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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night/Early Morning Open Thread: Midsummer Edition

Late Night/Early Morning Open Thread: Midsummer Edition

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Today is Midsummer on the official calendar for whatever that’s worth because Monday was the first day of Summer – you can’t explain that!

But as it is Midsummer’s Night, the Seelie Court of the daione sidhe led by their Queen will be out enjoying their revels. And Amadan na Briona, the Fool of the Forth, and his coursers from the Unseelie Court will ride the night on the wild hunt. To be seen by them is to be lost forever! So set the proper wards and carry sharpened true silver just in case. And we leave the last words, of course, to Shakespeare:

   If we shadows have offended,
 Think but this, and all is mended—
 That you have but slumbered here
 While these visions did appear.
 And this weak and idle theme,
 No more yielding but a dream,
 Gentles, do not reprehend.
 If you pardon, we will mend.
 And, as I am an honest Puck,
 If we have unearnèd luck
 Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
 We will make amends ere long.
 Else the Puck a liar call.
 So good night unto you all.
 Give me your hands if we be friends,
 And Robin shall restore amends.

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  1. 1.

    Elie

    This to me speaks of some sort of ultimate hope in the worst of times….

    Your Blinded Hand
    — Tennessee Williams

    Suppose that

    everything that greens and grows

    should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.

    I think that I would find your blinded hand.

    Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries

    in a city of fire when the earth is afire,

    I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.

    Through flames everywhere

    consuming earth and air

    I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,

    I would

    find your hand.

    I know as, of course, you know

    the immeasurable wilderness that would exist

    in the moment of fire.

    But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us

    would find

    the other’s hand.

    We know

    that it might not be so.

    But for this quiet moment, if only for this moment,

    and against all reason,

    let us believe, and believe in our hearts,

    that somehow it would be so.

    I’d hear your cry, you mine—

    And each of us would find a blinded hand.

  7. 7.

    Elie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Cake? Elie likes cake!

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Omnes — are you sentimental about this? What are your thoughts? I know how I felt to this day when I passed my nursing boards way way back. Pride, excitement — then a career that I loved … Is that what your experience?

  9. 9.

    Lurker Extraordinaire

    I remember my mom reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream to my brother and I when we were kids. Plan on reading it to my little one when she has a longer attention span.

  11. 11.

    Splitting Image

    Hillary Clinton is leading Trump by 13 points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

    Clinton 46.6%
    Trump 33.3%
    Neither 20.1%

    Naturally it’s still early, but I think Clinton is now far enough ahead in the polls that we can stop worrying about how close Trump is to winning and start panicking about Clinton being another Dukakis.

  13. 13.

    Elie

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    AWWWW! Wonderful!!!

    Tell the kid to stay loose… nursing is a way of thinking as much as knowing the right answers…

    I wish her the very very best!!!!

  14. 14.

    Elie

    @Splitting Image:

    I aint taking nothing for granted. I am approaching the dark mansion that houses the Nosferatu with garlic, wearing and carrying a crucifix, stakes and a gun loaded with silver bullets…..

  15. 15.

    Prescott Cactus

    “If we shadows have offended,
    Know but this and all is mended.
    That you have but slumbered here,
    While these visions did appear,
    And this weak and idle theme,
    No more yielding, but a dream.”

    @efgoldman:

    I have internalized the play since she sang

    Very Cool !

    One of WS harder plays to present to an audience. Many stories going on. It’s primo when it works.

  16. 16.

    Emma

    Help. Please. For the last two days every time I come to BJ I get an add that plays automatically. The sound button is already disabled so I use the tab button in Firefox. It only works about a third of the time. If I want to play any of the videos (all that beautiful music today) the damn video triggers. Is there any Firefox add-on I can get to stop this thing?

    To add insult to injury it’s about a tequila brand called Avion. Who the bleeping hell calls its tequila Airplane!?

  17. 17.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Elie: Thanks, I’ll let her know. She was a bit of a non-traditional student(older) and spent 6 years as a med-tech in the Air Force(college didn’t take the first time).

  18. 18.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: BA, JD, and commission, all in a six week period. From now on, I am picking a day and taking them out together. One night for each, this close together, is a bit much.

  22. 22.

    Splitting Image

    @Elie:

    I aint taking nothing for granted. I am approaching the dark mansion that houses the Nosferatu with garlic, wearing and carrying a crucifix, stakes and a gun loaded with silver bullets…..

    Don’t forget holy water. And a small, portable sun.

  24. 24.

    Brachiator

    @Splitting Image:

    Naturally it’s still early, but I think Clinton is now far enough ahead in the polls that we can stop worrying about how close Trump is to winning and start panicking about Clinton being another Dukakis.

