One of my favorite movies is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (I think it is better than the play). This is probably because of my love-hate relationship with Hamlet and how it shows that Tom Stoppard understood That Bard’s play far better than That Bard. The thing about Hamlet is that it isn’t a good play, but it is a very interesting play. Frankly, I think the reason scholars love it so much is because it makes no sense and they think That Bard couldn’t possibly have written something bad, despite the overwhelming evidence.

Hamlet runs about four and a half hours long, and yet in one brief speech in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (the movie and the play), Rosencrantz sums up the ridiculousness of the plot in one short speech:

To which Guildenstern (pretending to be Hamlet) replies, “I can’t imagine!”

Maybe it is more correct to say that this is what Hamlet ought to be. The truth is, at the start of the play, Hamlet is upset that his father is dead and that his mother married his uncle, but not that he was screwed out of being king. Regardless, he is just sad and disappointed. It is only when his father’s ghost tells him[1] that his murder must be avenged[2] that Hamlet starts behaving badly.

So the play should really be about a guy who gets screwed out of being king and as a result, does something about it. Instead, we get all this nonsense about Claudius killing Hamlet’s father. In truth, the play would be much better if it were told from Claudius’ standpoint. He has a real problem on his hands with Hamlet, who he would just kill except that his wife (and the only reason he is king) loves her only son dearly. None of this really matters except that Hamlet shows all the signs of being a first draft That Bard never got around to fixing.

What I find interesting is that I learned a new word that almost seems as though it were created for Hamlet. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, while the title characters are watching the tragedians rehearse, they see Gonzago being murdered by his brother. Guildenstern remarks, “Not exactly fraternal.” To which Player responds, “Not exactly avuncular, as time goes on.” I had heard the word “avuncular” before, but I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up. It is basically the same as “fraternal” except that it is for uncles instead of brothers. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it thus:

So now I know a new word, and have more proof that Tom Stoppard understood Hamlet better than That Bard.

[1] Typical of this long-winded play, it takes 15 minutes from Hamlet being told of his father’s ghost to him actually seeing it.

[2] Hamlet’s father says it in, again, typically long-winded fashion, but here is the critical bit:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.

I just watched the full half-hour interview of Jon Stewart on Bill O’Reilly’s show. The first half of it is quite worth watchin:

The best you will ever do in a political argument of this type is get your opponent to admit that you make some good points, just as Jules says to Vincent at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. But this is rare—especially in a public setting. The way I know I’ve won an argument with someone is when their argument keeps getting changed. This is how I know that Stewart beat O’Reilly all to hell. O’Reilly starts out by saying that no one should be allowed to the Whitehouse who has defended a cop killer. Stewart brings up two examples of others who have done so without O’Reilly flying into a rage (most important, Bono who visited Bush Jr. in the Whitehouse), Suddenly, it isn’t about the fact that Common wrote approvingly about someone he claims was wrongly accused of killing a cop; now it is about the fact that Common visited this person in jail. And it goes on like that. If the argument went on long enough, O’Reilly’s entire case would be that Common has a high-carb diet.

O’Reilly is not really what most people think he is. He has a number of liberal positions on gun control and early-term abortion. But these are just the smokescreen of an smart hater. The entire appeal of his show (and most of Faux News) is that it allows angry people something to be angry about. So O’Reilly has these nice beliefs so he can say, “I can’t be pigeonholed.” But the fact remains that his show is only about anger. He could be a socialist and still do his show. Politics doesn’t really matter. What matters is, “Look at this outrage!”

I’m late getting to this, but I wanted to comment on something that President Obama said on 60 Minutes: “Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.” So I guess I need my head examined—but people have been saying that for years, so it shouldn’t shock me that the President of the United States has joined the chorus.

Let me make one thing clear: there are a lot of people whose deaths would make the world a better place and Osama bin Laden was definitely high on that list while he was still alive. I’m not sorry that he’s dead; the world is a better place.

Justice Was Done?

