And more: What a fucking family. What really gets me goat is the way she's always going on about being a virgin. "How do you do, I'm the Virgin Mary," to every bastard she meets, I mean me mates and everyone. Aye, the Virgin Mary, and this is my husband, the Incredibly Frustrated Joseph, his bollocks are scheduled to explode any day now. Meanwhile the proof that she isn't a virgin is eating me out of house and home. God I got a bum deal. I take on her and her kid and she'll never let me touch her, she just lies there next to me glowing in the dark. I married a night-light, not a fucking wife. Anyway I leathered Jesus to sleep that night too. ..A while after that we went on a family holiday to the Sea of Galilee. One day we were down by the shore watching the fishing boats. They were having a slow morning, and suddenly Jesus says, "Look, Mum! I'm going to create some fish." "That's nice, dear," said his mother placidly. And bugger me if he didn't do it. All of a sudden the nets were bulging with fish, fish were leaping out of the water and hurling themselves onto the boats, they were practically wriggling up on shore and jumping into frying pans, you have never seen so many fish in your life. Of course the price of fish plummeted until you could hardly give the things away, and the fishermen tried to lynch him. That night I endeavoured to teach Jesus a few basic economic realities; luckily I'd brought along a trunk full of my favourite belts and some good knobbly pieces of oak, just in case. ..As Jesus got older his merry pranks became more and more difficult to ignore, and my right arm grew weary from chastising him. Once we were at the wedding of one of my wife's relatives and he turned the water into wine, the little shithouse. There were teetotal dowagers standing on tables doing the dance of the seven veils left, right and centre, and an uncle who wasn't supposed to touch a drop because of an allergy vomited on the bride. ..Another time he made a complete arse of us by ruining a funeral. Everyone's there in their best mourning gear, the catering's already paid for, and right in the middle of it laughing boy goes and resurrects the corpse. Made a hollow charade of the whole thing. Nobody knew what to do or where to look. The rabbi tried to carry on as though nothing had happened, trying to hold the corpse down with one hand while he was saying the prayers. "I'm alive, I'm alive," said the corpse. "No you're not, lie down," said the rabbi. What a fucking shambles. ..He was forever resurrecting local kids who'd died. The neighbours complained in the end, they couldn't afford to feed them all. They were sleeping fourteen to a bed in some houses in our street thanks to his one-man war on infant mortality. And he'd heal all the little crippled kids and that. Just to annoy me, I swear. I'd work three days making a pair of crutches for some kid and no sooner would I sell them than he'd be up to his monkey shines and I'd have the parents back through the door demanding a refund. Still, I found the surplus crutches could make quite effective cudgels if used correctly, as my stepson agreed. ..When Jesus was in his late teens he started going round with a gang of twelve lads. "Do you want to be in my gang?" he'd say to anyone he liked the looks of. And he gave them all tough gang nicknames. There was this lad called Simon and he said, "You can be called Rock," and Simon said, "Cool." At first I thought he was finally toughening up, but they never caused trouble or started fights. They just used to hang about on street corners making nice remarks about passersby, or go round helping old ladies across the road en masse, they were crap. Once, though, they got in a scrap with some rough kids, and Rock, who was quite hard actually, pulled a knife and cut someone's ear off. Jesus picked it up and stuck it back on. Unfortunately the guy thought Jesus was going to hit him and flinched, and the ear ended up stuck to his neck. Which was a conversation piece for him to say the least. ..Well, anyway, Jesus idled round like that for the next ten years or so, cluttering up the house and showing no inclination to strike out on his own. His mother kept saying he was going to be a great man one day, but he was certainly taking his time about it. He was always going on about his real father's house and how many rooms it had, but he was in no fucking hurry to move out of mine. So then he eventually leaves home at the age of thirty - thirty, mark you, the bloody slacker. And what does he do? Does he get a job at last? Does he finally put his learning to some use and enrol in Pharisee school? Does he fuck as like. He goes poncing off into the desert 'to try and find himself'. Swanning round some fucking kibbutz shacking up with Scandinavian backpackers and that, no doubt. ..Anyway that was the last I heard of him until yesterday some cunt comes up to me and goes, "Hey, your kid's in the news, he's showing his armpits up at Golgotha at the weekend." ..Ah, he'll get off with it. His mother's there now trying to petition the governor, soft cow. He'll get off all right. He'll probably get some smart-arse mouthpiece to say he was abused as a kid and we didn't bring him up properly. Probably right, and all. I didn't leather him half as much as I should have done.

All very fine and interesting but where was this boys father while all this was happening to you?

Betsy, are the threats in another article? That one just says he mentioned slow downs at the border, but that the important thing was how it was done (decriminalized) and that he noted some states had already decriminalized it.

Late but. . .

Canadians know - and were meant to know - that this is a threat. Slowdowns means economic damage. However, this threat has been rather overused of late, so I don't know how seriously it's being taken.

Or as I said elsewhere on the same subject, " Ascend already."

Apropos of nothing, I'd just like to share my delight that the lecturer for my Shakespeare and Film class suggested that our essay-list might include the topic 'In Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, Keanu Reeves is crap. Discuss.' Hee.

I love your lecturer.

Poor Keanu. He is. He really is. But, that said, I can't but respect Branagh's decision to include leather bepanted and oiled-up Keanu as a means of stealth-Shakespeare-indoctrination. And his accent is less atrocious than it was in Dracula. Other than that? I got nothin.

Sorry, but any movie that gives me leather-panted Denzel on horseback can be forgiven. And the Keanu-oiling scene was good until he started talking.

...someone really, really should write Claudio/Benedick. 'Cause it's canon. Um.

(Not particularly thinking of the movie, yummy though RSL was, with his cheekbones. But I do like that play. It's got irritating bits, but the Beatrice/Benedick stuff is fabulous. Man, I love Beatrice more than words can say. Still, Shakespeare pretty much gave us Beatrice/Benedick already - looking at the play's relationships through the lens of...oh, God. Somebody stop me.)

But the thing is, it's anti-slash because one of the big Themes is Benedick's moving on from his immature relationship with the immature Claudio to the mature relationship with Beatrice.

But that would be fine. I'd be fine with that. I'm not all about Twu Big Gay Wuv - I just think that, storywise, it would be fun to look at the play's events in the light of the fact that Claudio and Benedick had been together - 'cause it's arguably canonical, but it's also not explored in much detail. It's an interesting complication.

Yeah, and Beatrice is played by a boy pretending to be a girl (who in the play pretends to be a boy)....