everybody’s at disadvantage speaking with their second language

So I’m at a bar on Saturday with the other jiu-jitsu students after one of our own promoted to nidan, or second degree black belt. We rented the back room in one of the nightclubs on Boylston St, less than a block from where I work. The outside’s full of scheming scenesters with unbuttoned shirts; [...]

most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly

Directing Discount Shakespeare: As You Like It In Forty-Five Minutes has made my weeks more exciting. For one thing, I picked a really good cast. They show up every night enthused to tackle the material. For another, I’m happy to be back in the theater again. I love having a show in production. But mostly, [...]

but we’ve got the biggest balls of them all

Talking with a very good friend of mine last week, we mentioned a mutual female acquaintance whom, I said, “had the ovaries to pull something like that off.” “Huh?” my friend asked. “Like saying, ‘she had the balls to pull it off.’ Only, y’know, ovaries.” “Right, right; I got that.” I still got the quizzical [...]

we never did too much talking anyway

I would like the following euphemisms excised from polite speech: “It is what it is.” No. I disagree. Now let’s fight over it. It doesn’t much help that “it is what it is” most often surfaces as a sort of cheery fatalism, an unwillingness to tackle a problem. We can’t change the facts! If I [...]

I’m a sinner, I’m a saint; I do not feel ashamed

Christine pointed out last week that all of UrbanDictionary’s definitions of feminism are pretty wretched. I navigated over to check and, sure enough, it’s some kind of travesty. It’s a rather well-cloaked travesty, don’t get me wrong – all sorts of intellectual shit like “if feminism were really about equality, it would be called humanism.”1 [...]

lower the curtain down on Memphis

First off a question: did Charles Dickens name Amy Winehouse? No? Are we sure? So it’s just serendipity, then? Now, an anecdote with a moral: a few months ago, a friend told me about a trip she took to Italy with her mother. In a dense part of Rome one morning, a pack of gypsies [...]

the grandma test

Whenever I wonder whether I should get really angry about a feud on the Internet – or even in real life, where many Internet tendencies are born – I use a private standard, which I believe I invented, called the Grandma Test. The Grandma Test works as follows: could my 85-year-old Southern grandmother understand the [...]

god loves ugly

A quick one to start us off: my favorite workout at the gym – to observe, not to perform – is the desultory chin-up. That’s when a guy walks up to the bar and does one chin-up, maybe two, before remembering how hard they were. Then he drops to the mat and walks off like [...]

just like witches at black masses

Does anyone else find it odd that we refer to activating a hyperlink in HTML, or an icon on a graphical desktop, as “clicking”? That we call the action by the noise the input device makes? I find it weird – not offensive, mind you, just deeply odd – that that evolved the way it [...]