Humble Pie

In the before time...

When I was a lot younger than I am now, a pie in the face was the funniest gag I had ever seen. The Three Stooges, I Love Lucy and countless other old timey, slapsticky programs all provided countless examples of why a big pile of cream and filling -- whether thrown from a distance or slammed up close -- is the height of comedy. I started making it known that getting a pie in the face would be a dream come true. Come Thanksgiving, my Uncle Tom snuck up behind me and waylaid me with  a tin full of whip cream. It wasn't quite a pie, but it was a pie equivalent and the sentiment behind it was the thing that really counted.

The aftermath

For those of you unaware, I volunteered to be eligible for the Pie a Teacher in the Face fundraiser that the International Awareness club held Friday during lunch. The group's efforts raised money for Invisible Children, a group designed to help end the combat that utilizes child soldiers in northern Uganda.  People who donated money to the club chose a teacher from those eligible and the top four teachers from each lunch received a pie in the kisser. The sticky hair and sour smell in my nose for the remainder of the day was worth it because the cause is something I can get behind. Plus, it was a nice reminder of days gone by with my family.

I included the video of the pie-facing at the bottom underneath the cut.

Frosh
Monday through Thursday were all focused on reading through the first two scenes of Romeo & Juliet. The beginning always takes awhile, but we did manage to get through most of the second scene. We detailed the idea of spectacle and how Shakespeare uses it to engage the audience who might not be all that interested in a teenage love story otherwise. Plus, we get our first look at Rom-emo, but you'll get annoyed with him before too long. Mercutio is where it's at but we haven't met him quite yet.

Friday, we moved forward.

Seniors

On Monday, you received the Act I post-reading questions and spent the period working on those.

Tuesday, you turned in those answers. We then started our look at the rest of act II, which took us through Wednesday and part of Thursday. The summary of the act is located on my Files page here, but the big news is that Macbeth kills King Duncan, and his sons get the blame since they run out of fear for their own safety. There were a bunch of dichotomies that we discussed in conjunction with these events. Your goal in completing the paragraph that is due (as of this writing) tomorrow is to make sure that the analysis for whatever evidence you find explains why it fits for the dichotomy you choose. 

We dealt with my busted DVD/VCR situation by watching Orson Welles' version of Macbeth as opposed to the Royal Shakespeare Company's version, since the latter is stuck in the broken combo. Orson Welles made some weird choices, and, after reading up on the history of the production, his was only the fourth adaptation of a Shakespeare play ever filmed with sound and the first ever adapation of Macbeth as a big screen movie. The fact that Welles changed so much of the play was scandalous at the time to many critics, but it's since become common practice. There's a third version that the library has, so perhaps we'll watch that one for act III. 

You also took a quiz on act II on Thursday. 

Speaking of quizzes, everyone took the retest on the Macbeth terms on Friday, and we got a few lines into act III.