Almanac for January 8th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-8th-O4O6Z4TL1

Today's Observance: National Man Watcher's Day

Bummer January 8th

January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.

January 8, 2020: Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 is shot down by the Iranian armed forces. Five days previously, the U.S. had assassinated Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani and Iran had retaliated by launching missiles at U.S. forces stationed in Iraq. The Iranian military apparently believe the Ukrainian civilian airliner is an incoming missile launched by the U.S. military. The missile strike kills 176 people, with no survivors.

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And now, for something completely different, an affiliate link to a Gumroad creative product you may enjoy: 56-page color illustrated movie poster zine

If my words are not being censored by the Trump Regime, you may find my books here on Gumroad.

Bummer January

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer January post with the update.

January 3, 2014: Islamist extremists burn the Christian books of Al-Sa'e  Library in Tripoli, Lebanon.

January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.

January 6, 1977: Natalina Maria Vittoria “Dolly” Sinatra, age 79, the mother of singer/actor Frank Sinatra, dies when the private Learjet she’s taking to visit her famous son in Las Vegas crashes into the San Gorgonio Wilderness in southern California. Mrs. Sinatra’s friend Mrs. Anthony Carboni is also killed, along with the jet’s two pilots.

January 7, 2015: Two Islamist extremists target the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people are killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.

January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.

January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).

Countee Cullen in 1927. R. W. Bullock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.

January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

Lorraine Hansberry, likely at a welcoming event for the African-American Students Foundation in 1959 or 1960. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

January 13, 1908: One hundred seventy-one people die as a result of a fire that started during the intermission of a stage play at Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. The audience was in its seats to watch a Magic Lantern show. A Magic Lantern machine was a technology somewhat in between a slide show and a movie projector, with slide-like images that gradually faded into the next image.

The gases used to run the Magic Lantern caught fire after someone knocked over one of the kerosene lamps being used to light the stage. The dead include 170 audience members and one firefighter killed while responding. This tragedy spurs the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a variety of safety laws governing indoor public spaces.

Incidentally, the playwright of the drama being performed was Harriet Earhart Monroe. Mrs. Monroe was not present, but her sister Della Earhart Meyers was on stage as the narrator or chorus of the drama. Della Earhart Myers was among those who perished. Harriet and Della were the sisters of Samuel Stanton Earhart, who was the father of aviator Amelia Earhart.

January 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.

January 14, 1986: Actor Donna Reed dies of pancreatic cancer. She’s been diagnosed with the disease only three months earlier.

January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O'Riordan (no relation to me) dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with Champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.

Dolores O'Riordan during a concert with The Cranberries on May 31, 2010. Poudou99, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

January 19, 1729: Restoration-era playwright William Congreve dies of complications from internal injuries he suffered in a September 1728 carriage accident.

January 23, 1943: Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who regularly performed on the radio, appeared in a panel discussion about Adolph Hitler on CBS Radio. Listeners noticed he was uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion. 

In fact, Woollcott was having a heart attack. He wrote “I am sick” on a pad to paper to let the other participants know he needed medical attention. He died in the hospital a few hours later.

January 26, 2010: Boa Sr, an approximately 65-year-old woman of the Bo people on her mother’s side and the Jeru people on her father’s side, dies. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Aka-Bo language of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of India.

January 28, 1856: Robert and Margaret (called Peggy) Garner and their four children, an enslaved family running for their freedom along the Underground Railroad, shelter at the home of free person of color Joseph Kite on the west side of Cincinnati, Ohio. U.S. Marshalls, required by the cruel Fugitive Slave Act to track down escaping enslaved persons, surround Mr. Kite’s home and demand the surrender of the Garner party. 

To their horror, Peggy has attempted to kill her two sons and two daughters rather than seeing them returned to slavery in Kentucky. She’s succeeded in killing her second-youngest child, her 2-year-old daughter Mary. She’d intended to kill her children and then herself; the other three children were wounded but survived. After a trial, the surviving Garners were forced back into enslavement. Peggy Garner’s story became the basis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

January 28, 1960: African-American folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston dies from heart disease after suffering a stroke.

