I recently had a wonderful conversation with my mentor Howard Stein — also my Columbia University MFA Playwriting Chair and head of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, and now lifelong friend — concerning the appropriateness of ending an English sentence with a preposition.
When I lived in Seattle, I once attended a reading of the Megillas Esther, the ancient story of the triumph of the Jewish people over the wicked Haman who intended to wipe them out from the face of the earth, that really was special because of the way that the reader went through the story. When he would read the lines of dialogue as spoken by people in the story, he would read them in their voices — Queen Esther in one way, the vicious Haman in his own nasty voice. I appreciated it quite a bit because I would often do the same thing when reading it to myself — and when reading most other fiction, for that matter. Even some nonfiction — I tend to hear the voice of David Sedaris when I am reading his autobiographical pieces.
SOPA is one of those sudsy scandals that don’t easily wipe off in the public wash. Once you claim you’re all-in on SOPA, it’s difficult to recant and back out and say you didn’t mean it, and GoDaddy is learning that sticky lesson in heated spades:
GoDaddy was one of the few tech firms to back SOPA but it took its name off the public list of supporters following pressure by big web names and many angry customers.
Wikipedia said it would move its domains away from GoDaddy, as did the Cheezburger Network, owner of Lolcats, and image hosting firm Imgur.
In a statement explaining its change of heart, GoDaddy boss Warren Adelman said: “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why GoDaddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better.”
In an interview with tech news site Gizmodo, Mr Adelman took a neutral stance on SOPA but said the company might support it if there were a consensus among net firms on its wording.
Continue reading → Staring Down the SOPA Threat from the Public Square
Gears turn, machines come alive and ink splatters over metal, making the same sign over and over again — do not park here, street sweeping, please clean after your dog… all entirely uniform and wonderful in its own way, but still lacking something. What is it lacking? You don’t really get a good feel for it until you find yourself walking down the street and see a wooden sign nailed to a street pole with a simply painted dog, a hand behind it with a broom pan and three words — “Please clean up!” The grammarian in you aches to find the creator of the sign to point out the obvious prepositional phrase issue but you are warmed by the very sight of the sign.
I had a couple of hours to kill last night in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I enjoyed walking everywhere — including Cornelia Street and the temporary Apple SoHo store at 72 Greene Street — to relive some beloved, old, memories of living in that neighborhood years ago. Another regular, old, haunt of mine was NYU’s beautiful Bobst library. It had been awhile since I’d been in Bobst with a WiFi device and so last night I decided to do some testing with my new iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — and the results were amazing!
Every year during the month of November, I attempt to complete the National Novel Writing Month challenge and every year at a certain point in time it becomes clear to me that I will have no way of completing the challenge. This year has been particularly brutal to me in that it is only the 11th of the month and I am aware that, short of a complete writing miracle, or being temporarily stranded on a desert island with nothing but a word processor and necessary nourishment, I will not come even close to completing the challenge.
My eyes change from hazel to blue to green depending on the amount of sunlight shining in them and the reflective color of the shirt I am wearing. My lovely and beautiful wife has constant caramel eyes that I would eat like toffee if I were allowed. Imagine my dismay when I learned yesterday that a doctor in California has a new laser procedure to permanently remove the brown from brown eyes:
Dr. Gregg Homer at Stroma Medical in California announced on KTLA-TV that he had come up with a laser procedure that removes the brown pigment, known as melanin, in the iris. Once removed, the blue color underneath is revealed, giving the person blue eyes. Homer said the procedure takes about 20 seconds.
“We use a laser that’s tuned to a specific frequency to remove the pigment from the surface of the iris,” he told KTLA.
The change is irreversible because, once removed, the melanin cannot grow back.
Having already thoroughly exhausted the topic of movies and their bad sequels it gets us thinking about books and their sequels. I am not referring to books that are part of a series of books — such as the Harry Potter series. Rather, I mean books where the author does not intend a second book from the beginning and then opts to do so years later. This is especially the case when the second book doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the first other than its name or a good public relations firm.
Continue reading → Does The Shining Really Need a Vampire Sequel?
Do you think the children of bigots deserve a righteous education? If so, how does one go about providing a non-secular learning experience to the children of prejudiced parents?
Continue reading → Do the Children of Bigots Deserve a Righteous Education?
I was in a fast food restaurant the other day with a friend when I realized there is a specific reason for creating combination orders. I had always thought the reason for “order by the number” was for speed, but now I have a different notion.
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