Inside the Houses of Parliament

CNN has created an interactive tour of the Palace of Westminster or, as its more commonly called. the Houses of Parliament. The tour consists of a number of custom 'Street Views' of the building comprising of annotated 360 degree panoramic videos and images of the building's most famous rooms.

CNN's Houses of Parliament tour allows you to take a guided tour around one of the world's most iconic

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At the Best Date Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

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Kanye West wore a "Make America Great Again" cap on SNL, and he said some pro-Trump things and got booed and cut off.

People reports:

He started off by singing, “I wanna cry right now. Black man in America, you’re supposed to keep what you feel inside right now. And the liberals bully you and tell you what you can and cannot wear, where you and they can’t not stare. And they look at me and say, ‘It’s not fair. How the hell did you get here?’ Well…”

Wearing a Make America Great Again hat, he then delivered an unexpected speech in front of SNL performers like Colin Jost and host Adam Driver as some audience members booed. “Actually, blacks weren’t always Democrats,” he started. “It’s like a plan they did to take the fathers out the homes and promote welfare. Does anybody know about that? That’s the Democratic plan.”

Trump weighed in:

Like many, I don’t watch Saturday Night Live (even though I past hosted it) - no longer funny, no talent or charm. It is just a political ad for the Dems. Word is that Kanye West, who put on a MAGA hat after the show (despite being told “no”), was great. He’s leading the charge!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2018

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"They know they got a problem tomorrow."

Jesus Aguilar, after the Brewers won today and (assuming the Cubs win today), speaking about tomorrow's tiebreaker game for winning the National League Central Division.

The Cubs are up 10-5 in the 8th inning. If somehow they lose, the Brewers win the division outright. That seems unlikely, and the game tomorrow will be at Wrigley Field (because the Cubs have the better record against the Brewers this season). [UPDATE: 10-5 is the final score.]

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A closer look at my sense of humor.

As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also inspired by the 1874 painting "The North-West Passage/It might be done and England should do it."



Anyway. Though I laughed a sort of abstracted intellectual laugh during the play and appreciated it silently much of the time, there was something I saw and thought after the play that reduced me to flat-out hysteria.

I was walking down the path from the theater in the woods on the hill, down toward the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, and in front of me was a young man in a leather jacket that has 2 words painted on the back of it. He had a blanket or something slung over he shoulder. (It was a bit cold, and many people had blankets.) So I couldn't read the entire words, just the ends of the words. I saw "-ORM" above "-OW." I tried to think of what he might have written there, and I figured that "-OW" was "NOW," and it was a political slogan. He wanted something, and he wanted it now. Like Jim Morrison:



So what was it he wanted with this primal urgency? "-ORM"? I thought: REFORM. And the idea of "REFORM NOW" as a political slogan cracked me up to the point of insanity. It's like shouting "Give me moderation or give me death!" "Reform" is just too dull of a wish to demand it NOW!

I was lost in hilarity when the man whipped the blanket off his shoulder and revealed the 2 words. Suddenly the impossibly dull political demand was a blatant, far-off mistake, which only made it funnier to me, especially in contrast to the real words, which were for me nonsense — "STORM CROW." Nonsense is funny too.  You don't get nonsense when you always have the internet at your fingertips, but I did not have it there as I was dissolving in laughter on that hill. To me STORM CROW was just a new way to shout REFORM NOW!

In the clear light of morning, internet at my fingertips, I see the boring information that Storm Crow is a character in "Magic: The Gathering," and "Magic: The Gathering" is a trading card game. There are over 20 billion "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards out there. That's all news to me.  Maybe if you saw "-ORM/-OW" on a young man's leather jacket, you'd figure right off it was "STORM CROW." But I had my 2 minutes of high amusement trying to think what sort of person would get so intense about reform, that he might caterwaul — in the Jim Morrison mode — We want reform and we want it... NOW!!!!!

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"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."

Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.



The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.

Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says:  "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."