January 29, 1933: Poet Sara Teasdale overdoses on sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. She is 48 years old.

January 30, 2006: 55-year-old playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies of lymphoma.

January 31, 1957: A Douglas DC-7B aircraft takes off from Santa Monica Airport on a test flight, accompanied by two U.S. Air Force Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jets. The role of the jets is to test the DC-7B’s radar capabilities. At 11:18 a.m. local time, one of the Scorpions collides with the DC-7B. The pilot of the Scorpion is killed in the crash; the radar operator ejects from the jet, and despite severe burns and a broken leg, survives. 

All four crew members aboard the DC-7B are killed when the craft crashes, partially into the grounds of Pacoima Congregational Church and partially into the grounds of Pacoima Junior High School, where a boys’ gym class is taking place outdoors. Three students are killed, and approximately 75 students are injured by falling debris. 

Among the witnesses of the mid-air collision is musician Ritchie Valens, 15 years old at the time. Valens himself will die in a plane crash two years and three days later. 

Bummer New Year: Unfortunate Literary Happenings of Past Januaries

Previous Installment in this Series: Bummer Halloween

January 3, 2014: Islamist extremists burn the Christian books of Al-Saʼe  Library in Tripoli, Lebanon.

January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.

January 7, 2015: Two Islamist extremists target the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people are killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.

January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.

January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).

January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.

January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

January 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.

https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Alice-Is-the-Problem-by-ErinORiordan/134066500.EJUG5

January 19, 1729: Restoration-era playwright William Congreve dies of complications from internal injuries he suffered in a September 1728 carriage accident.

January 23, 1943: Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who regularly performed on the radio, appeared in a panel discussion about Adolph Hitler on CBS Radio. Listeners noticed he was uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion. 

In fact, Woollcott was having a heart attack. He wrote “I am sick” on a pad to paper to let the other participants know he needed medical attention. He died in the hospital a few hours later.

January 28, 1960: African-American folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston dies from heart disease after suffering a stroke.

January 29, 1933: Poet Sara Teasdale overdoses on sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. She is 48 years old.

January 30, 2006: 55-year-old playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies of lymphoma.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

GUNPOWDER

Gun"pow`der, n. (Chem.)

Defn: A black, granular, explosive substance, consisting of an intimate mechanical mixture of niter, charcoal, and sulphur. It is used in gunnery and blasting.

Note: Gunpowder consists of from 70 to 80 per cent of niter, with 10 to 15 per cent of each of the other ingredients. Its explosive energy is due to the fact that it contains the necessary amount of oxygen for its own combustion, and liberates gases (chiefly nitrogen and carbon dioxide), which occupy a thousand or fifteen hundred times more space than the powder which generated them. Gunpowder pile driver, a pile driver, the hammer of which is thrown up by the explosion of gunpowder.

 -- Gunpowder plot (Eng. Hist.), a plot to destroy the King, Lords, and Commons, in revenge for the penal laws against Catholics. As Guy Fawkes, the agent of the conspirators, was about to fire the mine, which was placed under the House of Lords, he was seized, Nov. 5, 1605. Hence, Nov. 5 is known in England as Guy Fawkes Day.

 -- Gunpowder tea, a species of fine green tea, each leaf of which is rolled into a small ball or pellet.

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by Various: Public domain in the USA.

“Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.” - traditional nursery rhyme

November 5, 1664: Samuel Pepys sees Macbeth: “Up and to the office, where all the morning, at noon to the ‘Change, and thence home to dinner, and so with my wife to the Duke’s house to a play, Macbeth, a pretty good play, but admirably acted. Thence home; the coach being forced to go round by London Wall home, because of the bonefires [for Guy Fawkes Day]; the day being mightily observed in the City. To my office late at business, and then home to supper, and to bed.”

I still find it incredibly charming and cute that "Pepys" is pronounced "Peeps," like the marshmallow candy. 

