01. Good News for Inebriates Down Under!
On this morning's Wait, Wait, Dont Tell Me show, a news clip mentioned that rubber sidewalks are being installed somewhere in Australia. Those great Aussies love to slug down their giant Foster's Beers each night, and this will help them avoid hurting themselves as they careen down the street towards home.
Take a look at some of Foster's great commercials. Be forewarned..it may take a long time to load, and you may have to submit proof of your age! However, if you like beer, you will probably think that it is all worth it.
http://www.fostersbeer.com/
02. Royal Perqs
Also mentioned on the WWDTM show today was a section about nice things that you can have if you are members of the UK royalty, such as:
Help with Pressing Matters
For instance, the Prince of Wales has a servant who irons his shoelaces.
Help to eliminate Encrouchments
For instance, the Earl of Mountbatten has a servant who lubricates the Earl's tight pants so that he can slip into them easily.
What about the Duke of Windsor?
03. Seattle's Best
After I sent a nasty email to NETFLIX, they reactivated my ROKU and now, once again, I have access to both mailed-to-me movies and online NETFLIX selections. To celebrate, I pulled up and watched the first two episodes of the Frasier TV show. It started in 1993 and I loved to watch it then because it always made me laugh. It still does. (La Comedia e Stupenda!)
Two segments on these early shows knocked me out.
Lupe Velez
Roz told Frasier the story about the supposed suicide of Lupe Velez, the hot-blooded vixen of 1940's movies. When she was in her forties, she decided to commit suicide and stage it so she would always be remembered. She put on her finest clothes and had her beautiful bed draped with the finest coverings, and prepared by drinking some of the finest champagne and exquisite food. She planned to then take poison, drape herself over the bed provocatively, and await notoriety. However, she must have eaten too much of that good food, got nauseous and was instead found drowned with her head in her toilet bowl. She did achieve her notoriety alright, but perhaps not the way she would have wanted.
http://quiterevealing.com/personal/cafeq/fdtextlupe.htm
Punxsatawney Phil?
Frasier comes out of his bedroom in a disheveled manner, wearing a loose bathrobe. During an argument with Roz, his bathrobe opens by accident. Roz then delivers the line that I think is the funniest line I have ever heard on a TV sitcom: "Oh.. I see that we will be having six more weeks of Winter."
04. Gangsters!
The Brits are upset. English kids are betting money on the game of marbles! What next!
The Americans are upset. American kids are betting money in online poker! Moral depravity!
Members of the U.S. Congress are upset. People who play the slots are now being deceived into thinking they are on the verge of winning, because of interactive messages now appearing on the slot devices that say things like: "Wow! You just missed winning $1,000 by 4 pulls.".. or words to that effect. A Congressional Hearing was held last Tuesday. I hope that I can pull up some of this session on CSPAN and learn what to avoid when I go to Nevada.
No.. I don't really gamble.. just like all senior citizens, when I go to a slot machine parlor, I take $20 and when I lose that, I quit. Besides, the slots are no longer fun.. they have taken away the buckets and the coins that would flow out of the machines when you won.. some have even taken away the metallic sounds. Damn spoilsports! I think I'll stick with the Maryland Lottery; at least, with them, I can play by mail and once in a while get a $2 winning check in the mail.
By the way, statistics show that the top three "sports" watched on TV are:
1: NFL; 2: NASCAR; 3: POKER
05. Pass me the Bacon, please.
For many years, certain people have maintained that Shakespeare did not have the brains or education to write the plays that list him as the author. Since he was "just an actor", he did not have the "smarts" to write something like Hamlet or MacBeth. The real author obviously must have been a nobleman who didn't want anybody to know he wrote them.
In fact, some critics have even gone so far as to ascribe the works to Sir Francis Bacon, (most notably, a lady named Elizabeth Wells Gallup) and state that words in some of the plays are cryptograms. Sir Francis had developed a "biliteral" alphabet that used multiple type fonts/faces for letters of the alphabet and she had determined, by using this code to lines in Shakespeare's folios, that messages appeared. For example purposes: By assigning coded letters to the type faces on one line of Hamlet, the decoded line might then read: I Bacon am the author of this play. And, yes, that was shown to work out in many cases.
However, a husband and wife team of cryptographic geniuses (William and Elizabeth Friedman) also showed that the following might also be read by using the same alphabetic scheme: I Mark Twain wrote this damn play.
Check out this background information for the Friedman's. I think that you will find it interesting. There are also whole books covering the Bacon Theory and how the Friedman's debunked it.
http://kakopa.com/geo/friedman.htm
Much other work over the years has been done to debunk the Bacon is Shakespeare theory. For one thing, existing writing by Bacon does not come anywhere near the classiness of Will's work.
Anyway... what I am trying to show is that the theory of another (nobler) author of Shakespeare's works was long ago debunked. So, why the sudden appearance of the movie Anonymous?
Roland Emmerich, the noted director of a lot of spectacular movies such as Godzilla, has a hit on his hand.. with remarkable photography and acting. But, one must ask why he has to rationalize this work by coming up with ten reasons to defame the bard? (Methinks thou may protest too much.)
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/anonymous/featurette-roland-emmerichs-10-reasons
I will order the movie from Netflix and probably will enjoy it.. however, I will still consider it a fictional story unless some other evidence comes up to convince me otherwise.
Goodby for now.
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