"the majesty and power of law and justice" king henry iv, part ii: v, ii

I thought I'd share with you what kind of state Rhode Island is.

If you walk past the building that houses the Rhode Island Department of the Attorney General



You'll see an inspiring quote to the right of the door:


A quote from a comic book author. On an engraved placard. I just think that's great.

On the bright side, at least our courthouse doesn't have a monument to the Ten Commandments in it.

"a most notorious pirate" measure for measure: iv, iii

Many thanks to Adam, who pointed out in his blog yesterday that today is National Talk Like a Pirate Day. I actually saw a dude walking down the street today dressed in full pirate gear. It was pretty awesome.

In honor of this fake holiday, here is my favorite pirate joke. (It's, uh, also the only pirate joke I know.)


A guy on vacation in the Carribbean walks into a bar. Sitting at the back corner of the bar is what appears to be a real, honest to goodness pirate - he's got it all: parrot on the shoulder, hat, eye patch, peg leg, hook for a hand, the works. The man approaches the pirate.

"Excuse me, sir," he says. "Are you really a pirate?"

"Aye, that I be," replies the pirate.

"Wow!" the man says. "You must have had such an interesting life and seen so many things! Do you .... do you mind if I ask you how you got the peg leg?"

"Yargh," the pirate says. "That was indeed a terrible day. A rival pirate gang captured me and made me walk the plank. A huge shark grab hold of me leg and was going to drag me down into Davy Jones' Locker, but I managed to escape with only the loss of me leg."

"Wow!" the man says. "And how about the hook -- how did you lose your hand?"

"Aye, that be a terrible day as well. I was on the banks of the Nile, digging up a chest of treasure. I had a precious gem in my hand when a great big crocodile, attracted by the gem's glittering, lunged out of the water and chomped down on me arm, taking the gem and me hand back into the Deep with him."

"Holy crap!" exclaims the man. "What about your eye? How did you lose that?"

"Yarrrrr! That be the worst of them all, ye scaliwag!" the pirate exclaims. "I was lying out on the deck on a clear autumn night, looking up at the stars as we made our way to safe port, when all of a sudden ... a seagull flew over and shit in me eye!!"

"A seagull shit in your eye?" says the man. "Well that doesn't sound so bad; how did you lose the eye from that?"

"Yaaarrr! It was the first day with me hook!"

"but what care i for words?" as you like it: iii; v

I say I'm a recovering English major in my profile, but it's not entirely accurate. More correct would be to say that I'm an English major who's found her calling not to be in reading and writing English, but who still harbors a crush on it as a hobby. I get a kick out of the written word; it's pretty astonishing to think how language has developed and evolved and devolved. I try to be observant of language patterns in our changing culture, and so I read a lot of different, and in some cases, crappy, literature and media. Along the way, I often pick up amusing anecdotes that have not so much to do with language, but more about how absurd life can be.

Like this.

If, like our president, you're not what we call a "reader", here's the Reader's Digest: A British biographer named A.N. Wilson wrote a biography of the British poet John Betjeman, who had, apparently, stated late in his life that he wished he had had more sex. He was married and it was assumed his sex life was dull. Well, the biographer received a letter that supposedly revealed an extramarital affair between Betjeman and another writer; it was apparently a love letter from him, and Wilson printed the letter in the biography saying there had been this affair. Ok, here's the thing: it was a hoax. The letter was a fake, and not only that, but encoded in one section of the letter, using the first letter of each word, was the sentence "A.N. Wilson is a shit." Nice!!!! But ok, here's the other thing: the letter came from an unknown correspondent using a French return address, but the letter was postmarked in London.

Now, I'm not a fancy-schmancy biographer or anything, so maybe I'm overthinking things, but it seems to me that before actually publishing a letter received from an unknown person in a book about someone else, one might take care to research the contents of that letter, and perhaps check other sources to corroborate, or, at the very least, cast some degree of authenticity on the whole matter.

What's worst about the whole thing, for this dumb-ass biographer, is that it seems that he was informed of the hoax by the Sunday London Times, who pointed out the nasty encoded message to him, and he was left lamely saying "I should have smelled a rat." Smelled a rat? No, good sir, it is not that you should have smelled a rat, it is that you should have simply done your job.

* * *

Well, I am trying to finish up a book about Shakespeare, so I'll close for now. Shakespeare: now there's a guy who liked to play with words. If he didn't find a word he liked for what he was trying to express, he just made one up! And a lot of them stuck! To name a few: impartial, jaded, gloomy, premeditated, frugal, and zany. I find that to be ... well .... transtounding.