john_j_enright

A "serpent-handling" West Virginia pastor died after his rattlesnake bit him during a church ritual, just as the man had apparently watched a snake kill his father years before.

Guar gum, which is also used to make sauces and ice cream, is a main ingredient of the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process used to extract oil and gas from oil shale.

We saw Ian McDiarmid last night on stage, playing the title character in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.



McDiarmid is most famous as the guy who plays the Emperor in Star Wars.

I can't say I cared much for the play, but McDiarmid's performance was very impressive. He was quite spry for a man of 67, and his vocal technique as an actor seemed to outmatch everyone else on stage. He seemed to move through a couple of octaves when speaking, without drawing attention to the changes in pitch. He projected his voice even when apparently speaking quietly and reflectively. And his pronunciation was crisp and distinct, articulating his consonants and vowels, again while seeming natural about it. Mind you, he was on stage with a lot of very experienced Chicago Shakespeareans, who have spent a lot of time on that same stage, so his superiority was actually a bit puzzling to me.

The play is unlike other Shakespeare plays, in various ways, including having an extremely simple story line. Shakespeare's plots are usually complicated. Current scholarly thinking has Shakespeare writing two thirds of the play, with Thomas Middleton writing the rest.

For some reason, this production recast two female prostitutes into one lascivious male soldier/prostitute. I didn't know this going in, but I suspected genders had been altered while watching the play. The dialog and relationships weren't making sense to me. So I researched it today.

Despite the players' acting chops,
gender switching often flops.

“Let’s compare apples to apples,” the other CNN host said to the DNC chair. “It seems to me the criticism you’re offering is that Mitt Romney went into businesses and laid people off. But wouldn’t the apples to apples comparison be that’s exactly what Barack Obama did when he touts the auto industry as a feather in his cap, didn’t the federal government and Barack Obama go in and layoff thousands of autoworkers to save that industry?”

An amateur video, filmed by an annoyed Manhattanite and broadcast Tuesday on WABC-TV, showed the mayor landing and taking off several times over the weekend from the East 34th Street helipad, where trips on Saturday and Sunday have been expressly banned for more than a decade.