First up, can we please stop it with the 9/11 hysteria already. Yes, it’s the tenth anniversary, yes it’s an important turning point in recent world history and a raw wound for a great many people still, but can’t it all be done a little bit more dignified and restrained? Every television channel seems the need to come up with its own unique 9/11 spin and it’s getting sick making. I can’t imagine how bad the family and friends of those who died that day must feel right now, having this shoved in their faces 24/7 this week…
Second, this is the week that Michael S. Hart died. Who he? Just the founder of Project Gutenberg, who had a simple vision: make public domain books freely available on the internet. For all your Google Books or Internet Archives, Hart thought of it first, back in 1971. He was an avatar of the old skool, not for profit internet, seeing it as something that would enrich people’s lives, not something to make himself rich. He’ll be missed.
Third, you should never tug on Superman’s cape, but that hasn’t stopped Jim Lee and DC comics from “improving” it. It’s not just that it now looks like a thirteen year old’s idea of what a cool costume should look like, but that it looks like what a thirteen year old twenty years ago would think was cool. All it misses is some goddamn ankle pouches. DC should know better than to try for the hip, edgy look: it’s constitutionally incapable of doing so. Superman’s costume is a design classic, something that has been able to stay iconic and classy for decades with only little tweaks. It doesn’t need to be chucked just because some nerd can’t live with the underpants over his trousers jokes anymore.
Fourth, well, this:
Horatio brought him his sword. “Laertes is looking for you,” he said.
“I don’t have time for Laertes. He must know I didn’t mean to kill his father,” Hamlet said.
“It’s not his father,” said Horatio. “It’s his sister.”
“Ophelia? I didn’t touch her.”
“She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead.”
“And for that he wants to kill me?”
Orson Scott Card “improves” Hamlet and makes it all about teh gay menace. The homophobia is expected and you can feel some pity for Card being so messed up in the head by his church, as by now it should be quite clear that he himself is the biggest old queer to ever force himself into the closet, but the sheer arrogance of wanting to adapt Shakespeare for our times? Ugh. Have some antidote:
That’s better.