Veni Vidi Scripsi

You may like your rewengie bloody, or you may like it bleak, but sitting here with this late evening salmon pate and ruby port, I will take my rewengie by way of living well, thank you very much.

Last night, cat9 and I went to see the Actors' Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night. It was fantastic. If you're in Boston and you like Shakespeare you should see it. Even if you just like comedy you should consider seeing it.

I had heard good things about Actors' Shakespeare before, but never seen a production. And, although I knew a number of bits and pieces fro it, I had never actually seen a production of Twelfth Night. So it is difficult for me to measure the quality of this production against others either by this troupe or of this play. However, this was a damned good show.

There were no weak actors; I tried to pick a few to highlight as especially great, but the I quickly encompassed most of the cast. All of them acted the hell out of their material. They strongly embraced the musicality of the play, and the physicality, including some very nice violence. The staging was fairly simple, with a few quirky bits that they made full use of. The costuming was modern, and had a couple of nice subtleties to it.

They handled the twins in what I think is an unusual way, that initially confused me a little, but which actually worked out great. And although I believe it can be difficult to make Toby Belch likable, or the tricks they play on Malvolio more funny than tragic, all of those parts were hilarious in this production.

I think you'll like it.

President Obama has endorsed a DOMA repeal bill.

About bloody time.

It doesn't seem that useful at a time when the bill is so likely to die in the house, but I suppose his taking a public stance explicitly for it represents progress.

Well, that was a lot of foods.

My father just took us out for the 14-course (plus 2 amuse bouche) tasting menu at Clio. There were a lot of tasty things. The fois gras with fig jam was especially delicious, but really everything was very good.

It's an odd effect to eat so many tiny things, each of which barely affects your state of fullness, that you feel overwhelmed by a tide of food. Interesting.

I heard on the radio this morning about what I thought must be the best thing to have happened at the MFA:

Tonight, just before 7 p.m., a group of Boston artists installed a “renegade exhibition” in a pair of bathrooms at the Museum of Fine Arts.

But apparently this artistic rebellion was an echo of another one I'd just never heard of:

it was a reenactment marking the 40th anniversary of a historic event known as “Flush with the Walls.”

On June 15, 1971, six Boston artists pulled their own Banksy maneuver with the first MFA men’s room exhibition. They even printed invitations on toilet paper saying, “When you gotta show you gotta show.”

Well, that seems like a good tradition to keep alive. I guess it's disappointing that the MFA didn't go along with it, but in a way their dour opposition allows the artists to be rebellious, so perhaps they're just dutifully fulfilling their role.

I also like this tidbit from The Globe's coverage:

Cook, shaggy-haired and with a package of prints tucked in his suit pants, appeared

Surely that's true art in action.

In more pleasant culinary news, I've started a Blogger account for medieval (and occasionally ancient) cookery. I've only put a couple of things up so far, but I have a backlog of redactions kicking around from the past few years, and hopefully I'll be more timely in posting new ones near when I actually cook them.

I just heard an ad on the radio touting a new form of relief for tinnitus: Quietus!

As if that wasn't creepy enough, they followed up with glowing quotes from, apparently, those who've tried it, like "the ringing has finally stopped!" or "I love Quietus. It's silence at last."

Yeeugh.

I know that sometimes companies check a new product name for unfortunate connotations in various languages, but this seems like a pretty big oversight in one's own language. And yes, they do seem quite serious.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot about it. I had read a comment to the effect that Twitter's length constraint wasn't that severe, really, since haiku were much shorter than 140 characters, and they contained plenty of expression. I thought it was a pretty silly way to defend the arbitrary restriction of SMS and thus Twitter, but it did make me wonder whether there weren't, in fact, haiku longer than 140 characters. It proved difficult enough that I don't think anyone would write one by accident, but here, at least, is one.

Cleansed crowns weighed strengths, frowned
Spring's wreathed blooms scourged braves' breasts' clouds
Pitched fights brought fraught thoughts

It's not great art, but at least it has a kind of narrative thread.

Alright, I'm all done with August now. We had Pennsic, and that was very nice, but the number of other things that have gone awry at work, at home, with computers, and with cars is far too high. (Though we're quite happy with the new Scion so far.)

Roughly at the beginning of the month, I noticed that there was some water dripping in the basement. I talked to the upstairs neighbors, and it turned out that the guy on the third floor had been showering when it was dripping, so he said he would get in his friend who was a plumber to look at his place - we'd had some leaks around the bathtub right when we moved in, and we thought it was possible his was just leaking into the pipe chase somehow.

Well, he got called up for army service, and then we were gone at Pennsic, and there was a lot of negotiation on who could be around when and when a plumber could make it in, and the leak which hadn't really looked that bad started looking worse, and started looking like it happened whenever water was run on the second or third floors, and we had a plumber in but he was having trouble finding the source, what with the symptom being at the bottom of the main plumbing column for the house.

We finally worked out that we'd be here this morning and the plumber could do some more invasive searching for it, and when he cut a piece out of our dining room wall, there it was: a big crack maybe three feet long in the side of the cast iron pipe. The one major pipe, incidentally, that the general contractor told us they didn't replace when they stripped out the rest of the plumbing, because it seemed to be just fine.

I am awaiting the actual fix right now (the guy has to put in some supports while he splices it, because the main vertical pipe in your home gets a lot of its support from the bottom). There is a decent chance that it won't turn out to be too severe a fix; if the crack stays isolated, we just need to replace that one bit, fix up the wall, replace some sodden sheet rock in the basement, and do something about some wet and moldy parts of subflooring that were getting dripped on for an unknown period of time. It's even remotely possible that the original developer will pay part of the cost, when we show him pictures of this crack that must have been developing for a long time. Nonetheless, I'm not holding my breath that everything will work out in the easiest possible way.

It is still August, after all.

... after a very long day.

(On the way out our transmission exploded in Rotterdam Junction, and we got a rental truck to let us carry on. And, with that much extra space, it seemed like a good idea to bring back a bunch of stuff from storage as well, so we wound up doing quite a bit of loading and unloading today. But that's all pleasantly behind us, and sleep is before us.)