CAESAR: The thought, dear Antony that our countrymen Hath misconstrued but three things through the year Is an assessment most untrue for that Cassius Georg, who hath a lean and hungry look about him, and who hath misconstrued everything, is immeasurably off from our fellow countrymen and that it was not meet that he be counted among them.
a man wrote an article about this mysterious new Fan Fiction craze, and oh boy did we all learn a lot from it.
okay but that should be a folk blessing though?
may your days be bright, your nights be sweet, and your sense of self-importance equivalent to a middle-aged man writing about a topic he doesn’t understand and hasn’t bothered to research.
Once upon a time I was in the world’s worst production of Hamlet. I’m not exaggerating–our Hamlet was a ginger who didn’t know his lines, our Gertrude had food poisoning, our Ophelia had never been in a play before, our ghost missed his entrance more than once and I had to ad-lib blank verse until he came back on, and in the midst of all this clowning around, I was the world’s most exasperated Horatio.
Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the play, there’s a scene where Hamlet and Horatio talk to a friendly gravedigger, who makes a lot of jokes and just generally alleviates the uninterrupted sense of suffocating tragedy–and in our case, suffocating fucking boredom–that is Hamlet. And for some reason we’d blocked out this like slapstick Three Stooges bit where the gravedigger tosses the Yorick skull to Hamlet, who talks to it for a bit like an absolute fucking loon, and then tosses it to me to catch and hold until the end of the scene because, in case you haven’t noticed, HORATIO IS HAMLET’S BITCH, EVEN WHEN HAMLET DOESN’T KNOW HIS FUCKING LINES AND HORATIO HAS TO BE ONSTAGE FOR AN EXTRA FIVE SCENES TO MOUTH THEM TO HIM WHEN HE FUCKING FORGETS. WHY FOR THE LOVE OF RICHARD BURBAGE DIDN’T THEY JUST MAKE ME HAMLET???
But, uh, that’s beside the point.
Anywhoo, I’m standing around like a piece of fucking furniture like Horatio usually does while Hamlet is chatting up the gravedigger, and because this dude is a comedian at heart (BAD CASTING CAN YOU SAY BAD CASTING) he decides to change the blocking. He catches the skull, kisses it smack on the teeth, says, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew thee well!” and just fucking flings that motherfucker over his head. Now, what you have to know for the rest of this to make sense is that we borrowed this skull from the fucking anatomy school at a local university and if we broke it we owed them like $500, and let me tell you, this whole damn company wasn’t WORTH $500. So, in retrospect, giving Hamlet free reign to toss the skull all over the fucking stage just maybe wasn’t the most genius plan, o Herr Directrix. But nobody ever listens to Horatio.
So Hamlet just fucking chucks this very valuable skull over his head and I’m completely unprepared for it because this is not where he usually throws it (probably because he forgot the rest of his goddamn lines) so I hurl myself across the stage and fall and slide six feet on my knees like I’m Zac fucking Efron in High School Musical 5: Disney Destroys Shakespeare, BUT YOU HAD BETTER BELIEVE I CAUGHT THAT GODDAMN SKULL BEFORE IT HIT THE FLOOR. WHAM Yorick lands smack in my outstretched hands and I’m relieved for all of two seconds before I realize oh right, human skulls have fucking TEETH, which sank straight into my palm when this thing fell from the sky like a ballistic missile, and I am now bleeding everywhere. (There’s a hand-injury theme happening this week apparently.) And it all happened so fast that Hamlet hasn’t even fucking noticed, because Hamlet is a self-centered twat, so he’s still talking with the gravedigger and I’m just staring at the friggin’ skull in my hands like Wtf Yorick you fucking BIT me–and the audience is beside itself because this is a travesty tragedy and they don’t even know what to laugh at.
But I still have lines, I can’t leave the stage, so for the rest of the scene I’m just kind of sitting on the floor, holding a skull, casually bleeding all over it, waiting for Hamlet for finish his fucking tea party so I can wash my hands and soak poor Yorick in bleach so the anatomy school doesn’t have to deal with any actual human anatomy (i.e., my blood). But this is a long-ass scene, so I had to get up and stand in the back for the whole fucking funeral while Hamlet and Laertes are fighting over who loves Ophelia more (like it matters now, you morons, bitch be DEAD). Eventually Hamlet has his tantrum and storms out and everyone turns around and looks at me like they’ve forgotten I’m there, because everyone always forgets Horatio is there until Hamlet has a tantrum, and I’m standing there, looking sketchy as hell, still clutching a fucking skill with blood all over my hands. And Claudio gets this really confused look on his face and just goes, “Horatio…?”
And I swear, it took every ounce of my self control not to just yell, “That’s right, ‘twas I that killed Ophelia! Plot twist, motherfuckers!” and spike Yorick on the floor and swan the fuck offstage.
And that is the story of the time Hamlet sucked and Yorick almost bit my fingers off.
Your honor! Please direct your attention towards the manga.
