No clue where I was going with this...

There is no credible evidence that William Shakespeare could speak Polish. There is also no credible evidence that William Shakespeare ever ate an avocado. The first statement is a fact so commonplace that no philosopher has ever given the proposition a second thought. In the second statement, however, the committed student of philosophy will find the key to understanding the place and destiny of humanity in a universe wholly bereft of evidence that William Shakespeare ever ate an avocado. A suffering humanity demands, and by humanity I mean this planet’s extant population of the species Homo sapiens sapiens and not some other group of hominids like Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, and life insurance salesmen, that this attempt to write the avocado out of the Shakespearean canon should cease immediately, or at least be put on hold until world peace is achieved or the Yankees get to the World Series, whichever comes first. This prejudice against native North American fruits is contemptible and has no place in any modern society. There is, after all, no evidence that William Shakespeare ever ate a banana either and no one says a thing about that, do they?

I was going to add something important here, but I have forgotten what it might me. Now, I will freely concede that if the important point I was going to make here was as important as I thought it was three minutes ago then I would not have forgotten what it was, but I am growing old and weary in my service to the people of our happy little burg and every so often some great immutable truth slips out the back door of my mind and heads off to Vegas with an eighteen year old blond waitress named Tiffany. What can you do, it happens, right?

AN INDECISIVE PHOTOGRAPHER'S SECOND SOLILOQUY: DO I USE FLASH OR NOT, COMPLETE WITH AT LEAST ONE SIGNIFICANT SPELLING ERROR?

To flush, or not to flash–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous flatulence
Or to take Rolaids against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To flush, to flash–
No more–and by a flush to say we end
The bellyache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flash is heir to, so don’t play with the damn strobe in the shower or when you still have the batteries in it.. ‘Tis a constipation
Devoutly to be wished away, and sooner rather than later, if you ask me.. To flush, to flash-
To flash–perchance to forget Cartier-Bresson’s warnings about flash and photography: ay, there’s the rub, and there will be no rubbing and flashing or flushing in public or the cops will show up muy pronto and you can take that to the bank, kids,
For in that flash of flush what dreams may flash of flushing, and make us wish we lived in SoHo or Tribeca or even Park Slope
When we have flushed off this mortal coil,
Must give us paws, which won’t do a damn thing if you’re stuck in the toilet bowl; just ask any rat who’s been caught in that situation. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long flash.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Time, Newsweek, or even GQ, for that matter,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, or the photographer fiddling with his gear while you’re sitting there smiling in your very stiff Sunday best and feeling the sweat start to run down your back and your face begin to hurt because this doofus doesn’t know the difference between a f/stop and a cheese danish, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make, out of papier-mache and half-empty cans of Spam, no less,With a bare bodkin?
(Bodkins are often bare; it’s some sort of religious thing. The last sighting of a clothed bodkin was in 1778, when a unbare bodkin was seen serving in the Continental Army at the Battle of Monmouth). Who would fardels bear, the fardels bear being a particularly rare species of European brown bear, for those of you interested in zoology, once used by the Romans in gladiatorial games for comic relief-they were finicky eaters and disliked eating Christians, although they just loved Dacians, for reason best left to the imagination,
To flush and flash under a weary life, and look, and vanity fair
But that the dread of something after flush,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn ultimatum
Only the plumber returns, puzzles the will, especially when you see how much he’s charging you just for showing up and looking at your damn piping,
And makes us rather bear those hot flashes we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus incontinence does make flushers of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Photoshop,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currants turn awry with pastrami and hot mustard, and some French fries on the side,
And lose the name of action, but not for very long, not if you insist on eating this kind of stuff on a regular basis. Crack out the antacids here, boys and girls!

BRUSH UP YOUR SHAKESPEARE: It’s almost spring as I write this, the snow is melting, baseball season opens in only a few short weeks, and here in our happy little burg, it’s drama club time down at the new high school. Yes indeed, all is almost right with the world. This year the kids put on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Now, I have to admit, the idea of this mob of juvenile delinquents putting some Shakespeare on the boards impressed the heck out of me when I first heard it; back in the day I could swing a mean pentameter and forsooth with the best forsoothers in the school, but that was once upon a time, when our happy little burg still imprisoned adolescents in the great brick hulk of the old high school. Things have changed since then, as they always do, and today I couldn’t soothsay if my life depended on it. Actually, I couldn’t do it then, either. I was Trinculo, one of the two comic relief guys in The Tempest who get Caliban drunk and try to help the misshapen monster rebel against Prospero, but I bailed out about a month before opening night. I think I was all right in the part; I knew my lines, I knew where I was supposed to be and when I was supposed to be there, and I enjoyed the process of rehearsals and brainstorming the problems, big and little, that go with putting on any stage production; I just didn’t want to act in front of an audience, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of acting in the first place; it also puts a fairly large crimp in ticket sales. My English teacher tried to convince me to be a trouper and go on with the show in the best tradition of the theater, but while the flesh was nauseous, the spirit was unwilling, and so I became the lighting director instead, which I found suitably congenial as it involved little more than standing back stage out of sight of God and this acting company turning the stage lights on and off on cue. I was great at it, too. I flip a mean switch, if I do say so myself.

But this year’s play was wonderful, as such things go; the kids did their best, but speaking verse doesn’t come naturally to American kids unless they’re rapping about politically incorrect antisocial behavior, and so they filled the night with a singsong manner of speaking they wouldn’t dream of using in their real lives without a Dr. Seuss book in their hands and their annoying little brother or sister sitting next to them. Still, they did a good job of it, all things considered. The parts with Bottom and his merry crew of incompetent thespians went very well, indeed; here the requirements of the part and the skill of the actors met and melded in a positive orgy of overacting, with the smell of ham fried, roasted, and boiled permeating every part of the theater, to the absolute delight of the audience, who no doubt thought that the play was over and Rachael Ray was somewhere in the building about to cook up a thirty minute meal for everyone. In short, a good time was had by all and sundry.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have gone to this showing, but the niece was in the play this year and I had to go and show moral and financial support. She was one of Titania’s fairies; it was not a speaking role and so, along with the rest of the nonverbal cast, she had to spend a lot of time up on stage nodding her head as if she agreed with everything the principals were saying and in general being conscious that hundreds of people were looking at her not do anything. As a high school student, of course, she often spends a good deal of time not doing anything with hundreds of people around, but she is usually not cognizant of their presence. Ignoring an audience is a bit harder to do, especially in the new high school’s equally brand spanking new theater. That auditorium is huge, not at all like the overheated hole in the wall wherein I flung my iambs all those years ago. I also noticed that the typical high school division of labor was yet again at work in this particular production. The popular girls got all the best roles, and apart from my niece, who is tall and willowy, most of the rest of Titania’s fairies looked remarkably like the Chicago Bears’ defensive line. If Oberon, the king of the fairies, had tried anything with Titania while those girls were on stage, they’d have knocked him back on his ass for a fourth down and a loss of seven yards.

In any case, the niece had very little to do up there and she did it very well, I thought, and I was impressed that she thought so much of the part that she actually colored her hair a uniform shade of something dark in order to play it. This is, in and of itself, no mean accomplishment, and I think you could safely say that this might even be one of the few triumphs of modern American secondary education. The niece’s hair has been all the colors of the rainbow these past few years, and often several of those rainbow colors at the same time, and for a school project to engross her to the extent that she would willingly surrender her ongoing experiments in tonsorial spectroanalysis is nothing to sneer at. Of course, the dark color her hair is now is not her natural color, or, at least, I don’t think it is; it’s been quite a while since I saw her hair in its natural shade, so I could be wrong about that.