My first complaint is: was justice done? We are at war with al-Qaeda, so we have put them in the place of a country. As far as I know (and I am no expert on this, so I could be wrong), it is against the rules of war to attempt to assassinate the leaders of the country we are at war with. For me, this is like the torture debate. Even if those we fight torture our people, we do not torture their people because that is not who we are. President Obama touched on this when he talked about how we provided bin Laden with an honorable funeral.

Of course, that’s all fantasy because we aren’t in fact at war with al-Qaeda. This was a police action—albeit, carried out by the military. Osama bin Laden was akin to a guy who hires a hitman to kill his wife. All the people who actually killed the roughly 3000 people on 9/11 are dead. So I’m against the military storming the bin Laden compound and shooting him, but not for the reasons you might think. So far as I know, bin Laden ran into a small room when he saw the troops. When the troops entered the room, they found bin Laden hiding behind two of his wives. The troops pushed the women aside. I have not heard any credible reporting that bin Laden was even armed, much less prepared to shoot. In other words, he could easily have been taken alive. But he wasn’t and it is clear why: this was an assassination mission; they had no intention of taking him alive.

That’s what police do, right? They don’t just shoot suspects. And let us not forget that in our culture Osama bin Laden was just a suspect. I think he should have been treated like the banal criminal who he was. Now he’s a martyr for the cause.

The Good Guys

My second complaint is why it is such a big deal that those 3000 deaths were American. Iraqi mothers don’t grieve when their innocent child are accidentally (I use the term advisedly) killed? For that matter, are the wives and children of bin Laden not grieving over his death? Death is death and let’s not let ourselves believe the myth that American lives matter more just because we happened to live in the same country.

But I’m a child. I still hang on to all those ideals I learned in civics classes. I still believe the Cold War rhetoric that taught me that we were different from those other countries that tortured and invaded and set children against their parents. But intellectually, I know: we do torture, we just call it something else; we do invade, we just claim we have just cause or have been invited; and we set children against their parents as all over the nation school children are told to report to the police their drug using parents. But emotionally, I still believe we’re the guys in the white hats. Although Obama didn’t mean it this way, I do need to have my head examined.

As I was browsing through Strunk and White[1] for an upcoming article, I noted some examples of the “wrong”‘ way to write a sentence and the “right” way. And, of course, I agreed; even though I am not a “Strunk and White” man[2], it is hard not to agree with them on most matters grammatical. There is a very big difference between grammatical analysis and writing, however. Consider the following example from the 50th Anniversary Edition of Stunk and White.

I know the second is grammatically correct, just as sure as I know there are times when a writer would rightly use the grammatically wrong construction.[3]

How can I say this? How can I defend it? Very easily it turns out. When I write a sentence, paragraph, article, or book, I just don’t care if the writing is grammatically correct. I just care that the writing works. For example, in a recent song, I wrote:

The issue isn’t that this is poetry and it is okay to play with words and syntax in poetry. I would do and do do the same thing in prose—I just can’t think of any examples at the moment. My point is, however, that while Strunk and White and Fowler and Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences and The Chicago Manual of Style are important to anyone who wants to write well, one must be willing to let them all go to hell. This is writing, not grammar school.

[1] I don’t mean to be cryptic. The book is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little). But everybody calls it Strunk and White—perhaps because there are many other books with this title (but none that I know of are about English grammar; they are about things like interior design and knitting) or because writers are a bunch of pretentious twats. On second thought: it is definitely because writers are a bunch of pretentious twats.

[2] Roy Blount Jr. wrote, “After Scott Simon interviewed me on NPR about whether the word ‘e-mail’ needs a hyphen (yes it does) [No it doesn’t! -FM], some listeners, including friends of mine, wondered why I had answered in the affirmative when asked, in passing, ‘Are you a drunken white man?’ Those listeners misheard. ‘Strunk and White man’ was what Scott said.”

[3] In this sentence “sure” is an adverb and does not need an “ly” to announce how I am using it!

According to MSNBC, Donald Trump has announced that he will not run for President of the United States. This is no surprise. I don’t know any reasonable person who thought he would. But the question remains: why did he pretend he was going to run? I don’t think it was to improve the ratings of his show; I think it was just a chance to get a whole lot of attention and he is addicted to attention. This comes on the heals of his “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” moment with President Obama. Trump said he would show his 2010 tax return if Obama would so his long-form birth certificate. Well, Obama showed his long-form birth certificate (which pretty much put an end to Trump’s entire platform), but Trump didn’t show his tax return. But we already knew that Trump was a liar, so no big deal.

