7 May 2010: Mating with Neanderthals

Today’s big headline news is that human beings mated with Neanderthals over 80,000 years ago.  I don’t know why scientists are just discovering this now.  Tennessee Williams explored such a relationship between Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play.  And, of course, we also see such relationships being acted out…

5 May 2010: Ted Nugent on Sarah Palin

Writing on Sarah Palin in Time magazine’s double-issue on The 100 Most Influential People In The World, conservative gun-toting sexagenarian rock guitarist Ted Nugent asserts that “the independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah.  In the way she lives, what she says and how she dedicates herself…

Chinglish, Japlish, Kapish?

An article by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times gives some wonderfully wacky illustrations of English as it is written and spoken today in China—e.g., the Dongda Anus Hospital for what should be the Dongda Proctology Hospital, restaurants offering “fried enema” instead of “fried sausage,” and signs in parks which urge visitors to treat grass humanely, with such admonisments…

29 April 2010: All Men Are Dogs!

How-to guru Karen Salmansohn has sold over a million books, among them How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Successful Dog Trainers.  She might have gotten the idea from Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, wherein the haughty heroine treats one suitor like a dog by making him jump…

28 April 2010: What Do Kansans Look Like?

Guess who helped to write the controversial law which allows cops in Arizona to arrest anyone whom they suspect to be illegal aliens on the basis of how they look and sound?  Like it or not, it’s Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who is now running for secretary of state in…

25 April 2010: Fashion’s New “Wetback Look”

Now that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed Immigration Bill SB1070 into law, which allows cops in Arizona to arrest anyone who looks suspiciously illegal, it’s time for the fashion industry to come to the rescue. According to California Congressman Brian Bilbray, cops “will look at the kind of dress you wear.  There is a…

New Playwriting Award for Asian-Americans!

Gregg Henry, Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, sent out this press release earlier this week. The Paul Stephen Lim Asian-American Playwriting Award Supported by the University of Kansas Endowment Association, this award is given to the outstanding full-length or one-act play on any subject written by an Asian-American student, in honor…

Miss Utah Made Me Do It!

I was smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day when I finally quit in 1994.  And now, sixteen years later, when the nurse weighed me at the doctor’s office prior to my annual physical, there was no avoiding the fact that I’ve packed on sixty pounds since my last cigarette.  So how did this happen? Let me start…

4 April 2010: Lesbian Albatrosses!

The cover story of The New York Times Magazine today is about Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who has been studying a colony of albatrosses in Hawaii.  Young’s research reveals that, not only do albatrosses mate for life, but many of the “couples” she has been studying are, in fact, Sapphic females.  Which leads me to…