A Midwinter’s Dream Tale is a fantastic play. The plot is loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and A Winter’s Tale. Fairy king Oberon is horrified that his fairy queen Titania has borne him a child, and orders it taken away by a pair of bumbling mortals. The mortals make off with the child, and Titania follows after them. In that, you could kinda/sorta say that it has something to do with the original Shakespearean plays.
The two mortals: Pommes Frites (an oaf) and ‘Restes (an idiot) are a mix of Bob and Doug McKenzie and Inspector Clouseau. They stumble through the plot wonderfully, never quite understanding what’s going on, or what they should be doing. Coincidentally, they happen to be the core of the Company of Fools company, and some of the stronger actors.
A Midwinter’s Dream Tale isn’t Shakespeare redux. The dialog is fast, modern, and (kinda) witty; there are more dance numbers than soliloquies; the pacing is quick; and the characters are fun.
Go see this play. Pick up the phone, call the Gladstone Theatre (at 613.233.4523) and order tickets. Seriously. It’s only on until Saturday, and this is probably the best play that’s going to be produced in Ottawa this year.
Four hours, dear reader. Four hours. That’s how much
time is devoted to policy discussion at the upcoming
Green Party convention. Doesn’t seem worth the effort of dragging myself 1400(ish) kilometers to Pictou.
I just got a pushy call from a telemarketer telling me that I was getting a “second notice” of my car’s warranty expiring, and that I should re-register it through them. I’ve never owned a car. They refused to tell me where they got my phone number, anything about the car in question, or the company they are working for. It sounds like a scam (and the RCMP thinks so too).
The call was from 1.916.219.8163. It comes about five days after I moved the number to Rogers’ wireless service. I hadn’t received any phone spam in my 2.5 years with Virgin Wireless.
Anyone else gotten these calls?
Sent to Paul Dewar, MP for Ottawa Centre.:
Dear Mr. Dewar,
As a constituent of your ward, I ask you to vote tonight to end the bus strike. It has cost my financially (over $400 in taxi fare and car rental), it has lowered my productivity (I now work 1-2 hours a day less, because I must car pool), and it has cost me emotionally (it is difficult to visit my elderly grandmother). As unpleasant as these problems are, I can afford to spend my way around them. I feel very, very sorry for those who can’t. This strike is hitting the least privileged in our society hardest.
The strike has an ongoing emotional and economic cost to Ottawa’s citizens. Please vote to end it.
e
As much as I support the union’s right to strike, and the members’ right to fair compensation, I have to say that this strike is hitting the city too hard. If the union wants to put pressure on the city, work to rule, park buses around city hall, stop collecting bus fair, just leave the poor out of it.
I’m about a week late in saying this, but better late than never: Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is immoral at best, and a war crime at worst.
The thing I find depressing about Israel’s assault on Gaza is that it has no apparent exit strategy. If Israel gets its way and wipes out the entire Hamas leadership, what will happen? Another crop of angry youth will rise up to replace them; Israel will respond to their posturing violently; and the cycle will begin again.
It’s sad to say, but about the only good thing that I can realistically expect to come out of this is an improvement in the level of agitprop software being published. Playing Raid Gaza! gives me the same feeling of discomfort as reading news reports of the casualties.
Let’s hope that when this foray into mass murder ends, Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to forge some sort of peace.
Update: I spent most of the week being sick as hell. This is delayed one week.
Like most of the world, I think Barack Obama is awesome (viz: this video). But I don’t know much about him. So I picked up his autobiography and I’m intending to read it in January. If you’re interested in reading Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, here’s my blogging/reading schedule:
January 11 – Introduction and Chapter 1 to 4.
January 18 – Chapter 5 to 10.
January 25 – Chapter 11 to 15.
February 1 – Chapter 16 to, uh, the epilogue.
Which is a pretty easy schedule: a mere 110 pages a week. If you feel like it, grab a copy of the book and read along with me. If you don’t, just crib my comments and pretend you’ve read it yourself!
Miniposts 0.6.8 is now out. It’s another fix release that removes post duplication issues, cleans up the preferences page, and fixes a couple of bugs with the smiley code that nataan contributed.
The big news is that the miniposts plugin is now hosted on WordPress autoinstallation site, meaning that installation and upgrades should be easy peasy. Since this is my first hosted plugin, I’ve taken a quickie screenshot, so I can remember when my plugin’s average rating was 5/5:
This is my five hundredth published post on Pie Palace. That doesn’t include the half written drafts, nor the posts I deleted before publishing. But it does include:
- I’ve seen fit to comment on 116 good things, but only 81 bad things. In the worst case, that means I’m an optimist.
- Only 26% (134 of 500 posts) are marked as being self absorbed, meaning I have to start commenting on my breakfast more often.
- My first post was in January, 2005. I’ve posted roughly once every two days. I clearly need a life.
Except for the occasional slip, I’ve managed to avoid posting personal information, compromising pictures, nudity, LOLcats, useless links, and drunken rants. I’ll try to do something about that over the next 500 posts.
Image credit: Mrs Magic.
As much as I try to avoid it, I occasionally get sucked into gadget marketing. The latest toy that has caught my eye is the Agora Pro made by Kogan. It’s specs are a laundry list of what I want in a phone:
it runs Android,
it has an FM receiver,
it talks wifi,
and it has a touch screen.
To top it off, the Canadian price after shipping is less than $375.
Now, if it just had a “democratically depose Stephen Harper” button, I’d pre-order one right now.
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