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Nov. 20th, 2015 10:12 pm* "Sri Lanka: five steps to vaccine success:" http://www.vaccineswork.org/post/133290012222/sri-lanka-five-steps-to-vaccine-success
* At least 34 people in one attack and 15 in another (with two bombers) are dead in Nigeria. Boka Haram, being cowards, has been turning little girls into suicide bombers, likely the ones they've been kidnapping, though it's not proved yet. Boko Haram has killed more civilians than any terrorist group, including ISIS.
* So a pretty alarming thing just happened in Mali. I'm going to give you a little background first. There's been long running trouble between the people in the North of Mali and the government in the South. Over time, people who got exiled or were wanted by the government, particularly Tariq people went north across the Algerian desert to Libya, where many of the men signed up to serve in the military. Remember that tank convoy and various military transports spotted going South during the overthrow of Kadafi? Those were deserters taking weapons an vehicles back to Mali, where they formed the core of a Tariq separatist uprising in northern Mali. The more secular wing of the uprising quickly got overwhelmed by the religious extremist wing and it became one of those monstrous extremist nightmares that goes around destroying cultural treasures, burning books, killing moderate Muslims, etc.. Some of you will remember the heroic efforts of the people of Timbuktu to hide and smuggle out irreplaceable and unique early Islamic manuscripts.
Mali's government wasn't up to a challenge of this magnitude and French and Pan-African forces have been helping them fight. The pro-government forces have been doing well. The French being there is a thing that is politically complicated because of their history of colonialism in Mali, which I'm not going to get into in depth, but their plan to pull out in the near future was a bit of a relief to pretty much everyone in the region, who given many of the neighboring countries' history with colonialism and French colonialism in particular, is not surprising.
At 7AM local time (my last night), the extremists took a large hotel frequented by international travelers hostage. Government forces with help from french special forces were taking it back floor by floor when I went to bed. It is thought they had over a hundred hostages at one point. Reports continue to be a bit chaotic and contradictory. It is thought the attackers are dead. It is thought approximately 20 hostages were killed. The French withdraw has been cancelled.
* The UN approved a resolution calling on the world to unite against Islamic State.
* "Texas Women Are Inducing Their Own Abortions:" http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/texas-self-abort/416229/
* A response to the complaint "women don’t know how much rejection hurts:" http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133523850002/inkskinned-women-dont-know-how-much-rejection
* Trump is calling for a Nazi-style mandatory National registry of Muslims with required religion specific identification they and only they would have to carry. O.o For pretty fucking obvious reasons, the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish groups are condemning this Trump policy.
* "More Universities Move To Include Gender-Neutral Pronouns:" http://www.npr.org/2015/11/08/455202525/more-universities-move-to-include-gender-neutral-pronouns
* Misleading headline alert. It's about adding genetic data to linguistic and archaeological data to try to figure out where the Indo-European language group likely originates. "DNA reveals the origins of modern Europeans:" http://phys.org/news/2015-03-dna-reveals-modern-europeans.html
* "How did the chicken cross the sea?:" http://phys.org/news/2015-03-chicken-sea.html
* In which I talk about the Wycliffe Bible and the backlash in the notes. "Society despairs of the Modern Woman, 1915 style:" http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133587535367/questionableadvice-progress-1915
* "Victorian Nipple Rings:" https://www.bodyartforms.com/blog/victorian-nipple-rings-part-one/
* "The schoolboy sailors who died at Gallipoli:" http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31712158
* "Ponds and their toads cured of dreaded disease:" https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ponds-and-their-toads-cured-dreaded-disease?tgt=nr
* "Tragedy in Paris: The Three Stages of Political Grief:"
( Embed: )
* "Hey, Huddled Masses: Get Lost:"
( Embed: )
* "Sesame Street: Game of Chairs (Game of Thrones Parody):"
( Embed: )
* My scheduled thing got moved, so today was supposed to be a bureaucracy day, but Hector wouldn't stop hurting me when I was sleeping so I couldn't do it. He's pretty manicky today just generally but I got him to eat, so i attempted some experimental baking even though he was way too interested in what was going on. I put the experimental pie in the oven, cleaned up, and went to write up events in Africa. He WOULD NOT leave things in the kitchen alone. I kept having to go in there to do things like fish him out of the trash can. He knew I was making a bread smell in there and he wanted whatever I was making RIGHT NOW! He eventually flung a glass flour canister off a shelf, managing to break one of my Great grandmother's plates in the process. Glass everywhere. It's likely too damaged to glue together and I'm not up to trying tonight.
