Odds & Ends

Over at the august hypertext confines of McSweeney’s there has appeared a new piece by one Sarah Schmelling, entitled “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition).”  A sampling:

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- - - -

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

Click on over there to read the whole piece.

 My brother and his cohorts bring forth the funk:

For more about this performance, check out his post over at …nwood….  The tune they play is called “Sweetheart,” and is apparently unrelated to my friend Chelsea’s eponymous forthcoming book… except in my blogroll, baby!

Excerpted from The State of the Web - Summer 2008, a clever commentary in illustration form by web designer Matthew Inman:

If you don’t get all of the web-geeky references in the picture, you’re not alone (anyone want to fill me in on what the “Rick/Never gonna give you up, etc.” thing is?). I’ll own up to my penchant for Facebook, but I have been cutting way back on the SuperPoking.

That’s it - I am through with dumbing it down for you people.

George Carlin is gone. Damn it. I never got to meet him.

His work showed me what comedy could be - that its full scope extends well beyond what is merely funny. His wit was restless, impatient; it tugged persistently at the uneven corners of our society. People who know me well will attest that in a normal conversation, it’s quite common for me to quote George Carlin. It’s no accident: he was so prolifically funny and insightful for so long that he covered the majority of topics relevant to our lives at one time or another. More than any other individual source, George Carlin’s stand-up formed the basis of my comedic sensibility.

When I was about 11 or 12, his 1972 album Class Clown became the first comedy recording I ever owned. I brought that LP home, listened to it, and then listened to it again. And then again, a few more times. Soon his brilliant riffs were committed to my memory (where they remain), and I returned to Tower Records in Mountain View to repeat the process with another opus from the Carlin catalogue. LPs gave way to cassette tapes - easier to store, useful for my new, bitchin’ bright-yellow Walkman, and good for comedy recordings because the eventual decline in audio fidelity didn’t matter so much.

As I’ve mentioned, his penetratingly funny insights are too numerous and wide-ranging to recount. Here’s just a few, off the top of my head. George, forgive me if I paraphrase.

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