Posted August 31st, 2011 by Peg
I filled in for a high school English teacher one day who had left the following instructions: “Have the students rewrite one of the two scenes from Romeo and Juliet – either the balcony scene or the fight scene – into contemporary English.”
“Okay,” I said to the class, “this can be lots of fun, let’s take a look. Open your books to the fight scene, please, and imagine it: you have these guys raging at each other, and they’ve been doing it for years; they’re going to fight now, and they’re going to fight so hard a couple of them end up stabbed to death. Now instead of shouting ‘A plague o’ both your houses!’, Mercutio would say, if it were today, he’d say maybe ‘Fuck you!’, right? Okay, go ahead, see if you can translate the whole scene.”
The students did indeed have lots of fun. And the principal had hysterics. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted August 24th, 2011 by Peg
I recently discovered that my workplace has ‘wedding leave’: apparently you can get up to three days off—with pay. What the fuck is going on here?
I mean, what’s a wedding? It’s just a big party. Should employees be allowed to have personal parties on company time? I think not.
Oh, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime party. Well, no, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted August 14th, 2011 by Peg
So I was working in my local public library the other day – well, trying to work. I was distracted by the kid on the computer next to me who was playing a computer game. My first point. Is it appropriate for kids to be allowed to play computer games on the computers in public libraries? I suggest that libraries are repositories of knowledge that people either peruse to borrow or access on-site.[1] Given that, playing computer games should not occur in a public library. Libraries aren’t entertainment centers. Yes, perusing and accessing knowledge can be fun. But that doesn’t mean that that which is fun is necessarily perusing or accessing knowledge.
Furthermore, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted August 9th, 2011 by Peg
So I’m out walking today, and as I pass a neighbour tending his bird feeder, I wave.
And the guy calls out to me “I’m feeding some seed to the little birdies!”
The little birdies? What am I, twelve?
No, I’m female. (I have a hard time believing that he would’ve said the same thing to a middle-aged man.)
And (many) men talk to women differently than they do to men. They talk to us like we’re children. Idiot children.
Posted August 1st, 2011 by Peg
Imagine a “No Advertising’ rule. Whenever you wanted to buy something, you’d just look it up in a central directory with a really good search engine that enabled you to see all of your options (a select few based on your preferences) accompanied by product information. Or you could just choose from the selection offered by whatever store you went to.
Most magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television stations would die. The ones that are just tools of the companies who use them for advertising. The ones supported by people genuinely interested in reading, listening, and watching what they have to offer would live on. Read the rest of this entry »
