What I’m Blogging

So what are you going to be on Halloween. According to this innocuous blog quiz, I should be out hunting for Dorthy and her little dog. Alright, I’m getting on with it… I’m flying, and I’m not your pretty OK?

Your Halloween Costume Should Be

A Flying Monkey

What Should You Be For Halloween?

Sunday morning. Presumably a morning of rest and relaxation. As usual, presumptions are wrong. This Sunday morning is the dreaded time of change, or more accurately, it is time to change time itself.

…what have the Romans ever done for us?…

In my house we are in the midst of an anomaly in time. I am trapped between time zones. In years gone past it was the job of the first to wake to change the clocks to the arbitrarily assigned time. Now with the advent of Network Time Protocol, computers, and clever algorithms, some clocks, change themselves. All my laptops changed. One old PC which I keep for sentimental reasons did not, but it sill thinks the date is 1985 so it’s not much of a bother. The TV, VCR, and DVD all made the transition. The microwave and the wall clocks were left behind. I’m on temporal clean up detail to gather the stray time pieces and return them to the flock.

It’s bad enough that there are different timezones and I have to calculate what time it is in London when I want to call the Queen. We could have just stopped with that nonsense, but no! Ben Franklin has to throw daylight savings time into the mix, and twice a year we have to go through this mess. My wife has a better solution - one time to rule them all. That’s it. It would be the same time everywhere. No zones. No daylight savings. It’s off the wall, people would have to get rid of their attachment to the old Roman division of the day into 2 halves of 12 hours. But honestly, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It’s the birthday of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born near Dublin, Ireland (1751). He’s best known for his play The Rivals (1775), about a couple, Lydia Languish and Captain Jack Absolute, who want to get married against the wishes of their elders, Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute. The first performance was an hour too long and much too bawdy for the audience. Sheridan rewrote it, and the play was re-produced 11 days later to an enthusiastic reception. The play became so successful that Sheridan was able to buy the theater it played in.

Richard Sheridan said, “The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is: Don’t we all anyway? Might as well get paid for it.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further bawdy theatrical reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK