Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The performance was certainly inspiringly passionate, but the dialogue was repetetive and the pacing dragged uncomfortably -- I think the choice to sacrifice poetry and wit for a more raw realism actually undermined the presentation a bit, and the conclusion might have been more effective at a shorter, more skit-like length. The lighting design was, in my opinion, uninspired though reasonably effective -- a bright overhead security light and a less intense porch light adequately evoked the mood and suprisingly did not backlight the actors badly, even with their blocking constrained by the vehicles occupying the center-left portion of the set, but I thought that it was rather cliche. The space was used well, the vehicles in the driveway and the luggage on the edge of the porch forcing the players to make dramatic arcing approaches to each other instead of advancing and retreating in straight lines, and the male lead managed to make each finger-wagging pass by the hood of the car upstage seem as though he was launching himself off the fender without actually moving any faster. The sound was well done, clearly audible from my seat across the street, without being overwhelmingly loud as long as I had the windows closed. One forty-five in the morning was, however, a fairly inconvenient show time, as the final curtain was not until two thirty or so, and this revieweer had intended to make a much earlier night of it.

"I have a friend, K who started a Socialist Party group in our city. At first it was just a small group of like-minded individuals working in the community to help make better conditions for workers (they helped people get legal help if they'd been wrongfully terminated, etc.), protesting certain local government actions, running for office, and they had a community garden in a lower income area. After a while the hipsters heard about the group, and since it's 'cool' to be a socialist, they started showing up. Attendance at the group has quadrupled, but the actual work of the group is way way down. Everyone wants shirts and stickers, and beer nights. No one wants to work in the garden. No one wants to show up to city council meetings to discuss ways to improve the city. No one wants to run for office. No one wants to go into the 'bad' part of town to look for people who need social justice. Its just a social club. So, K is quitting the group he started, and chartered, because he feels he can find a better place to spend his time. I've seen a similar pattern happen to groups all over the city. The original GLBT group quit helping kids who'd been kicked out by their parents for coming out; now they have parties and parades. There's a new group (made up of the old group's original members) who does the hard work now. And on and on. It isn't an age divide either. So, among my group of friends there is a lot of disdain for hipsters, not for what they wear (we look quite similar) but for the shallowness of what they do. They are hanger's on, they are posers. And they displace and destroy the hard work of people who are genuinely interested in doing something. [It's] frustrating." -- miss elizabeth, comment at Pandagon (I have not yet found the Pandagon post this was posted as a comment to); quoted earlier by realinterrobang

Since linguistics is a science, we should be able to perform linguistic experiments. So I'm (perhaps symptomatically) experimenting with a construction in English. So far I haven't decided whether I like it. Maybe I'll be able to decide after I've done what I describe in my example:

There's a level of wrongness I'm feeling that tells me maybe I should reach for the basil and cocoa powder^[*] to try to head off even-wrongerness.

[*] Cheap migraine remedy -- nowhere near as effective as the prescription ones, so best to take it early.