Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:51 AM

Google on Muppet Shakespeare. This page is the very first hit -- this entry, to be specific. I only posted that three days ago!

I remember attending a lecture by the Google founders at MIT a few years back, where they said they spidered the web every two weeks or so, and updated their indices maybe once a month. I know computerization has accellerated events, but this is nearly ridiculous.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:01 PM

Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man column:

There is less "real" violence (as opposed to CGI fantasy violence) in movies today than in the 1970s -- and a lot less sex and nudity. At the same time, I have the subjective sense that the ratings system has become more permissive or porous. The studios put enormous pressure on the MPAA to give them ratings that maximize their audiences. The NC-17 rating was the first victim, and now the studios are avoiding the R.

I agree with the Harvard study that there is now more violence and profanity in PG-13 movies. A long-term result of this trend may be a loss of serious content for adults, as more movies position themselves for the desirable teenage boy market.

Can I just say how wrong it is to see ads for Alien vs. Predator and discover it has a PG-13 rating? Particularly since all the original films in both series were rated R.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:01 PM

Okay, I've seen this personal account twice among my LJ friends, so here's hoping the story spreads to the blogosphere beyond. The author is a New Jersey resident.

This morning, they're doing bag searches again to get on the ferry. And the guy doing the searches pulls me aside and says, "Sir, I feel that I need to confiscate this book."
I pause and say, in that tone of voice that most people would recognize as meaning, "have you lost your grip completely, chuckles?": "You need to confiscate... a book."
"Yes. I feel it's inappropriate for the other people on the ferry to be exposed to it."
Now, I had the book IN MY BAG. It was not open. And while the Maiden of the Mirthless Smile is displayed as improbably proportioned, well, this is not, as far as I know, illegal to have. I mean, there was a guy carrying a copy of Maxim, and some of the women in THAT are improbably proportion. (All right, I admit: they're not wielding a huge sword and dressed in a bustier studded with human finger bones. But really.)

The incident goes on, and the security officer (whether police or private) eventually backed down and let him board, but things have gone too far when officials spout nonsense like this:

He gets all pissy at me and says, "Don't you understand this is for your safety?"
"Confiscating someone's gun or bomb is for my safety. PErhaps confiscating someone's pocketknife or nailfile may be for my safety. What's so damn dangerous about my book?"
"It's INAPPROPRIATE!"
"That's NOT YOUR DECISION! I could be carrying a copy of Hustler in here, and it's STILL not your decision! You're looking for bombs and knifes and guns and things that hurt people, and a book that is IN MY BAG is not going to leap out of its own damn accord and HIT SOMEONE!"

And the convention in NYC hasn't even started yet. What is this world coming to? And how do we reverse direction?

Added later: Why did nobody think of this sooner? One of the commenters to the above account is creating and selling tote bags with the fourth amendment printed right on them. Clever!

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:35 PM

And this kind of thing is why I decided to refer to the period as "Shakespearean" rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean in my earlier post. From The Friendly Shakespeare about the Porter scene:

"Equivocator" had an explosive meaning for the Elizabethans, specifically alluding to the Gunpowder Plot...

Um, no. The Gunpowder Plot happened during James' reign, after Elizabeth was dead. So the term might've had that resonance to Jacobeans, but not to Elizabethans.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 PM

Bad news: my throat has gotten so sore that it hurts to swallow food. [Feels like there's a lump in the back of my throat.]

Good news: Just to show that I do read your comments, I'm currently reading Friendly Shakespeare, borrowed from the library. I should say, I'm trying to read it straight through, but it's too much fun just skipping around looking for juicy quotes and fun tidbits. We also checked out the DVD of Ian McKellan's Richard III, considering two very funny works (Jasper Fforde's Eyre Affair and Michael Anderson's Freestyle Shakespeare) both treat it as great comedy, I felt I had to see it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:31 AM

Because people have asked, casting Shakespeare with Muppets:

First, a couple general rules:

The only play we cast pretty much in its entirety was Midsummer Night's Dream, with the usual doubled roles:

Other plays we handled in a hit or miss fashion as we thought of them, and we went on to the next so quickly that few of them stick in my mind. Here are but a few:

And that's all I can remember offhand. [Well, okay, I also remember our Muppet Lion in Winter which started the discussion, but that's another kettle of fish.] And aren't you sorry you asked?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:25 PM

Two stories to share that have been making the rounds:

As first seen in Demagogue, a chain of private schools has been teaching mostly Latino students such "facts" as:

• Congress had two houses -- the Senate for Democrats and the House for Republicans;
• that the U.S. flag had not been updated to reflect the addition of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico to the "original" 50 states;
• that the federal "administrative" branch oversees the Treasury Department; and
• that World War II occurred from 1938 to 1942.

These are too blatantly wrong to be accidental, particularly in a printed workbook. And isn't it curious how most of these errors relate to questions that might appear on citizenship exams? In a school targeting Hispanic immigrants? Kevin Drum calls it "intellectual sadism."

This firsthand account of a new kind of voter fraud sends chills down my spine. People are apparently filing false address change cards to the election offices, indicating the voter has moved from their district to another. People move all the time, so it often doesn't get caught until election day, when the voter shows up at the "wrong" precinct. How many people have time to either chase down busy election officials or drive around to find their proper polling place. What a nasty tactic. I don't care whose side is doing it, I am offended by any method used to discourage people from casting their ballots. We're supposed to be an enlightened democracy, decisions should be influenced by rhetorical appeals, not thuggery.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:45 AM

Just freeing up some mental RAM for other purposes, two books I saw at the bookstore last night that I wanted to remember for possible future reading:

• The Tower menagerie
• Maid Marian, a Robin Hood story which appears (from the blurb) to make Eleanor the villain instead of John.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:01 AM

An inspiring story of a brave woman.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 AM

Meant to get this up last night, but Ian was on the computer and I didn't feel like asking him to get off.

Answer to last week's riddle: Okay, I was a little unfair here, because researchers are in doubt over whether the answer is helmet or shirt. Ian considers it pretty obviously to be the latter, and who am I to argue with him?

This feature is starting to become more trouble than it's worth. There are six more of the bawdy double-entendre riddles. I think I'll go out with a bang and share two this week and three the next. Enjoy!

My weekend was a fun one. Unfortunately, I'm still feeling sick and under the weather, but I think I'm over the worst of it. Yesterday, a friend decided to host a Shakespeare reading: Macbeth. I'd never actually done one before, and really enjoyed it. Since nobody had any preference, we drew lots for the characters with the most lines, and then picked up minor characters as needed in their scenes. I think my raspy voice served quite well as the First Witch. <grin> Afterwards, I finally realized what I wanted from the Borders gift card I mentioned a few weeks ago, checked the online inventory to confirm it was in stock, and bought it: Shakespeare for Dummies. Don't laugh! It's a very good book for what it is. What's more, the grids of characters and scenes might be very useful for planning future readings (particularly if one wants, say, to coordinate all the history plays and see which roles carry over from one to the next).

Mind you, when I walked into the bookstore, I was very nearly sidetracked into the latest Jasper Fforde Tuesday Next novel: Something rotten. Particularly tempting since NPR just finished an interview with the author and a short reading. Hey, it's got Shakespeare in it! But after a moment of Hamlet-like indecision, I went with the Dummies book, which I think I will get more use out of over the long run.

A note for fellow Bostonians, Jasper Fforde will be at Brookline Booksmith, 7pm August 18. Mark your calendars!

Anyway, I could probably continue to ramble on in this vein for hours. [Is a blog an analogue to a monologue?] But I should probably attend to more urgent matters. A thousand times farewell.