November 5, 1946: Disco, Gospel, and soul singer Loleatta Holloway is born in Chicago. I become aware of her when I check out the Madonna tribute album Virgin Voices from the South Bend public library; Holloway covered “Like a Prayer” (and in my opinion, it’s the best track on that album). 

She also provided vocals for the 1991 hit single “Good Vibrations” for Mark Wahlberg’s group Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. I knew that song in 1991, and although Holloway appears in the music video, I wasn’t aware of her at the time. 

Sunday, November 5, 2006, Mishawaka: On my way to Meijer to buy some groceries, I heard a story on NPR. Samuel Menashe had won the Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters Award. I heard his poem “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am.” It reads in part:

“There is no Jerusalem but this

Breathed in flesh by shameless love

Built high upon tides of blood

I believe the Prophets and Blake

And like David I bless myself

With all my might”

Later we visited my parents, and in the evening I was privileged to watch a new Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. The first segment parodied The Blob, the second was based on the Jewish folktale of the golem, and the third parodied War of the Worlds. 

5 Recommended Podcasts

1. Oh No! Lit Class

With 93 episodes on Spotify as of today, you can probably find your favorite classic discussed among the episodes. The first episode is about Macbeth. More recently, Megan and RJ tackled "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

2. There Might Be Cupcakes

North Carolina writer Carla Pettigrew Hufstedler lives with multiple disabilities, and as a result her podcasting schedule isn't consistent. But no matter, because every new episode is like a shiny new gift to unwrap. She not only keeps listeners updated on her writing, knitting, drawing, and other creative pursuits, but shares ghost stories, synchronicities, folklore, and other subjects that readers and writers of speculative fiction will love. A personal favorite are Carla's Christmas episodes. In 2019, Carla introduced listeners to the tradition of Victorian Christmas ghost stories and read an early Charles Dickens tale that went on to inspire A Christmas Carol. 

3. Podcast Like It's 1999

This is a fun nostalgia trip for Gen Xers like me. (Relevant to my '90s NBA nostalgia zine? Not directly - yet - but maybe one of these days.) Journalist Brian Raftery argued in his book Best. Movie. Year, Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen that this was film history's greatest year. This podcast discusses individual films in detail, with occasional digressions into music and other 1999 topics. 

An especial favorite episode of mine discusses the movie Stigmata starring my sweet, sweet baby Gabriel Byrne. You may also remember that this podcast made me read A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson. 

4. Book Vs. Movie

Want to know exactly how Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle is different from the Studio Ghibli movie? Or how closely the movie Clueless mirrors Jane Austen's Emma? The two Margos will not only fill you in on how the written version translated to the big screen but also render their verdict on which one is better. It's not always the book!

5. None of This Is Real

Many, many podcasts will deliver a weekly dose of weirdness, but this one holds a special place in my podcast rotation. It's a comedy podcast about everything weird, from conspiracy theories to cryptids to ancient aliens to historical oddities and monsters. This is everything I liked to read about when I was a kid, in podcast form. 

What other podcasts should I listen to?

'The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet' by Myrlin A. Hermes

Let’s talk about The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes, because this book blew my mind. Be warned there may be SPOILERS in this post.

I learned about it from this post.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. Books that have well-rounded bisexual characters are few and far between anyway, and this novel’s locating its 2011 Lambda Literary Award-winning bisexual character within an exceedingly thorough re-imagining of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet made this a must-have inside my greedy little brain.

Hermes gives us a love triangle between Hamlet, Horatio, and her original character Adriane, Baroness of Maricourt. It’s not a love vee, in which Hamlet and Horatio are each separately in love with Adriane. Horatio is in love with Hamlet, Hamlet is in love with Horatio, Horatio is also in love with Adriane, and Adriane is using them both in an intricate chess game for her own literary and personal ends.

Adriane. Oh, Adriane. She’s a difficult woman, and she tries extremely hard to turn Hamlet and Horatio against each other (at the same time she’s trying to make their love immortal in poetry), but you can’t end up hating her. Like Lady Macbeth before her, she has to do what a woman has to do for her ambition’s sake. Unlike Lady Macbeth, she won’t have to live to regret it, and she won’t be punished by the author for it.

