glomph

And Wilbur Hatch was the music director for "I Love Lucy." In a galaxy far away, I trust.

Me, too. And congratulations, Kevin. I've read probably at least 1900 of the posts, maybe more. That's a sobering thought, but I did find them encouraging and enlightening.

Supposedly the motto of the Spartan army was "Never leave your buddies behind," or was it spelled "buddy's"?

The "hardened fabric" worked on much the same principle as Kevlar. There is some debate as to quite what the composition was at what periods, but thin layers of linen, and/or leather, and a thin bronze layer are likely. There was a breastplate anyway, and it was quite effective against the weapons of the time. Obviously the shield was the main defense for the soldier and the one to his left.

I'm not sure, but it sounds like the same woman. I bet it was Wisconsin. I'll try to find a lecture schedule from the last couple of years and see if I can find her name and university.

I heard a lecture on Shakespeare from a feminist perspective by an English prof from Wisconsin or Minnesota, maybe. She was wonderful. She had people to read a couple of scenes for us. She showed how in one scene Lady MacBeth tore down her husband to a mother/son kind of interaction and then built him back up to have the resolve to carry out the murder plot, and of course all of Shakespeare's language was perfect for that. I loved the movie Shakespeare in Love, especially the scene where the woman, dressed up as a man playing a woman does Romeo's lines as Shakespeare steps in to demonstrate how he wanted it acted by doing Juliet's lines opposite her Romeo.

The murder of Emmett Till or the acquittal of those who were tried for it.

I haven't seen it, but the negative things I've heard were from people who either thought it was a right-wing effort to get us to go to war with Iran or who couldn't deal with or didn't like the stylized nature of the presentation. A classicist was on the radio this afternoon and said surprisingly positive things about it. He said it was faithful to the comic, which he thought was the most important consideration. He said many of the distortions from reality go back to the Greeks themselves: stylization of battle depictions (lack of armor, not consistently representing phalanxes, for example) and Heroditus' historical views and dramatic oversimplification.

I didn't have any luck with a quick Google, but I'll keep an eye out.

OK, I'll bite. How do you come up with that? (Not to mention whether you're making St. Paul or Muhammed jealous.)

There are places that don't really have anything else for teenages to do but go cruising, and it became such a high school tradition on Saturday nights, and maybe Fridays outside football season, that some towns have outlawed it. That is in addition to the problems associated with cruising to buy/sell drugs or sex as suggested above.

James Cameron, just back from his exploration of the tomb of Jesus H. and Mary M. Christ and son, presents Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet, based on a play by William Shakespeare.

Exactly. The stylized staging--no scenery, symbolic horse person, nudity, symbolic sex, etc.--is a big part of the impact of the play. On Broadway, there were bleachers on the back of the stage so that a small part of the audience is facing you, thus emphasizing that what you are seeing is not real in real time. Real horses, even if practical, would have detracted from that, and, hey, might have blocked the view of the young nude actor and actress. The setting of the play is the investigation by the psychiatrist, so that what you see is a recollection of what happened that fateful night. I have no idea what they did in the movie. I avoided seeing it. Very "stagey" plays don't generally translate well to the screen.

True. True. Not true. That is a real horse in the picture, if we are talking about the same picture (the one I saw from the link). There is no real horse in the play, but a stylized one (a guy wearing a wire-frame horse head). I saw the play on Broadway years ago. From what I've read, they haven't altered the play to have real horses on stage. The picture in question is based on one of the publicity shots for the current London production. Dan may have well been nude during the photo shoot, but this picture stopped just above the pubic area. The linked picture looks like a composite of three pictures.

Well, someone had fun with Photoshop. It's a pretty good fake, though.

And there were free pancakes at IHOP on Tuesday.

I read just two of the stories so far, and they were great. When it is not so late, I'll make comments on them on the appropriate pages and read some more.

In grades 9-12 I had pretty consistently good teachers. I had several amazingly exceptional teachers. This was in a town in the South, so it's not like we had exceptional resources or were some kind of culture magnet. Most of the jobs in the town were in textile mills. I won't claim that that was the norm then. I know I was very lucky. I do wonder what has changed to make that kind experience even less likely. Salaries for teachers may even be higher, on a relative scale, than they were then in our area. The job of teacher has changed, I know. There is a lot more busy work and forms and reports. I've already mentioned having to spend so much time coaching for standardized tests and loss of respect. I know good people who have left the field over those things, and others who are going to retire as soon as practical. One thing I hestitate to mention, because I think it is an otherwise good thing, but I suspect is a big factor, is that women can now get jobs in so many other fields. Back when my teachers were in college, intelligent women didn't have that many other possibilities outside of teaching and nursing. Back when men worked and women stayed home and raised kids, being a teacher was socially acceptable as a career for married women. Now it is the norm for more women to work, but also they have so much broader range of options. The brightest women who would in the past have become teachers now can be doctors, lawyers, or many other things more lucrative and higher status than teaching.

I'm sure you guys will all be pleased to hear that Ted Haggard has been completely cured after only three weeks of therapy. {Check out my message of November 4, at the bottom of the first page of this thread, so I don't have to come out and say "I told you so."} I'm sure that if any of you want a quick cure, Rev. Ted will be glad to refer you to his therapists.

A problem with that is that some idiot will be the one to set the educational goals, probably someone less competent than the teacher. Look at the "no child left behind" kind of stuff. Teachers at certain levels have to spend most of their time coaching kids on taking standardized tests. Good teachers have been quitting for years because of that and because discipline in the classroom and respect and support for teachers by the schools, parents, and administrators have severely declined in a lot of places.

I saw the play on Broadway when Tony Perkins was playing the psychiatrist. I don't remember who played the boy, but it wasn't Firth.

Maybe if terrorists are smart, they will now.

Daniel has done publicity photos for Equus. He's obviously been working out and lost some baby fat since his bathtub scene in the last Potter movie. Publicity photos some larger shots

Besides adding flavor, okra has some kind of thickening agent that gives the soup body. "Gumbo" comes from the word for "okra" is some African language, as I recall. A purist wouldn't call something a gumbo if it didn't have okra.

The nice thing about -40 degrees is that you don't have to worry about whether it's F or C, and you know for sure it can't be K.