    Positive or negative, polls mean nothing right now. You will only hurt yourself paying too much attention to them.

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Emma: It might help. Try it. If it doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll let Alain know to take a look.

  26. 26.

    trollhattan

    Ssssh, I’m in Portland hunting rabbitsreds. Stalinists sighted: zero, so I’m clearly not hanging in the correct hoods. Been awhile and I forgot how much fun this place is. Going to be painful to decamp and head back into the heat,

    Attended the taping of tomorrow’s “Wait-Wait” episode last night and one of the time-shifting challenges was the Brexit vote results didn’t come in ’til the end of the show, so Peter had to rerecord his intro to fit. It was fun; if you ever get the chance, go watch radio.

    Also, too, everybody has a Subaru Legacy and half of them smoke. Weird combo.

  27. 27.

    Miss Bianca

    Wait…I thought Midsummer’s Day *was* the Solstice. Are you sure about this?

    Puck must have lent us some mighty winged energy, because “King Lear” flew along tonight – fastest and best we’ve ever done it!

    ETA: And the fairies must be fucking with me – pixie-leading me and my tech guy thru’ a positive thicket of server problems. The ecstacy of thinking we’ve figured it all out! The agony of crash and stall! Oy!

  29. 29.

    Doctor Cleveland

    Shakespeare’s era celebrated Midsummers Eve (St John’s Eve) on June 24 and Midsummers Day on the 25th for the same reason their winter solstice celebration (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) was on the 24th and 25th: the dates were traditional, and there’s been about four days of calendar drift. Think of it this way: it is EXACTLY six months to Christmas Eve.

  30. 30.

    Amir Khalid

    @Emma:
    I’ve heard of an alcoholic beverage called Aunt Mary (or in the original Spanish, Tia Maria).

  32. 32.

    Brachiator

    @trollhattan:

    Attended the taping of tomorrow’s “Wait-Wait” episode last night and one of the time-shifting challenges was the Brexit vote results didn’t come in ’til the end of the show, so Peter had to rerecord his intro to fit. It was fun; if you ever get the chance, go watch radio.

    Sounds like fun. I can’t recall if it was “Wait … Wait” or some other radio program that had to do two versions of a healthy chunk of the show because they wanted to spoof an event before knowing the final outcome.

  33. 33.

    Emma

    @Amir Khalid: Originally made in Jamaica and now, IIRC, in the Saronno factory in Italy. As the story goes a young girl was forced to flee her family plantation accompanied by a servant carrying the girl’s best jewelry and a recipe for liqueur. The servant was named Maria and the girl named the liqueur after her, honoring her help by calling her Aunt. So, Tia Maria. (added) My own take is that the “servant” was probably a slave nursemaid and that she had always been Tia Maria.

    I asked a friend who says that Avion is made outside Jalisco by an American and that it seems to be the drink of choice in a show called Entourage.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Miss Bianca:
    On the official Catholic Church Calendar its the 24th, which is St. John’s Day (trust the Jewish American guy that went to a Jesuit high school…). It is centered around the summer solstice, which is why its usually considered to fall between the 19th and 25th and is celebrated on different days in different countries, but all within the same window.

    http://metro.co.uk/2016/06/22/when-is-midsummer-2016-and-why-do-we-celebrate-it-5958376/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsummer

  36. 36.

    trollhattan

    @efgoldman:
    Good point. The onliest smoking cars I saw were “classic” diesels. One hopes they’re fueled with reclaimed truffle french fry oil.

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    @Brachiator:
    They’re taping another tonight (evidently there’s a lot of ticket demand in Portland) and it won’t be a typical show intended for immediate broadcast; they’ll probably chop it up for use in one of their compilation shows. They’re pretty committed to keeping the content topical.

    p.s. The limerick challenge contestant is from Texas, teaches opera and may have been home-schooled.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    @efgoldman: RE: You will only hurt yourself paying too much attention to them.

    We’re Democrats. Hurting ourselves and driving ourselves crazy is what we do.

    Yeah, good point.

    Still, not all numbers are data, and not all data is information. But on to more important stuff. As another poster asked,

    Wait, what? The Yale Rep’s at Harvard now?

  44. 44.

    Prescott Cactus

    @efgoldman: Gut wrenching that you cant’ get a copy. Have only seen it two or 3 times when when it was a home run. So much back story that unless it out just right,a lot gets lost.

    If you ever get a copy, keep me in your thoughts, even it it a BJ Shakespeare night ( no doesn’t that sound odd?)

    Seeing shows in Oregon and Utah this year. Very good companies.

