May 4: Special "Birds and Brits" Edition

I have made friends with a Western Scrub-Jay that lives around the corner from me. With the help of the linked article, I was able to identify the bird as the California sub-species:

http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jmorlan/birdingquiz.pdf

Scrub-Jays like "suburban gardens," according to Wikipedia, and sure enough, my little buddy lives in one. It's on a quiet Carson City corner, protected by a wooden fence, and the Jay is often perched on the fence or flitting between it and the garden's small tree. The California subspecies is said to be bold and tame, and this fellow certainly is; I can walk within a couple of feet and talk to him, and he shows no inclination at all to fly away. It has become pleasant to greet him on my morning walks!

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democratic candidate for Prime Minister in this Thursday's British general election, has revealed that his favorite author is -- Samuel Beckett!

Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.

It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?

http://playgoer.blogspot.com/2010/05/politician-admits-to-reading-modernist.html

http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2010/05/oh-no-now-nicks-gone-and-made-me-like.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/may/04/nick-clegg-samuel-beckett-politics

Along with the important fact that I like his politics better than Gordon Brown's or David Cameron's, this would be enough to get my vote. Also, I must admit, the guy is swoonily good-looking. So go, Nick, go!

Maybe, if Clegg is elected, he can put down as #7,483 on his to-do list, the need to persuade BBC America to run actual British programming instead of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nothing against the excellent ST: TNG, but come on:

http://cultureshark.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-america-in-bbc-america.html

Staying with the British theme here, Neil Young at The Auteurs lists the upcoming British film releases he's most excited about. Young has unimpeachable taste:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1753

Sean Axmaker draws my attention to a modern-dress Royal Shakespeare Company/BBC (yes!) Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart that is being released on DVD presently:

http://www.seanax.com/2010/05/03/tv-on-dvd-05-04-10-david-tennant-is-hamlet-robert-young-is-marcus-welby-and-invader-zim-the-conquering-hero/ 

On the current London stage, Laura Wade's "continually riveting" political play Posh sounds like a winner. The review reminds us that "the Liberal Democrat candidate Nick Clegg appeared in 1988 in a Cambridge University production of Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Sam Mendes":

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/arts/05iht-lon5.html

J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet is overjoyed to see the return of the British TV series Foyle's War. I haven't watched the show yet, but one photograph of lead actor Michael Kitchen in splendid period garb is enough to hook me sartorially. Love the look, chum:

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2010/05/no-more-bombs-but-still-bombshells.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Graham Swift and Amos Oz, poet Thomas Kinsella, historian William Prescott, critic Lincoln Kirstein, journalist George F. Will, urbanist Jane Jacobs, painters Frederic Edwin Church and Keith Haring, stage designer Alexandre Benois, educator Horace Mann, scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, explorer John Hanning Speke, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, jazz bassist Ron Carter, rock guitarist Dick Dale, country singer Randy Travis, conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and actors Audrey Hepburn and Richard Jenkins. The great British actress and humanitarian Audrey Hepburn, born in Belgium to an English father and a Dutch mother, and partnered in her adult life by an American, an Italian, and a Dutchman, could and did play characters of many different nationalities (although she sensibly turned down playing a Japanese role in Sayonara!). Here she is as an American in Breakfast at Tiffany's, singing the exquisite "Moon River," which Henry Mancini wrote for her unique delivery; he later said that no one would ever understand the song as completely as she did.