As you can see there are small pieces of paper sticking out of every volume.
But no such paper is sticking out of the Batman comic.
The reason? The Batman book doesn’t belong to the library. The photographer put it there to take a picture.
Once again making hasty assumptions, Wright?
First of all, I’d like to direct the court’s attention to this particular spot, in the top right-hand corner.
Notice how the words are blocking the top of the Batman book.
With this in mind, how can you claim that there is “no such paper sticking out of the Batman comic”?!
Say whaaaat?
Well uhm
Look at the size of the paper pieces, they’re all sticking pretty far out.
If there was paper in the batman comic, it would be big enough to stick up over the text.
And while gravity does exist, it probably won’t make the paper do a 90 degree turn and just lean horisontally left at the middle.
Still grasping for straws, Wright?
Hypothetically, if there were a paper there, this picture would not be able to prove its presence. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing a diagram to illustrate my point. We are faced with three possibilities. It is possible that (1) the paper was simply tucked in deeper than the others.
Paper is a soft material, Wright. It’s not unreasonable for it to do a (2) 90 degree turn.
Or perhaps, (3) a paper does not exist there at all.
Either way, you cannot prove your client innocent without sufficient evidence.
Which, of course, is impossible thanks to the obtrusive words.
I’m sorry Edgeworth.
I concede that I can’t disprove theory 1
But the image you submited for theory 2 is contradictory.
Look at the tilt of the other papers. They clearly prove how much the paper would tilt.
And theory 3 is my point! Why would the library’s book not have this piece of paper when the other library books do?
While you still have thory 1, there is another contradiction.
The books are not in alphabetical order, this proves that the batman comic was placed there specifically for the picture!
Ack.
(Perhaps I should’ve left the artistry to the forensic artist…)
Now hold it right there! It doesn’t matter which direction the paper is going because it’s impossible to prove it even exists!
Those theories are all the same! We do not have enough information to prove them. There could be an infinite amount of papers in there for all we know. I simply presented them only so that the court could better understand your baseless conjecture!
… I suppose the order of the books do seem out of the ordinary. However, therein lies not just one possibility. Clearly, those are Japanese graphic novels, also known as “manga”. And the Batman comic book is a graphic novel, too, no?
Seeing as it currently has only graphic novels in the shelf, it is possible that any other novels have simply not yet been restocked. Asserting whether or not this effect was deliberate is useless– there is no way of knowing if the photographer and the captioner are the same person, let alone their involvement in this picture.
Face it Wright, you can’t prove any of these groundless accusations!
One thing I love about Judaism is that long involved conversations about things like “can a zombie attend shul?” or “can i use my pet dragon to light candles on shabbat?” or “is meat from a replicator kosher?” are seen as completely normal.
Yes, but it should avoid contact with a Cohen if it can, and if the dragon is a Gentile sure, why not, a pet dragon is an ideal Shabbos goy, since it probably lives with you, and will get a kick out of helping. If it’s a Jewish dragon, though, no, it’s better for you to do it yourself rather than cause another Jew to violate Shabbat.
Wait wait… if a jew owned the dragon as a pet wouldn’t using the beast’s labor to light candles be pretty explicitly prohibited?
Good point. Is the dragon property, or is it a roommate?
I think it was ruled that one may allow a dragon to ignite a fire if (a) the dragon is non-sapient, and preventing them from lighting the fire would be animal cruelty, or (b) the dragon is sapient, non-Jewish and not in indentured service.
I love that a discussion that started with “I love Jews because they’ll have arguments about theoretical Shabbat dragons” ignited an argument about a theoretical Shabbat dragon
But is replicator meat kosher?
Depends. There’s a nice big passage about what you are and aren’t allowed to eat (Leviticus 11), but it only addresses “living things”, and on top of that, it’s pretty clear that it means “animate things” specifically–plants are all parve. So the real question becomes: do you consider replicator meat to be alive?
Well, if it’s made via cell divisions, tissue cloning, &cetera, one could argue that yes, it is alive, in which case either a) none of it is kosher, because it is a living thing of the land that doesn’t chew its cud or have cloven hooves (being, you know, sludge in a vat) OR b) it is kosher only if the original DNA belongs to a kosher animal. I’d justify the latter by arguing that the cloned tissue is ~part~ of the animal or that it’s an animal by-product of a sort, which means if you can eat the animal you can eat the replicator meat. (And, bonus, don’t have to worry about kosher butchering and draining all the blood.)
That said, you could also argue that vat meat is /obviously/ not a “beast that is on the earth”, much less a sea creature, bird, or “swarming thing that swarmeth upon the earth.” This is a particularly compelling argument if your replicator meat is just a bunch of synthesized proteins, closer to a dietary supplement than a partially cloned organism. If it was never a living (animate) thing at all, it’s all kosher, and maybe even parve to boot.
In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, “”Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;”
I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:
“Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.”
I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
–Charles Babbage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, re. his poem “The Vision of Sin” (via
Kimchi and Justice 