Hector explains his behavior:

HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....

Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:

HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).

Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?

"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.

Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?

Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

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Was Lindsay Lohan simply mistaken in believing she needed to save these children from sex trafficking?

I'm reading "Lindsay Lohan gets punched in the face after accusing refugee parents of trafficking, trying to take the kids" (Fox News)(video of the incident at the link). I know it's easy to make fun of Lindsay Lohan, but what does she know, and shouldn't we care?

“Guys, you’re going the wrong way, my car is here, come,” Lohan is heard yelling at the children who continued to follow their parents as she chases them down the street.

How do we know the adults are their parents?

“They’re trafficking children, I won’t leave until I take you, now I know who you are, don’t f--- with me.”

How does she think she knows they are sex traffickers?

While trying to get the children's attention, the actress, who spent a few years living in Dubai, can also be heard shouting Arabic phrases in a what sounds like a Middle Eastern accent.

Lohan speaks Arabic, apparently.

“You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this. You’re taking these children they want to go,” she said before yelling at the boys, “I’m with you. Don’t worry, the whole world is seeing this right now, I will walk forever, I stay with you don’t worry.”

Lohan tries to take a child's hand, and, in the middle of her own live-stream video, gets punched in the face.

I do not know what is going on there. I also don't know what if anything happened with Christine Blasely Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, decades ago in a Maryland house. But we're spending weeks peering into the distant past of 2 hyper-privileged Americans, and some unknown number of children right now are, it is said, dragged into sex slavery, and we let that be merely a passing tale of celebrity weirdness. That Lindsay Lohan. What was she thinking? But it's not really a story about 2 children arriving in Moscow from Syria and a laughable actress punched in the face. It's a story of thousands of children, all over the world. Do people even care if Lohan was wrong or right? Why are things so distorted and out of proportion?

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"The Queen's first openly gay footman has stood down after reportedly being demoted for 'courting publicity.'"

The Daily Mail reports. What a fantastic job:

Ollie Roberts, 21, was required to accompany Her Majesty on all her carriage rides and carry out other duties like collecting her mail at Buckingham Palace and walking the Corgis.

But you're not allowed to call attention to yourself in this fantastic job!

The former airman was told he would be bumped down to an ordinary footman after the palace became concerned about his increasingly high profile, with several articles in gay publications.

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"And the Chicago Cubs have company at the top of the National League Central."

First place mood. #LetsGo pic.twitter.com/4fwwlDgwMO

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) September 30, 2018

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"Saturday Night Live" does a fantastic cold open with Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh.

I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.

1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot of the details observed in the hearing: turning the pages angrily, drinking water, sniffling.

2. Yesterday, I was predicting that "SNL" would do a Kavanaugh cold open, and I pictured lines like "I like beer, do you like beer," and I got them.

3. The character of the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was very well observed, conveying apt criticisms that I myself have about how she was used. The SNL castmember, Aidy Bryant, did a nice job of playing the bland professional who found herself in a place where she didn't belong, asked to do something she wouldn't be permitted even to begin to do.

4. The Lindsey Graham part was a complete disaster. Kate McKinnon will get credit for suppressing any vanity and dressing as a man, but there were 2 things wrong. First, Graham was the loudest, angriest person in the room last Thursday, so McKinnon needed to top Matt Damon, and Damon set a high baseline. McKinnon has a less powerful voice than Damon, unsurprisingly, so the loudness may have been physically impossible, but she also couldn't begin to match him in conveying intense anger. Second, the writers gave her a script premised on the idea that Graham is a gay man. Some of the lines were like lines in a dating ad, saying he's 5'11" and "uncut," and the part ended with "This right now, this is my audition for Mr. Trump's cabinet and also for a regional production of 'The Crucible,' and let me tell you, queen, I was good." Queen???!!! Did I mishear that? I replayed it 10 times, and we turned on the closed captioning, which simply omitted the word (after pausing, so apparently the closed captioner didn't know what to do).

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