  47. 47.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Emma: 8 years of Jewish day school, three years of Jesuit High School – fourth year public high school in Denver after we moved, four years at a Methodist University, parents with enough sheepskin to wallpaper a small house. If anyone wonders why I am the way I am, now you know!

  48. 48.

    Brachiator

    @trollhattan:

    p.s. The limerick challenge contestant is from Texas, teaches opera and may have been home-schooled.

    I will make sure to give the show a listen.

    Funny, recently I have listened more to Peter Sagal on the Nerdette Game of Thrones podcast than on Wait Wait.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Some people get really excited about Christmas. As long as he doesn’t start singing carols in the comments before Thanksgiving, lets not spoil his enthusiasm. Or hers as Doctor Cleveland is kind of an ambiguous nym.

  53. 53.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Were you trying to link to something or just back to my comment? Because if you were the external link didn’t make it.

  54. 54.

    Miss Bianca

    @Doctor Cleveland: I never thought about it that way before – so, that “calendar drift” accounts for the fact that there’s four days between the Solstices and Christmas/St Jean’s?

  56. 56.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Miss Bianca: The Catholic Calendar fixed the date: St. John’s Eve on the 23rd, St. John’s Day on the 24th, and Midsummer’s Eve on the evening of the 24th. The English maintained it when they spilt away and formed the Anglican Church. The Anglican calendar is basically the same as the Catholic one with only a few tweaks here and there.

  57. 57.

    Miss Bianca

    @efgoldman: Ah, ART! And Bob Brustein! It’s all starting to come back to me, dimly…grasp, that would have been about the time when this theater-mad person was transitioning from high school to college.

    Almost went to the Yale School of Drama for grad school – but they weren’t offering me a free ride, and Northwestern University was, and since I was already in Chicago, well…

  58. 58.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: No worries, I’m mostly out of it from this respiratory infection. Its just that linking to stuff often goes wonky, so I figured I’d check.

  59. 59.

    Mike J

    @trollhattan:

    if you ever get the chance, go watch radio.

    Oh jesus christ no. It’s interesting to watch like watching a slaughterhouse is interesting. There’s a visceral thrill that makes you feel bad afterwards.

    I can’t say I’ve ever gotten laid in a slaughterhouse though, so radio does have that going for it.

  61. 61.

    Mike J

    @Adam L Silverman: Bill Clinton recounts in his book that when he was at Gtown, Father Hentz asked him if he had ever considered serving the church as a Jesuit because he was able to think deeply about a problem and approach it from multiple angles. Clinton had to disappoint him by admitting he was a Baptist.

  62. 62.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mike J: That’s a great anecdote. He always seemed able to think in several directions at once while on his feet. Both a blessing and a curse.

  63. 63.

    Jeff Spender

    Oh, geez. The Buster I know joined a Facebook group called something like “DNC Class Action Suit.”

    It’s filled with so much conspiracy nonsense that I just have to shake my head and sigh.

    Apparently the DNC planning strategies for the person that was the frontrunner in May 2015 is evidence of FRAUD!

    Yeah. I’m sure a court won’t toss that into the garbage pile like all the others.

  64. 64.

    Miss Bianca

    @srv: I saw that on the previous thread. Damn, what a year for great musicians passing! And we’re only halfway thru’. : (

  66. 66.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jeff Spender: There’s another one being pushed in California, even though they’re not done counting the ballots, claiming fraud because the exit polling was so far off, initially from both the pre voting polling and the final, declared results. There is going to be a lot of time and money wasted dealing with this stuff.

  67. 67.

    Brachiator

    @Adam L Silverman: A free pun title in case you do another EU related post.

    You Brexit, You Own It

    This hit me when I was reading about the EU leader calling for Britain to leave as soon as possible.

    Also bubbling up was a revision of the title of a Dr Seuss book, “David Cameron Will You Please Go Now!”

  69. 69.

    Jeff Spender

    @Adam L Silverman: I tried SO hard to explain the deal with that exit polling to a Buster. I literally studied presidential polling and statistics from the man who wrote the book on it.

    But all I got was that I was just complicit in fraud.

  71. 71.

    Miss Bianca

    @Jeff Spender: Ah, bah, what are your “statistics” and “study” and “head knowledge” compared to the “gut knowledge” and “instinct” of your true believer? To the devil’s cook fires with your sophistical stuff, sirrah! Bernfollowers are not to be gulled so easily!

    THERE MUST BE FRAUD. THERE WILL BE BLOOD!

  73. 73.

    trollhattan

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Epic! (am assuming the kewh kids no longer say that).We had three daleks and two tardises in the tree last Christmas and nobody raised a fuss, to my disappointment.

  74. 74.

