Jesus wrote Bibles" (necessary comma omitted, and sentence starts with a lowercase letter.)
________Some answers to "Who is Jesus?" according to Jack Chick in his latest tract, although I'm sure that only the first one is held by actual people.

Link of the Day: Six Degrees of Wikipedia (If only I could have known that the only link I needed between Judy to J.D. was the article on Pleurisy).

Tract review: Who is He? This is simply another of Jack's "Christianity in a Nutshell" tracts which happen to not be too controversial or even have a story, although some peoples' answers to the question "Who is Jesus" in the tract are particularly bizarre.