Many have said that Trump would not run for President because he would have to give up his show. I don’t buy that. Sure, he makes a lot of money from the show, but it isn’t much compared to even the lowest estimates of his net worth. His net worth, however, is the reason he won’t run. A major part of his “brand” is that he is super rich: multi-billion-dollar rich. If he had run for President, he would have had to disclose how much money he makes. Most recently, he has claimed that he is worth $7 billion. But we all know what a liar he is. If it turned out that he was worth less than a billion dollars, it would have destroyed his celebrity and therefore his life.

Thus, we won’t have Don Trump to kick around any more!

PS: I have a huge soft-spot for ol’ Tricky Dick. Such is my love for the man that I have written an entire puppet play about him. I’ll post it if anyone asks (and no one will).

Almost every day—often many times per day—I ride the Santa Rosa City Bus. Inside each bus are signs that explain (1) the cash fare price for riding for a two-hour period, (2) the City Pass price for riding for a whole month, and (3) the Ticketbook price—ticketbooks being a collection of tickets that are equivalent to a single cash fare. This is what it looks like for the cash fare:

Fare Type       Price
Adult           $1.25
Youth           $1.00
Half            $0.60

The “half” price is for senior citizens and the disabled. I’m sure you can see the obvious problem right away. Sixty cents is most definitely not half the adult fare. But okay, I’ll go with it. After all, there is no longer a half-cent piece, so they couldn’t charge our older riders 62.5 cents. But make no mistake, while youths are getting a 20% discount for being (what?) youthful, oldsters are not just getting a 50% discount for being old; they are getting an extra 2% discount for accounting ease. Thus, they get a 52% discount.

Things get even worse when it comes to the ticket books. Here are the prices:

Fare Type       Ticket Number   Book Price      Ticket Price
Adult           50              $60             $1.20
Youth           40              $38             $0.95
Half            40              $22             $0.55

First note that adults must buy more tickets: 50 instead of just 40 for the youths and oldsters. This seems wrong. Adults are already paying more than the others. Why should they have to buy more tickets at once? But this is a minor, if annoying issue. The more important issue is the per ticket cost.

The per ticket price for adults and youths is reduced by five cents per ride—hardly a great incentive to buy a ticket book. And note that the youth ticket price is a greater percent discount than the adult ticket price (5% compared to the adult 4% discount), even though adults are forced to buy 25% more tickets at once. The bigger annoyance here is the half ticket price. Santa Rosa City Bus, in its infinite wisdom has chosen to give these riders a five cent discount too, even though they already have a 52% discount. What’s more, they skipped the opportunity to reverse the cash fare inequity by making ticketbooks $25 for 40, and increased it by giving half fares an even larger discount (an 8.3% discount compared to the adult 4% discount). An adult ticket is $1.20, but a half ticket is not $0.60 as logic would dictate—it is $0.55!

It is only when we get to the monthly passes that the full extent of Santa Rosa City Bus’ innumeracy is seen. Here are the prices:

Fare Type       Price
Adult           $40
Youth           $30
Half            $20

At long last! For monthly passes, the half fare really does cost half of what the adult fare costs. Of course, this fact only proves that the errors on the daily fare and ticketbook prices are no fluke, and rather the result of ignorance or laziness. But the monthly pass prices are not without problem—this time with the youth prices. When paying daily, youths get a 20% discount compared to adult riders; when paying monthly, they get a 25% discount.

The reason for all of this is to make all of the numbers even and easily remembered. One can tell this by just perusing the numbers. Of course, it would be much more memorable if a 40 pack “half” ticketbook cost $25 rather than $22. So in the end, one is left with the conclusion that whoever set these prices did it cavalierly, without regard to logic or aesthetics.

