How much I find Viola/Olivia really uncomfortable. Specifically, I always dislike it when productions have Olivia kiss Viola at the end of the play, and suddenly Viola is into it. (This happened in the first production of Twelfth Night I ever saw, actually.) I mean, I know it's all about gender fluidity and everything, but Viola has spent the ( Read more... )

…you are excited by the fact that the opening voiceover in this trailer (which is set in 17th-century New England) forms its first question - "What came we to this wilderness to find?" - without the use of auxiliary 'do'.

The Witch Trailer and Poster: 1630s New England Was a Scary PlaceRead more... )

A PBS commercial for Nova (for next week's episode, called "The Great Math Mystery") just asked, "Is math an invention, or a discovery?" and my brain so does not understand how to wrap itself around how you would even begin to answer that question.

Of course, I am someone who took an extraordinarily long time to understand that 2+3 was the same as ( Read more... )

According to Nicholas Orme in Medieval Children, "faunt" is a medieval word for "infant." Which, it occurs to me, means that Little Lord Fauntleroy is really redundant: it basically boils down to "little lord infant king."

I don't really know what to do with this fact.

Remember that "Time-Travelling Celebrities" article/meme/hashtag/whatever that was going around a little while ago? I was scrolling down this page:
http://bjws.blogspot.com/2014/03/1500s-european-families.html

and got to this portrait:
Adriaen Thomasz Key ( Read more... )

Once again, Linda Holmes writes a paragraph that might as well have been written for me ( Read more... )

The summary of the book I'm thinking about requesting from the library suggests that the book is motivated by a "revenge pot."

Death by ceramics! A pot haunted by the ghost of a 17th-century nobleman! It can throw itself around, poltergeist-fashion!

You know, it occurs to me that if I never see another movie that makes a parallel between a nature program and a character's sex life, it will in fact be too soon ( Read more... )

It's probably at least a *little* weird that I just got an eyelash in my eye, yelped "ow!" and then giggled and said, "eyes, that are the frailest and softest things, that shut their coward gates on atomies..."

But it distracted me until I could get the eyelash out, so I guess there's that.

Someone on TV just asked someone else if he could get back in time. I thought, what a weird question, why would you--

Oh. Not go back in time. Never mind.