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Thursday: September 29, 2011

Best Unintentional Pun Ever?

Filed under: — site admin @ 11:04 PM GMT-0500

Volume II of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1955), contains these five titles:

  • The Honest Whore, Parts I and II
  • The Magnificent Entertainment
  • Westward Ho
  • Northward Ho
  • The Whore of Babylon

Four out of five is not bad, though it would be better if the second title were omitted.

Saturday: September 24, 2011

Blackfriars Quiz

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:51 PM GMT-0500

The following eight foodstuffs represent eight different plays presented at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia in the last three years. Can you identify them all? These are not verbal jokes, and the quantities (such as the three apples in #4) are not significant. (The eyes in 4 are also not significant: it was the only picture I could find.) Answers may be posted in the comments or mailed to me.

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

To cut down on the possibilities slightly, the plays put on at the Blackfriars in the last three years are:

Shakespeare: As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, 1-2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1-3 Henry VI, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale; Marlowe: Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine (Part I); Chapman: The Blind Beggar of Alexandria; Jonson: The Alchemist; Middleton: The Revengers’ Tragedy, The Changeling, A Trick to Catch the Old One; Massinger: The Roman Actor; Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest; Stoppard: Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

There were one or two more, but they are not correct answers for this quiz.

All images are from the web, except #7, which was part of my lunch today.

Tuesday: September 20, 2011

Counting the Months, and Weeks, and Days, and Hours . . . .

Filed under: — site admin @ 11:00 AM GMT-0500

As of noon today – right now, if I’ve figured out how to preschedule a post properly – we are two-thirds of the way through Obama’s first and (barring divine infernal intervention) only term. If we can make it through the next year and a third without any more permanent damage, we can begin the huge task of putting things back together. Some prosecutions would be in order, pour encourager les autres, but the next sixteen months are likely to provide plenty of encouragement for despisers of Obama, and discouragement for his dwindling band of admirers. Will the spectacle be terrifying, infuriating, revolting, pathetic, or just tedious? Probably all of the above, and some other adjectives that haven’t occurred to me yet.