Primrose Road

From Current via Feministing via my friend A.: Target Women: Birth Control, in which Sarah Haskins offers some hilarious commentary on how birth control is marketed on TV as "period control" and how the whole not-getting-pregnant aspect is conveniently omitted in the advertisements. More clever LOLs from Haskins on ads for Botox ("the true price of beauty is needles in your face") and yogurt.

"The FBI hunts down the most vicious criminals online," reads a half-page ad for the new thriller Untraceable, "but the most dangerous one is hunting them." I'll bet that in the world of American crime thrillers, the FBI hunts down criminals via Google searches. According to film and television, any and all information is available to us with a web browser and a couple of clever keystrokes. Computers never fail, except when they explode. On police/courtroom procedural dramas, often all it takes to catch a criminal is a simple search of a database of fingerprints, which never fails. And somehow, TV's fictional rendering of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit (Law and Order: SVU) is outfitted with gigantic hi-def flat screens that display information relevant to the case (a function served by simple marker-boards on the other two Law and Order series). Lawyers and court employees involved in jury selection have to worry about the CSI Effect because of the widespread belief that when it comes to criminal investigation, computers can do just about anything. No wonder today's college students think that Google and Wikipedia are all-powerful.

Hamlet/Bart (after stabbing Polonius/Chief Wiggum): Polonius! What are you doing here? Polonius/Chief Wiggum: I hide behind curtains because I have a fear of being stabbed. (To Laertes/Ralph) Laertes, I need you to do a big boy job for daddy. I need you to avenge my death.

Tonight I am going -- with two of my favorite people in the world -- to see Cymbeline at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center. I haven't been to that theater in almost a decade; the last play I saw there was The Little Foxes, with Stockard Channing, who was not Bette Davis, in the lead role. But the set was lovely, almost Chekhovian. I will post a review after I've seen Cymbeline, a play which, much like the film Shakespeare in Love, is an entertaining fairy tale if you're not intensely familiar with Shakespeare's works, and an entertaining fairy tale full of hilarious 'in-jokes' if you are.