I want to make clear, I am not feeding this cat pie, but that doesn’t stop him throwing a tantrum on the off chance.
* I watched The Hollow Crown: Henry IV pt. 1. The Henry IV's are amoung my least favorite Shakespeare plays, but I was promised Hiddleston and they did such a brilliant job with the very difficult to do well Richard II, that I gave it a try. I am not sorry. My fundamental problem with IV pt.1 I it is full of pointless cruelty with a particularly nasty clsss based underpinning all framed as if it is funny. It's not something I find funny. Seriously, that thing where they torment the pot boy, who's poverty is extreme by offering him a huge sum of money then making him say anon... Incredibly, pointlessly cruel.
I think one of the reasons this adaptations works for me is that the people making it clearly get how appalling this is. Most Shakespeare adaptations re so full of reverence for the Author, that there is a portentousness and exaggeration to the acting. There is so often an air of trying a little too hard about the comedic bits and it's a little too easy to overact the dramatic bits. This production treats the dialog like dialog, if that makes sense. They speak the lines as if they were modern instead of as if they were poetry. This makes a huge difference in the feel of the thing.
What Hiddleston does with Prince Hal is kind of brilliant. Hiddleston's charisma really helps, but the genius is in the way he plays the horrible pranks. It's rather like the "Loki'd" short he did a few years ago. He plays his Hal a little bit dorky, as a likable, but awkward doofus who isn't quite sure how far is too far and keeps trying anyway to be the class clown so that the cool kids will like him. He plays his Hal in such a way that it's clear the jokes don't quite work because they are sort of childish and aweful and nearly always a little too much. The result is that instead of a callous brute, you get a significantly more subtle character study of a rich kid trying too hard to fit in with a rough crowd.
The performance also really invites you to think about what his childhood and relationship to his father must be for him to run around behaving like this. The little playlet section is pivotal for this. When Falstaff plays the King, he is playing A King. When Hiddleston's Hal plays the King, he is very distinctly playing Jeemy Irons playing Henry IV. It is unnerving and uncomfortable but it really sucks you into the psychology of it. The scene goes from a mocking jest to ouch rather quickly as a result, which is perfect.
There are lots of clever little moments in the acting all over the cast like that. Hotspur's much put upon wife repeatedly punching his arm in exasperation under witch there is an obvious affection. Little moments where Fallstaff's expression suggests that under the bluster there is both self awareness and a deep vulnerability. The moment where Hal and his brother simultaneously realize their father is mortal in an imminent rather than abstract sense.
Look, I'm never going to like watching either Henry IV, but this was riveting and the performances are brilliant, even though the battle scene suffered rather from budgettary limits. This interpretation really works for me in a way that no other version I've ever seen did. (Yes, that includes My Own Private Idaho. I love all the Rent Boy bits in it, but the explicitly Henry IV parts are excruciating, and I mostly skip those when I watch so as to get back to River Phoenix). This is the Henry IV made for people who don't like Henry IV. I am excite to see if they can manage to make pt. 2 interesting which would pretty much be a miracle).
* Mad Max is Not the hero: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133584243892/potofsoup-bookshop
* A good criticism of the star trek reboot: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133527809982/well-heres-the-thing-that-i-try-to-explain-to
* Marina Sirtis, Sexism, and TNG: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133516791352/webgeekist-colonel-kira-nerys
* "Photographer Unearths Vivid Images From 1980s NYC:" http://gothamist.com/2015/11/05/revisit_1980s_nyc.php
* I want the real Sam back. "Book 2 vs. Season 2: Sam Tarly’s Love Life:" http://turtle-paced.tumblr.com/post/133395490597/book-2-vs-season-2-sam-tarlys-love-life
* Story Dragon Store: http://thestorydragon.com/?product_cat=owens-art
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* At least 34 people in one attack and 15 in another (with two bombers) are dead in Nigeria. Boka Haram, being cowards, has been turning little girls into suicide bombers, likely the ones they've been kidnapping, though it's not proved yet. Boko Haram has killed more civilians than any terrorist group, including ISIS.
