May 2020
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Sir Smile is a "character," in a way of speaking, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He's one the play's most fully-realized figures, even though he says no words, doesn't appear on stage, and exists nowhere but in King Leontes' diseased, paranoid fantasy life– and then only for an evanescent second. Truth to tell, Sir Smile…
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Everyone has their favorite 1940s "bad girl." Some of mine: Ann Savage in Detour (1945), Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1948), Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947, and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) but…
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It's an unlikely pairing — what possible connection could there be between Petruchio, a creature of farce, and Othello, distinguished general and tragic victim of the green monster. Yet there is a surprising point of contact — two similar (but very different) reminiscences. It's not usual for Shakespeare's characters to have a "backstory," but both…
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I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the most terrifying words in the English language were, "I want to tell you about my dream." Nevertheless, I persist. Last night, I came out of a train station in Berlin (a city I've never visited in my daytime life) but instead of a valise or…
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The Israeli TV program Shtisel, about an ultra-orthodox, Haredi family, is soap opera, but with a hair fetish. It's all about beards, peyot, and sheitals; one female character cries the whole night through because her wig slipped and an inch of her own natural hair was visible — to men. Sometimes it's taxing to be…
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No question but that he's a serial liar: just think of the birther thing, the attendance at the inaugural, Sharpiegate, "the best economy in the history of the world," that Hilary Clinton received 3 to 5 million illegal votes, "total exoneration," the 16,000+ lies and misstatements since 2016 that the Washington Post has catalogued. Enough…
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I don't know what is signified by DBMs or EIDE. I am boggled by hard tokens. Defragment leaves me all a-quiver. Shortcuts generally take me the long way around. Does a firewall keep them out or me in? Kibibytes are things you would feed to a pooch. A logic gate is beyond my capacity of…
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It's not often that a figure of speech makes the headlines — as happened this week with the rhetorical term "sarcasm." At a press conference a couple of days ago, the present occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump, whose use of language is occasionally infelicitous, let fly with a giant whopper. He announced…