Recognizable lines from Macbeth are woven into the dialogue and narration of this novel, as are lines from a number of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets and other plays. Sometimes they’re consciously created by the characters as they’re creating art within the context of the novel, and sometimes they come up in more organic ways from the plot. Sometimes Shakespeare feeds Myrlin A. Hermes a straight line and she turns it into a dirty joke, in the same way that Shakespeare plays with his characters.

That’s some of the beauty and brilliance of Hermes’ writing. Although it’s written in prose, the whole thing feels like poetry in blank verse. This is astounding work.

Ophelia still gets the short end of the stick, alas.* She doesn’t drown, and she does live long enough to marry Hamlet and become Denmark’s queen. She even produces an heir, although the little boy dies from an accidental wound. It’s implied he may have hemophilia, which of course is something that historically affected the real royal houses of Europe, after too many centuries of intermarriage between cousins.

Incest is a creeping theme throughout the novel. Hamlet is rumored to have an incestuous relationship with his own mother, although Hermes never gives the reader any reason to believe this is true. Gertrude is certainly unsure which brother is Hamlet’s biological father – Hamlet the Elder or Claudius – although this doesn’t make any genetic difference, since they’re identical twins. The cheeky undertaker at the end of the novel tells Horatio, in unnecessarily vague terms, that the king is marrying his sister – what he means is that King Claudius is marrying his sister-in-law.

Yet it may actually be the case when Hamlet marries Ophelia that he is marrying his own half-sister. A small portion of this novel is told by Polonius talking to Laertes. Polonius – whose name literally means that he is a Polish guy – tells his son that he, Polonius, was a minor prince in his native land, although he was the youngest son who was never going to inherit any kind of throne. When Hamlet the Elder conquered Poland, not only did his men kill all of Polonius’s older brothers on the battlefield, but Hamlet the Elder also took Polonius’s wife, Aphelia. Polonius and Aphelia were married but, because she was still a young teenager, their marriage wasn’t consummated. Aphelia became Hamlet’s concubine, and it’s possible Laertes and his sister Ophelia are both Hamlet the Elder’s biological children.

Hamlet the Younger marrying his bio sister? Sounds like an acting job for Benedict Cumberbatch, who has both played Hamlet on stage and, as a character in the film version of August: Osage County, has unknowingly had a sexual affair with probable his half sister. (And not even in a bad way. Ivy and Little Charles and two of the only humane characters in that grim Tracy Letts play. ‘Tis pity they are whores*.)

Someday I’ll discover why Letts keeps setting his plays in the Plains States, which he is from and seems to hate.

Hamlet isn’t my favorite of Shakespeare’s tragedies – I understand and enjoy Macbeth better. (I recently saw the 2015 film adaptation with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. I thought she was gorgeous and brilliant as Lady Macbeth, but I didn’t want Duncan to die, not only because he doesn’t deserve it but also because he was David Thewlis, the actor who played Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter movies. I still have issues with Remus and Tonks’ sad deaths.) That said, I found myself heavily invested in the romantic relationship between Hamlet and Horatio. I’m glad they got to be together long after Ophelia’s unprocessed grief over her child’s death sent her to a nunnery for long-term mental health care.

http://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/128423110740/brain-drops-soul-winks-promotional-posters-for#notes

At first Horatio is conflicted about his own bisexuality. He’s wildly attracted to Hamlet when Hamlet dresses as a female character in the play Horatio has written, but rejects Hamlet’s amorous advances out of deference to his upbringing in the church, even though Horatio is not a religious man. Later, when he believes Hamlet has drugged them both with belladonna and intends to kill them both, sex becomes a lifeline for them. Horatio eventually has to admit he loves Adriane physically, but the lifelong commitment of his heart he reserves exclusively for the Danish prince. Lady Adriane is Horatio’s first love, but Hamlet is his true love. Hamlet, surprisingly (for he is infamously fickle with Ophelia, including in this version), reciprocates the depth of Horatio’s feeling.