* So a pretty alarming thing just happened in Mali. I'm going to give you a little background first. There's been long running trouble between the people in the North of Mali and the government in the South. Over time, people who got exiled or were wanted by the government, particularly Tariq people went north across the Algerian desert to Libya, where many of the men signed up to serve in the military. Remember that tank convoy and various military transports spotted going South during the overthrow of Kadafi? Those were deserters taking weapons an vehicles back to Mali, where they formed the core of a Tariq separatist uprising in northern Mali. The more secular wing of the uprising quickly got overwhelmed by the religious extremist wing and it became one of those monstrous extremist nightmares that goes around destroying cultural treasures, burning books, killing moderate Muslims, etc.. Some of you will remember the heroic efforts of the people of Timbuktu to hide and smuggle out irreplaceable and unique early Islamic manuscripts.
Mali's government wasn't up to a challenge of this magnitude and French and Pan-African forces have been helping them fight. The pro-government forces have been doing well. The French being there is a thing that is politically complicated because of their history of colonialism in Mali, which I'm not going to get into in depth, but their plan to pull out in the near future was a bit of a relief to pretty much everyone in the region, who given many of the neighboring countries' history with colonialism and French colonialism in particular, is not surprising.
At 7AM local time (my last night), the extremists took a large hotel frequented by international travelers hostage. Government forces with help from french special forces were taking it back floor by floor when I went to bed. It is thought they had over a hundred hostages at one point. Reports continue to be a bit chaotic and contradictory. It is thought the attackers are dead. It is thought approximately 20 hostages were killed. The French withdraw has been cancelled.
* The UN approved a resolution calling on the world to unite against Islamic State.
* "Texas Women Are Inducing Their Own Abortions:" http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/texas-self-abort/416229/
* A response to the complaint "women don’t know how much rejection hurts:" http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133523850002/inkskinned-women-dont-know-how-much-rejection
* Trump is calling for a Nazi-style mandatory National registry of Muslims with required religion specific identification they and only they would have to carry. O.o For pretty fucking obvious reasons, the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish groups are condemning this Trump policy.
* "More Universities Move To Include Gender-Neutral Pronouns:" http://www.npr.org/2015/11/08/455202525/more-universities-move-to-include-gender-neutral-pronouns
* Misleading headline alert. It's about adding genetic data to linguistic and archaeological data to try to figure out where the Indo-European language group likely originates. "DNA reveals the origins of modern Europeans:" http://phys.org/news/2015-03-dna-reveals-modern-europeans.html
* "How did the chicken cross the sea?:" http://phys.org/news/2015-03-chicken-sea.html
* In which I talk about the Wycliffe Bible and the backlash in the notes. "Society despairs of the Modern Woman, 1915 style:" http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133587535367/questionableadvice-progress-1915
* "Victorian Nipple Rings:" https://www.bodyartforms.com/blog/victorian-nipple-rings-part-one/
* "The schoolboy sailors who died at Gallipoli:" http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31712158
* "Ponds and their toads cured of dreaded disease:" https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ponds-and-their-toads-cured-dreaded-disease?tgt=nr
* "Tragedy in Paris: The Three Stages of Political Grief:"
( Embed: )
* "Hey, Huddled Masses: Get Lost:"
( Embed: )
* "Sesame Street: Game of Chairs (Game of Thrones Parody):"
( Embed: )
* My scheduled thing got moved, so today was supposed to be a bureaucracy day, but Hector wouldn't stop hurting me when I was sleeping so I couldn't do it. He's pretty manicky today just generally but I got him to eat, so i attempted some experimental baking even though he was way too interested in what was going on. I put the experimental pie in the oven, cleaned up, and went to write up events in Africa. He WOULD NOT leave things in the kitchen alone. I kept having to go in there to do things like fish him out of the trash can. He knew I was making a bread smell in there and he wanted whatever I was making RIGHT NOW! He eventually flung a glass flour canister off a shelf, managing to break one of my Great grandmother's plates in the process. Glass everywhere. It's likely too damaged to glue together and I'm not up to trying tonight.
