Reduced Shakespeare

The Reduced Shakespeare Company's show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is very, very funny. If you've ever been forced to read ol' Billy in school you should appreciate it. It's under two hours long and the humour runs in a similar vein to most renaissance festival comedy shows, if you've had the pleasure to experience those. though the performers in this show definitly had more classical training, if their swordsmanship was not as finely developed as some i've seen.

I also had the pleasure to see The Mousetrap this weekend--good show, well written, though the actress playing the guest house owner was horrendous. Everyone else was good, particularly the flamboyant homosexual and the disappointed guest. A well-played whodunit, with enough laughs and scary moments that it doesn't drag or become tedious, though it also keeps you on your toes trying to figure out from context who the killer is. Oddly, it's not something the audience can figure out and is instead a startling revelation at the end. I thought Agatha Christie was more of a clue-dropper, but it was a good show regardless.

frickin' art

Maybe its just my cold, heartless, unenlightened interior showing through, but something the world would be better off without is post-modernist art. Drama has some entertainment value, as do music and even dance to an extent, but nothing positive can be said for red, black, and gray paint poorly rolled onto a cheap canvas and named "Exposed Painting Scheveningen Black Cadmium Red Deep" that has been purchased by a gallery and put on display. I'm sorry, but the gallery owner has been played the fool. That "artist" had no talent, expressed no emotion, and has succeeded only in laughing his socks off while pretentious dipshits look at his poorly painted wall covering and exclaim "i really see what the artist feels here" or "so true, so true." So much of what is passed off as "Art" today is simply useless, meaningless crap. If someone does submit something to a gallery that could possibly mean something or that requires skill or at least effort to produce, it'd be hard to find in the sea of bullshit that most people are submitting so they can eat rather than packing up their ego and getting a real job. Though the idiots wandering around babbling "oh yes, i see what the artist is saying here" even though they obviously don't ('cos the artist is actually saying "i have put color on a piece of paper. give me money") are just as bad as "artists" if not worse. They can belittle you for laughing at something poorly drawn (for any longtime reader, we're talking about shit that makes the grossly disproportionate doodles inside Canterbury Cathedral look like da Vinci's) just by saying "you just don't understand. You're not one of the elite who can appreciate True Art." Well honey, if the Elite consists of people like you who choose to delude themselves into thinking they've got some higher universal understanding, i sure as hell don't want to join. All "artistic" means is "functionless." Anyone who shares this belief would do well not to visit London's Tate Modern or the Whitechapel Gallery--it'll only serve to piss you off.

Pallid and Unhealthy

If there's one life-choice i absolutely cannot stand, its veganism. Go ahead and be vegetarian if you want--plenty of people are very happy not eating steak--but you've got to draw the line somewhere to define the difference between being a picky eater and being in denial about having an eating disorder. Being vegan is not healthy. You have to replace all sorts of vital vitamins, fatty acids, proteins, and loads of other things the hard way--with pills and gelatenous tofu-based products--just to stay alive. Just admit it, vegans--YOU HAVE AN EATING DISORDER. I just read through a list of candidates for PETA's "Sexiest Vegetarian Alive" contest and though most of the vegetarians looked somewhat healthy, the vegans literally had to tint their photos so their weird green skin didn't show up. Without taking proper vitamins vegans' hair and teeth fall out, their skin flakes off, their eyes lose lustre, parts of their digestive system break down, they lose muscle tone and flexibility, and they essentially waste away like an anorexic. These are not physically healthy individuals, and as they do this to themselves willingly, we may infer that they are not mentally healthy. If you or someone you love is vegan, I urge you to seek assistance from a dietitian or psychologist to help you realize that you're an omnivore and its okay for you to eat meat. (my mom's best friend is a dietitian, now a major in the Air Force, and she eats and encourages her family to eat meat.)
Recently in the UK several parents have been convicted of child abuse for raising their kids vegan. All of the children in question were malnourished even though they ate the same quantities of filth as their parents. Children especially need calcium and protein and even cholesterol and fat that you're not going to find without some form of meat in their diet. I hope their mothers at least thought to breastfeed. "No! I can't! Breastmilk comes from me and I'm an animal, so i must be being cruel to myself!"
My policy has always been "If a tiger would feel no qualms about eating me, why should I feel bad about eating it?" (except that I've heard tiger meat is pretty tough. But the tiger and I could happily share a cow.)
At the beginning of high school I went through about a year of vegetarianism because i realized that chicken legs look pretty disgusting before they're cooked. Now, though I still think chicken legs are pretty gross, I've realized that I don't have to eat them but can still find a rare filet mignon scrumptious.

frickin' snow

It has been snowing all day today in Canterbury. So far that makes the third snow in three weeks, though when it snowed on Monday it melted the following night. But now its back in full force--somewhere around 4 inches, and town is closed down. Interestingly, there's a spot on campus where you can usually look out and see all of town and the surrounding valley (the cathedral in particular looks neat from this vantage point) and as of today all of it was completely erased from the map. No light, no outline of a building--it was a uniformly gray mass from campus. Looked....odd.