While You Were Out

I smell a Pulitzer.

So when can we expect Breitbart and friends to apologize to Media Matters for their depiction of the MM campaign to get advertisers off the Beckerhead show as “suppressing free speech”? Or does IOKIYAR apply here as well?

Oh, and speaking of crazy right-wingers:

Terry Jones accidentally discharges firearm outside of Fox affiliate

Apparently spreading hate on TV is so much fun it can lead to, um, “premature discharge”. ;)

@al2o3cr: What a maroon.

I take it that Stinque Law is taking a long weekend and has flown, en masse, to Nassau?

It couldn’t have happened to an assier asshole.

My eyes! Jesus H., man! I feel a fucking seizure coming on. Monkeys could have designed a better illustration.

@Benedick is not as stupid as he looks.: I’m here, darling, about to leave the house for work.

Gawd, they’re still using blingees? WTF? That horse died two years ago.

@Benedick is not as stupid as he looks.: No, my monthly poker game is tomorrow night, and since Obama left town this morning I can get to it.

BTW I saw Merchant of Venice with F. Murray Abraham last night. It was a wonderful performance, very thoughtful, very funny in places, with the homoerotic element right out in front, so to speak. My wife was troubled by the anti-semitism, but I think you have to take it as a product of the times and, indeed, Shakespeare probably never met a Jew, our tribe having been thrown out of England 200 years before.

@Dodgerblue: You’ll be missing Metallica’s set in Indio at that time. They’re playing with Slayer, Anthrax and JNOV’s boyfriend’s band Megadeth tomorrow. I would have gone, but when I saw the date – the day before Easter – I said “no fucking way in Hell will Mrs RML let me go.” Travel out on Good Friday, travel back on Easter? Yeah, right.

http://www.sandiego.com/music/the-big-4-to-crush-indio-california

/listening to Deicide at work.

@Dodgerblue: The OH is with your wife. He says the best production he’s seen was with Brian Bedford playing Shylock as an outright monster, which, paradoxically, gave him a real humanity. I love the final Belmont act, unless one is unlucky enough to be playing Lorenzo.

Jews were expelled for what? 600 years? I suspect that in Shakes’ day the audience might well have laughed at the “If you prick us do we not bleed” speech. Certainly Belmont doesn’t work unless it’s seen as the celebration of Shylock’s defeat.

@Benedick is not as stupid as he looks.: And Antonio’s defeat? His life is spared, his ships come in, but he loses Bassanio to the lovely Portia. As the final curtain came down last night, a spotlight remained on Antonio who appeared to be lost in poignant, unhappy thought. Lots to think about in this play, including Portia evolving in a matter of days from a lovestruck twit to a fearsome advocate who ripped her feckless husband a new one.

@Dodgerblue: I think that’s reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaally stretching the meaning of the play. Bassanio is Antonio’s romantic friend but I don’t think the play supports more than that. In those days men would kiss on the mouth, hold hands and skip about the garden together and it didn’t necessarily mean that they were into assless chaps and hot nights at Splash Bar. It’s a while since I’ve read it but I seem to remember that Antonio ends up with Nerissa. I know someone does. But no, the trial is the complete rescue of Antonio which is then celebrated in one of WS’s most extended rhapsodic finales beginning with “On such a night as this..” the youngest of the pairs of lovers looking up into a sky so thickly paved with stars it looks golden. You can’t play Belmont if there is any cloud left on the story. It’s the triumph of good over evil. You may know it but if you don’t the Serenade to Music by Ralph v Wiliams is a beautiful setting of Belmont. And Portia is one of His most engaging heroines: cultured, educated, brave, grave, steady, loyal, daring and true. Only Imogen compares, and maybe Cordelia. If she seemed to be a love-struck twit she’s doing it wrong. Trust me.