Get that: They are two bisexual men who commit themselves to each other, and neither one of them has to be killed off violently and tragically. See, TV? Writers can do that. It’s possible to let same-sex lovers grow old together and die of natural causes.

This is a beautiful, poetic, and sexy book, with complicated characters we think we know exposed from entirely new angles.

The titular allusion, by the way, is to a line spoken by Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

*That’s supposed to be remedied in a film starring the English actress Daisy Ridley, who stars in the most recently released Star Wars film.

*I'm not really judging them. That’s me showing off that I know the plot of the 17^th-century John Ford play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore includes a brother-sister pair who commit intentional incest. In August: Osage County, only Ivy knows her cousin is probably also her brother.

John Ford is probably not related to Ford Madox Ford, the English poet, novelist, and critic who wrote Parade’s End, a novel series turned into a Downton Abbey-esque drama for British television. The protagonist, Christopher (“Chrissie”) Tietjans, marries a monumentally inconsiderate woman who is pregnant with a child that may or may not be his, then falls in love with a saucy Women’s Suffragist. It’s an Edwardian disaster and possibly semi-autobiographical. I’ve been watching it in small doses. 

http://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/150032747400/somanyperioddramas-parades-end-tv-series

Because Benedict Cumberbatch.  

Because I have problems.

Review: 'Family' by Micol Ostow

Several years ago I went to a performance of MacBeth at my alma mater, an all-women's college. The cast was composed entirely of women. As the director noted in the program, this was a deliberate choice, harking back to the Celtic matriarchal tradition, in which women used storytelling to pass on the culture's morals and values.

I imagine Family by Micol Ostow being read by a chorus of women for just such a purpose.

If you're younger than me, you may have read a book called Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse, in school. It's a novel in episodic verse, a series of linked poems that tell the story of a teenager named Billie Joe living through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Family is written in a similar style.

Like Billie Joe, the 17-year-old narrator of Family is a young woman. Her name is Mel. Mel is one of those tragic young adult characters, the likes of which inspired Meghan Cox Gurdon to write her controversial Wall Street Journal essay "Darkness Too Visible." Mel lives with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, whom Mel calls Uncle Jack. "Uncle" Jack is an alcoholic who sexually abuses Mel. Mel's mother knows about the abuse and does nothing. In Mel's mind, her mother offers her up as a sacrifice.

Mel decides to run away from home. Now the historical context becomes important: the book is set in the late 1960s, the era of free love, hippies, beautiful people and Haight-Ashbury. With the vague sense that she'll be able to survive there, Mel heads for San Francisco. Instead of a utopia, she finds a park bench, where Mel sits down and is overcome with inertia. She doesn't have a clue what to do or how to take care of herself.

Along comes Henry. Henry is loosely based on Charles Manson, and as Mel as drawn into his inner circle there is a terrible sense of foreboding. Younger readers may not be aware of the historical events on which the book is based, but will probably not find them terribly shocking compared to crimes that routinely play on the evening news. Still, readers young and not-so-much, those familiar with the Manson Family and those just learning of the crimes, must wonder the same thing: what causes a seemingly "normal" young woman to participate in something like that? This is precisely the territory Ostow's poetry explores.

It's all very well done. The reader is aware of Mel's "brokeness," as Mel frequently calls it. She often refers to being full of empty, hollow places, places inside her she longs to fill, fears to have filled. She always feels as if she's drowning, treading water, caught in the undertow. Henry offers her a lifeline, though Mel soon comes to realize that not even Henry can hold back the tide. Henry, who at first seems so godlike, has his own broken, hollow, empty and drowning places, places that will have terrible consequences for an innocent couple.

The subject matter is chilling. Yet the ending, remarkably, is a hopeful one. It's enough to keep the reader from drowning in the book's darkness, enough to keep Mel from descending into utter despair. There is a spark at the end that makes this narrative-in-verse seem redemptive, a cautionary tale, a morality play that makes it ideal to be read as poetry traditionally was, by a chorus in front of a large audience.