It is worth noting that Sonoma County Transit—which is not nearly as good a transit company—does not suffer from these problems. Whoever set their prices, did it correctly. As a result, I am not mentally assaulted every time I board a county bus the way I am every time I board a city bus.

For someone who really likes movies, I find a surprising number of them really boring. What’s more, I can tell you when I find them boring: after one hour. In over half the movies I watch, I look at my watch at some point because I’m bored and I’m wondering when whatever “entertainment” I’m watching will be over. In almost all cases it is within five minutes of one hour. I take this to mean that most films should only be about an hour because they only have an hour’s worth of creativity (or less—much less).

Sometimes, I will look at my watch earlier—say, after a half-hour. But nothing could prepare me for the experience I had yesterday when I went to see Thor with my brother. After only three minutes (2% of the film!) I looked at my watch. Three minutes and I was already willing to leave the theater.

The film had the problems you would expect, but what really bugged me was the character of Loki. I know nothing of Thor, but I knew immediately that Loki was the bad guy. Why? Because he was the skinny, thoughtful guy. Heroes aren’t thoughtful! Heroes just rush in, knowing that everything will work out because the skinny, thoughtful screenwriters have deemed it so.

Still, there was something weird about this film: the actors. It had some really good actors and I am most definitely not referring to Natalie Portman. It had Anthony Hopkins (okay, he’s been in a lot of dreck) and Stellan Skarsgård. Even relative newcomer Tom Hiddleston was good. I don’t even have anything particularly bad to say about Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth. (I could, however, go on and on about how much I hated Natalie Portman in this film.) How was it, I thought, that this movie that in just about every other way was terrible had good actors and good acting from pretty much all of the cast?

And then I got my answer, right after Thor went to sulk that he would never again see Jane Foster (Portman)—at least until the sequel.

Oh my God! What in the hell is the greatest Shakespearean actor of all time directing this stupid film? Does he owe back taxes? Is someone blackmailing him? I just don’t get it. But don’t let what I’ve said about the actors cause you to give this movie a chance. It is dreck, dreck, dreck. But it does show that Branagh is not just a great actor: he is a great director of actors. (He is not, as far as I can tell however, a great director generally. Maybe I’ll write more about that later—but probably not.)

Regardless, this film should have been titled, Thor: God of Boredom.

In Sam Harris’ excellent The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values,[1] he puts forth an excellent experiment called The Asian Disease Problem. Here is how Harris presents the problem:

The reason this is interesting is because there is no difference between the options. In each case, Program A saves 200 people and kills 400 people, and Program B has a one-third chance of saving everyone and a two-thirds chance of killing everyone. To me it is easy. I am the most unlucky person alive. So if I have a two-thirds chance of killing everyone, I’m going to kill everyone. Therefore, I feel confident that regardless of how the problem was put to me (which it wasn’t—I was given both, just as you just were), I would go for the sure thing: save 200 lives. But what about other people? Would they really change their answers based upon how the question was asked?

I decided to find out, even though countless graduate students have done this to death. I asked 14 of my friends (it’s hard to believe I have that many, I know). The results I got were not as stark as I had expected, based upon what Harris wrote, but they were pretty much in accordance with what my intuition indicated.

When the first question was asked, four people picked Program A and two picked Program B. That makes sense: you are telling people they can save 200 people and you don’t even mention the 400 who will necessarily die. When the second question was asked, four people picked Program A and four picked Program B: an even split.

I don’t have much to add to this. According to Harris, what this shows is that people overvalue certainty. So, the certainty of saving 200 lives is really compelling. Just the same, the certainty of losing 400 lives is really repugnant. Thus, when we are asked, “Do you want to save 200 people, and by the way, 400 others will die,” we jump on that option. But when we are asked, “Do you want to kill 400 people, and by the way, 200 others will live,” we figure, “Well, maybe I’ll try my luck at saving them all, even though the odds aren’t that good.

The brain in a funny thing.

[1] I will be writing more about this just as soon as I can find my many pages of notes. You see, I just moved and things are even more out of control than usual. Plus, I am working on the pilot of the first Frankly Curious Media TV show called, The Post, Post Modern Comedy Hour. Just in case you were wondering: it’s a half-hour long. Oh! And here’s the theme song:

It’s the post, post modern comedy hour
You mega-dose of curiosity power
Out goes illusion! Out goes myth!
In comes compassion, knowledge, and bliss
It’s the post, post modern comedy hour!