    Brachiator

    @Jeff Spender:

    I literally studied presidential polling and statistics from the man who wrote the book on it.

    But all I got was that I was just complicit in fraud.

    Wow. That is one of the classic defenses of those who are hopelessly conspiracy fixated.

  75. 75.

    Adam L Silverman

    @trollhattan: I don’t know, the only kids I ever talk to are my nephews. And I’ve not heard them say that. A German comedian apparently tweeted something to the effect of: “How wonderful of David Cameron to finally achieve Bismark’s 19th Century objective of isolating Britain from the rest of Europe.”

  76. 76.

    Mnemosyne

    @Jeff Spender:

    The proliferating lawsuits are another thing that’s making me assume that ex-Paulistas are at the core of a lot of the Bernie-or-Bust stuff. Libertarians love to sue people and tie up the courts with bullshit.

  78. 78.

    Mike J

    @Brachiator: I was looking for an ancient web site that explained why exit polls that are used by US press and exit polls used to detect fraud are so different. I could not remember who wrote it. It was all very logical and unlikely to be accepted by the conspiracy minded, but I’d love to find it again.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    So I’m getting an ad from Emily’s List saying “Five seats could flip the Senate” and listing Arizona, Illinois, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Arizona and North Carolina seem like long shots, but shouldn’t we have a decent chance in IL, NH, and PA? What do I not know?

  84. 84.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: PA is interesting. Toomey is considered weak because he’s Club for Growth, not Tea Party. It will depend how the Democratic challenger runs the campaign. And as always in PA, it’ll be Philadelphia metro and Pittsburgh metro versus the rest of the state. Arizona is in play because McCain is seen as a RINO, so even if he survives his primary, if Trump produces a real drag, he might still be toast. IL: Duckworth versus the idiot, nuff said. Ayotte has similar problems in NH as McCain as she’s Lieberman’s replacement in the three amigos of war, more war, war all the freaking time! She’s seen as a RINO and a squish, so there are concerns she can’t consolidate GOP support. Not sure what the dynamic is in NC.

  85. 85.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Adam L Silverman: Hmm, but where the dates fall, vis a vis the actual position of the Earth around the Sun, changed in the mid 18th Century when Britain finally surrendered and went Gregorian, did it not?

    I recall that when you celebrated Easter was a marker of which branch of Christianity you were following. Still does western vs. Eastern Orthodox.

  86. 86.

    Jeff Spender

    @Mike J: The biggest difference is that polls used to detect fraud are generalizable–they have a wider polling population selected randomly, with a few specific questions.

    Ours can take up to 10 minutes because they have general questions ranging from policy, they are not usually generalizable because they are not random samples and they only operate during a small window, and they typically have a no-response rate of between 50-60%.

  88. 88.

    Mike J

    @Adam L Silverman: All great links that may play the same role, but not the one I remember. Which just makes the argument stronger. Unless an exit poll is being conducted with the purpose of detecting fraud, it’s not going to useful for that purpose.

  89. 89.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Mike J: But how would you know? Polling is already suspect because there are plenty of people who like to fuck with the pollsters by not telling them who they will actually vote for, and in the case of exit polls, who they voted for. The only thing you can have any certainty about is the marked/punched ballots authenticated by signature.

  90. 90.

    Brachiator

    I speculated that the UK vote might spur all kinds of nationalist reaction and counter reaction, and the shit is already starting to hit a bigger fan. Part of a Guardian story on the EU wanting Britain to get the phuque out now.

    Proposals for Scotland to become an EU member are already opposed by Madrid, which fears it would encourage Catalan secession. A previous Commission president intervened in the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014 to warn that states which split from existing members would find it “extremely difficult” to secure the consent of all EU countries.

    This mess is getting nastier by the minute.

  91. 91.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: Yes. The Gregorian vs Julian Calendars have different dates. The former for Catholicism and Anglicanism and continental European Protestantism and the latter for the Orthodox Churches. I don’t recall what some of the older traditions, such as the Copts, the Syriacs, and the Chaldeans use.

  93. 93.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mike J: I’d go with the pdf, I think that’s likely the best and most useful given who produced it and where it was produced.

  95. 95.

    Aleta

    Thanks Adam. Haven’t seen that movie in a long time. Each production of that play remains vivid, and the language never losses its magic.

    Once I was asked tp play the Wall.

  96. 96.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    It was one unique and excellent education.

    The Dominican nuns who taught me in high school frequently remarked, “It’s too bad you’re not a boy — you’d make an excellent Jesuit.”

    They did not (needless to tell you) mean this as a compliment. The Dominicans and the Jesuits are about as far philosophically as two groups can be while professing obedience to the same hierarchical organization.

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