Family is told in the first person, entirely from Mel's point of view. It seems like a tale told collectively because of the historical aspect, the sense that Mel speaks for an important time and place in American culture. It seems like a collective tale because of the way the "family" absorbs Mel and makes her part of it. It seems like a collective tale because there are at least two versions of Mel, including one who seems trapped in a mirror, helpless. I'm sure it will be absolutely stunning to hear as an audiobook, even without a chorus of women's voices.

Still, read the print version first. Micol Ostow's writing style includes short words and phrases set apart from the rest of the text by italics and braces. Some of the words that appear set apart like this are

static
white noise

In my head, the words that are set apart, sometimes complementing and other times contradicting Mel's narrative, sound like they're coming from a radio, not quite tuned to the right frequency. I imagine them as the words of mirror-Mel, the other, left-behind self who struggles to break through to Henry's Mel, but can't.

All in all, it's a remarkable achievement for Micol Ostow, one that's sure to be much talked about and debated among fans of young adults books, parents, librarians and book bloggers.

A Post Blogged by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

Melange Books has released The Smell of Gas, an erotic, pulp-style crime thriller by your humble author and her husband Tit Elingtin. It's available now in print and e-book formats. I don't want to blog about it here, though. I already blogged about it today on Breaking In Before Breaking Down. I would rather blog about...breakfast.

It was a fine, sunny morning in my home town this morning, so Tit Elingtin walked over to our usual breakfast spot, then went on a 3-mile walk along the river. I had the pancake special, chocolate chip pancakes. Delicious. Along with the chunks of candy in my breakfast, I was also treated to a hunk of eye candy, a guy at a table across from us who looked just like Sam Worthington. (I wish I had a Hunk du Jour photo to link to, but somehow HdJ has managed to miss the Aussie stunner.) Well, almost just like - this guy's hair was a little redder.

Many of you will remember Sam Worthington from Avatar. I like to remember him from Terminator: Salvation, because, well, I just like to think about Christian Bale.

I also like to remember Sam Worthington's interpretation of MacBeth. Those who love Claire and Leo in the contemporary telling of Romeo + Juliet (may Pete Postlethwaite rest in peace - best Friar Laurence ever!) will enjoy the 2006 version of MacBeth starring Worthington. I like the sexy, redheaded Scottish witches. They're like a trio of soothsaying Shirley Mansons.



This weekend I have rented, but have not yet watched, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead. Should be a good one, though. It has Hamlet, vampires and a score by Sean Lennon. So far, the best film take I've seen on the Hamlet story remains Royal Deceit, with Gabriel Byrne, Kate Beckinsale and Christian Bale. Not just Christian Bale, but a NAKED TEENAGE Christian Bale. Best Shakespearean version? I like Ethan Hawke's attempt. Julia Stiles is a particularly charming Ophelia.

Do not get me started on the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet. I will no longer watch films with that anti-Semitic, misogynistic douchebag. Except maybe Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; Mel is canceled out by Tina Turner, feminist icon supreme and possible reincarnation of ancient Egyptian woman-pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Sooooo anyway, Sam Worthington's redder-haired doppelganger sat in the restaurant, eating sausages off a fork in a way that would make an erotica writer with an active imagination think impure thoughts. In stepped a cute woman with a ponytail, approximately Sam 2's age, and I thought they would make a good couple. They would have adorable babies. Because, you know, babies are what you're supposed to be thinking about when it's a warm spring day, you're surrounded by egg and bunny decorations and everybody's getting ready to celebrate Ostara.

I would like to have some brilliant post connecting the Pagan celebration of Ostara with Jewish Passover and Christian Easter, since Passover was this week and it is Easter weekend. I don't. I have this, a post blogged by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (I promise you a worthy Beltane post on May 1.) Buy a copy of The Smell of Gas!

https://amzn.to/49Sd9SB