Ïîïóëÿðíûå ñîîáùåíèÿ

понедельник

Why is this Sandwich Monday different from all other Sandwich Mondays? In honor of Passover, I introduced my non-Jewish colleagues to the wonders of the Passover lunch.

It's not the Seder meal, but what I might have brought to school lunch back in the 1970s, when the affluent Jews of suburban New Jersey ate tasteless food to remind themselves that thousands of years ago, they didn't have nice professional jobs like being an lawyer, or maybe a CPA. That's a steady living. I know David Birnbaum does nicely as an accountant, maybe you could look into that?

So what's the sandwich? Manischewitz gefilte fish on Manischewitz matzo with beet horseradish, and Manischewitz potato chips on the side. I took mercy on the goyim by using egg matzo and the non-jellied kind of gefilte fish.

PETER: Eat, everybody. Seth, have some more, you look thin.

SETH: If I was the Red Sea, and Moses tried to get me to eat this, I would totally part.

PETER: Opening this jar of gefilte fish reminded me of my beloved grandmother, Rose Scholnick, opening a jar of gefilte fish.

i i

There are a lot of ways to adapt a film to a TV show, and it's not as common as it was for a while there. For a while, you had strange experiments like TV telling the story of Ferris Bueller, TV telling the story of Baby and Johnny from Dirty Dancing, and TV revisiting 9 to 5. Usually, it meant just moving the characters over to a series, having them played by new actors, and following new stories about them. (Melora Hardin as Baby Houseman!) Every now and then, it worked: you might have heard of M*A*S*H. Usually it did not: you might not have heard of The Firm, starring ... Josh Lucas. (Yes, a couple of those are also books. But ... still.)

It seemed, candidly, like an absurd idea when FX announced that it was making a TV series based on Fargo, the Coen Brothers film from 1996. That was a completed story that didn't lend itself to a lot of obvious "further adventures." It didn't seem like very much more activity could be ... afoot.

Furthermore, the film was full of performances surely no one would be dumb enough to try to do over, like Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson and William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard. The Coens were on board as executive producers; what could these people possibly have in mind?

As it turns out, what they had in mind was a completely new story borrowing the tone, some of the dynamics, and some of the atmosphere of the film, but not the characters and not the story itself.

The state of Ohio was told by a federal judge Monday that it must recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other states, Ohio Public Radio and TV's Jo Ingles reports.

The decision follows similar rulings by federal judges in other states and was not a surprise. Judge Timothy Black had said earlier this month that he would soon issue such a ruling.

For now at least, Black's decision applies only to the four couples who brought the case. They want their names on their children's state-issued birth certificates.

"The federal court has stayed the order for everyone except the 4 couples named in this suit," Ingles wrote as she tweeted the decision. The state will argue against expanding the ruling in its appeal of Black's decision.

In his ruling, Black said that "Ohio's marriage recognition is facially unconstitutional and unenforceable under any circumstances," The Columbus Dispatch reports.

In 2004, Ohio voters approved a ban on same-sex marriages in the state. As WVXU notes, the lawsuit at the center of Judge Black's ruling "did not seek to allow same-sex partners to get married in Ohio, just the recognition of marriages from other states."

[This piece discusses the plot of both the Alice Munro short story on which Hateship Loveship is based and the film itself, although it's frankly nothing you can't intuit from the trailer.]

The Alice Munro short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" begins with a plain and awkward woman named Johanna arranging a shipment of furniture and shopping for a dress. She's leaving town to go to the man she expects to marry, though he hasn't yet asked. The story shifts to follow the nasty fellow she's been working for, who's angry about her departure, and then it makes its way to Edith.

Edith is a young teenager, and with her at the center of the narrative, we leap back in time to learn how Johanna came to be leaving: Edith and her friend Sabitha played a cruel joke in which they made it appear that this man, Sabitha's father, was writing Johanna love letters. He was not. But, fooled into believing she's been carrying on a long-distance romance, Johanna made plans to leave all she knows and head off to what appears certain to be abject humiliation.

We then jolt forward to the present, where Johanna arrives at her destination, and we follow her for a short time again. But then we leap ahead two years. And those two years later, we learn, through a notice in the paper read to Edith by her mother, what became of Johanna and Ken.

Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. To adapt her work, as screenwriter Mark Poirier and director Liza Johnson have done for the film Hateship Loveship, is a hugely daunting thing. The risk is that there is a way to look at this story that would rob it of everything about it that's interesting, and that way to look at this story is the way this trailer looks at it.

Blog Archive