(Video soon to come!)

Franklin Graham is an Idiot

This is interesting. The only reason that his father wasn’t such an embarrassment was that his father didn’t talk so much. What evil men—both.

Late Breaking News from Mark

¹⁷ Now as He was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?”
¹⁸ So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.
¹⁹ “You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.'”
²⁰ And he answered and said to Him, “Teacher, all these things I have kept from my youth.”
²¹ Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “One thing you lack: go your way, sell whatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me.”
²² But he was sad at this word, and went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
²³ Then Jesus looked around and said to His disciples, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!”
²⁴ And the disciples were astonished at His words. But Jesus answered again and said to them, “Children, how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!
²⁵ “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first meet Hamlet in his eponymous play, he says with great delight, “My excellent good friends! How dost thou, / Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, / how do ye both?” Apart from the opening line (My excellent good friends!) this does not strike me as wonderful poetry, but I am no Shakespearean scholar. Nevertheless, I can certainly tell that this is rubbish compared to the opening of Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” [1] It is even rubbish compared to other parts of Hamlet—soon after these lines, he writes some of his most beautiful verse, “What a piece of work is a man! / How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, / in form and moving how express and admirable, / in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like / a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! / And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man / delights not me.” But the point is not that the lines that Hamlet greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with are bad. The point is that there is no hint of irony.[2] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends, and while Hamlet may not, at that moment, delight in “man,” he most clearly does delight in seeing his old friends.

As we all know, the King gives Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a sealed royal document to give to the King of England when they go there with Hamlet. Hamlet, however, in a typically ridiculous Shakespearean plot twist, escapes from the trip by bribing some pirates, but not before stealing the document and replacing it with a facsimle. He had found out that the letter said that the King of England should kill Hamlet. In response, Hamlet wrote a letter telling the King of England to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He explains this to Horatio in Act 5, Scene 2: “An earnest conjuration from the king, / As England was his faithful tributary, / As love between them like the palm might flourish, / As peace should still her wheaten garland wear / And stand a comma ‘tween their amities, / many such-like ‘As’es of great charge, / That, on the view and knowing of these contents, / Without debatement further, more or less, / He should the bearers put to sudden death, / Not shriving-time allow’d.”

If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern knew what the letter said (or even had some idea), Hamlet might be forgiving for acting as he did. But we know that these two men were completely honest. First, there is no indication in the play that they knew the letter to the King of England commanded him to kill Hamlet. Second, if they had know, they certainly wouldn’t have delivered the letter to the King after Hamlet ran away. So Hamlet had absolutely no cause for killing his “Excellent good friends!” Instead, he could have simply destroyed the letter or replaced it with one that requested something benign. But he instead choose to have his friends killed—successfully we learn at the end of Act 5, Scene 2 when the English Ambassador arrives to announces, “The sight is dismal; / And our affairs from England come too late: / The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, / To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d, / That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead: / Where should we have our thanks?”

Thus, I say: Hamlet was not a hero; Hamlet was not an anti-hero; Hamlet was an asshole.[3]

[1] Kenneth Branagh (and I mean this literally) is the best Shakespearean actor who ever existed. Shakespeare does not deserve him. Listen to him perform this speech in the “video” below:

[2] In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film, Hamlet’s reading of these lines is not so clear. Branagh speaks them with some suspicion. However, his suspicion seems to dissipate after Gildenstern admits, “My lord, we were sent for.” This reading by Reece Dinsdale as Gildenstern is the best I have seen, and it dispels any indication that Rosencrantz and Gildenstern mean any ill to Hamlet. It is Hamlet who mistreats them (and pretty much everyone else in the play, Ophelia most cruelly).

[3] Note also that when Hamlet traps the king using the players, they are forced to flee the castle for fear of their very lives. It is reasonable to assume that they were not paid for their performance either. Here is another example of Hamlet using innocents without a thought to the consequences on them.