Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets

I have a subscription with Audible.com for audio books. With my subscription I can download any two audio books a month.

After nine years I have fished all the gems out of their catalog and now have to scan the new releases every month. Fortunately they have quite a few new releases on a regular basis.

To facilitate search the list, I subscribe to their new releases RSS feed which allows me to go through the titles and a brief description.

My eye caught and read one of the titles as, "Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets." As a concept, that made my mind stumble and I had to go back and read the full entry.

At which point I read the title correctly as, "Dame Edith Evans Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets," and was slightly disappointed.

Not that I am down on Dame EE, but she was reading Shakespeare back when Kaiser Wilhelm II looked like he still had a long and glorious reign ahead of him. Plus the picture they chose to represent her has more than a bit of the "air of dried prune" about it.

All of which brought me around to thinking that Dame Edna reading Shakespeare might not be such a bad idea after all.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

United Breaks Guitars

The tale of a musician who has a bone to pick with United Airlines. They broke his guitar and gave him the run-around, so he promised their rep that he would write three songs and create videos for them about his experience. This song is the first.



The full story is available here.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

The French: Arrogant, Cheap, but Nicely Dressed

At least when they leave France, according to a recent survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.

The French, said at least one self-proclaimed expert on the subject, find their country so wonderful that they rarely leave, thus they never bother with foreign languages and customs. So leaving France causes them to become stressed, making them seem arrogant and demanding.

I guess I could buy that for most of the country, though I suspect a certain percentage of the population of Paris must be stressed even within France.

Anyway, I am jumping on this excuse. Living in California, which must be comparable in wonder to France given how many people keep showing up here uninvited, explains my arrogance, cheapness, and tendency to add avocados to just about everything.

It certainly explains my not being well dressed.