I want to make clear, I am not feeding this cat pie, but that doesn’t stop him throwing a tantrum on the off chance.
* I watched The Hollow Crown: Henry IV pt. 1. The Henry IV's are amoung my least favorite Shakespeare plays, but I was promised Hiddleston and they did such a brilliant job with the very difficult to do well Richard II, that I gave it a try. I am not sorry. My fundamental problem with IV pt.1 I it is full of pointless cruelty with a particularly nasty clsss based underpinning all framed as if it is funny. It's not something I find funny. Seriously, that thing where they torment the pot boy, who's poverty is extreme by offering him a huge sum of money then making him say anon... Incredibly, pointlessly cruel.
I think one of the reasons this adaptations works for me is that the people making it clearly get how appalling this is. Most Shakespeare adaptations re so full of reverence for the Author, that there is a portentousness and exaggeration to the acting. There is so often an air of trying a little too hard about the comedic bits and it's a little too easy to overact the dramatic bits. This production treats the dialog like dialog, if that makes sense. They speak the lines as if they were modern instead of as if they were poetry. This makes a huge difference in the feel of the thing.
What Hiddleston does with Prince Hal is kind of brilliant. Hiddleston's charisma really helps, but the genius is in the way he plays the horrible pranks. It's rather like the "Loki'd" short he did a few years ago. He plays his Hal a little bit dorky, as a likable, but awkward doofus who isn't quite sure how far is too far and keeps trying anyway to be the class clown so that the cool kids will like him. He plays his Hal in such a way that it's clear the jokes don't quite work because they are sort of childish and aweful and nearly always a little too much. The result is that instead of a callous brute, you get a significantly more subtle character study of a rich kid trying too hard to fit in with a rough crowd.
The performance also really invites you to think about what his childhood and relationship to his father must be for him to run around behaving like this. The little playlet section is pivotal for this. When Falstaff plays the King, he is playing A King. When Hiddleston's Hal plays the King, he is very distinctly playing Jeemy Irons playing Henry IV. It is unnerving and uncomfortable but it really sucks you into the psychology of it. The scene goes from a mocking jest to ouch rather quickly as a result, which is perfect.
There are lots of clever little moments in the acting all over the cast like that. Hotspur's much put upon wife repeatedly punching his arm in exasperation under witch there is an obvious affection. Little moments where Fallstaff's expression suggests that under the bluster there is both self awareness and a deep vulnerability. The moment where Hal and his brother simultaneously realize their father is mortal in an imminent rather than abstract sense.
Look, I'm never going to like watching either Henry IV, but this was riveting and the performances are brilliant, even though the battle scene suffered rather from budgettary limits. This interpretation really works for me in a way that no other version I've ever seen did. (Yes, that includes My Own Private Idaho. I love all the Rent Boy bits in it, but the explicitly Henry IV parts are excruciating, and I mostly skip those when I watch so as to get back to River Phoenix). This is the Henry IV made for people who don't like Henry IV. I am excite to see if they can manage to make pt. 2 interesting which would pretty much be a miracle).
* Mad Max is Not the hero: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133584243892/potofsoup-bookshop
* A good criticism of the star trek reboot: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133527809982/well-heres-the-thing-that-i-try-to-explain-to
* Marina Sirtis, Sexism, and TNG: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/133516791352/webgeekist-colonel-kira-nerys
* "Photographer Unearths Vivid Images From 1980s NYC:" http://gothamist.com/2015/11/05/revisit_1980s_nyc.php
* I want the real Sam back. "Book 2 vs. Season 2: Sam Tarly’s Love Life:" http://turtle-paced.tumblr.com/post/133395490597/book-2-vs-season-2-sam-tarlys-love-life
* Story Dragon Store: http://thestorydragon.com/?product_cat=owens-art
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
