My senior year in high school, I directed an “experimental,” which was our school’s somewhat odd term for a student-directed short play. They probably got the name because they tended to be less traditional performances — plays written by students, adaptations of material from elsewhere, avant garde one-acts, etc. These shows were always presented in pairs. I recall watching several of my friends act in a ribald collection of Monty Python skits, coupled with a student-written play titled A Brief Nictitation, which bordered on performance art. Fortunately, the truly experimental piece went on first.

My experimental was simply called Dialogues, and it was paired with my friend Kyle’s production of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. It was exactly that: a selection of dialogues pulled from some of my favorite plays. The Question Game from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one from Hamlet (though I don’t remember quite which one now), a scene from On the Open Road (which I’d seen the premier of at the Goodman), and a couple I’d found in a collection of dialogues I’d gotten from Mr. Faust, our theatre teacher. However, the one I was most proud of was one I put together myself. It was a dialogue built out of two monologues — the closing soliloquies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.

I arranged the lines in such a way that Puck and Prospero’s lines wove around each other, alternating every couple verses, so as to highlight the similarities in the speeches. It worked pretty well on paper, and I thought it really worked on stage, performed by my friend Brandon and an enthusiastic freshman named Rashmi. (Brandon, if you’re reading this, do you remember which played whom?) UPDATE: Brandon reminds me that he was Prospero, but really wanted to be Puck.

I thought I’d lost the script, but I found it recently in an old sketchbook. So, here it is, “Puck and Prospero’s Dialogue.”

Prospero: Now, all my charms are o’erthrown and what strength I have’s my own, which is most faint.

Puck: If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.

Prospero: Now, ‘tis true, I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples.

Puck: That you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.

Prospero: Let me not, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver , dwell in this bare island by your spell.

Puck: And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.

Prospero: But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands.

Puck: Gentles, do not reprehend: If you pardon, we will mend.

Prospero: Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails — which was to please.

Puck: And, as I am an honest Puck, if we have unearned luck no to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue.

Prospero: Now, I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant, and my ending is despair — unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assault Mercy itself and frees all faults.

Puck: We will make amends ere long; else the puck a liar call. So goodnight unto you all.

Prospero: As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.

Puck: Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.

Don’t leave Orbit lime-melon gum in your car, unless you want the car to smell like spoiled fruit. This was the unfortunate discovery Cinnamon and I made on our trip to Kansas City for a wedding this past weekend.

After taking off the cellophane, we were taken aback by the pungency of the gum — its melony fruitiness quickly filled the car. That was fine while the car was cool; once it was left in a hot parking garage overnight, we discovered the gum’s dark side. I find the flavor of ripe melon to be just shy of smelling spoiled anyway. Add a citrus note and some heat and you’d have thought we left a slice of cantaloupe under the seat. The smell lingered even after I took the gum out of the car. Only a full change of air — at 70 MPH up I-35 — fully eliminated it.

The gum itself was OK. I was expecting something fruity, so the rather strong undercurrent of mint was unexpected and not particularly welcome. The melon flavor was pretty accurate, but the lime and mint fought each other and the lime lost.

You know how kids sometimes have phrases that they say that don’t really mean anything, they just think they’re funny? My brother Peter had many, but one when he was 8 or 9 was “Chop suey!” He’d say “chop” quickly, and let “suey” drag out, like a hog call.

Once, we were at my aunt and uncle’s for a holiday dinner of some sort, and everyone was watching “Wheel of Fortune” either before or after dinner. A new puzzle had just started, and all that was known was that the category was food — no letters had been turned yet. Pete had to go to the bathroom, and as he got up from the floor, he exclaimed “Chop suey!” He walked out of the room, and the puzzle was solved just as he came back.

The answer was, of course, chop suey.

An infographic called Unboxing the iPad Data has been floating around since the iPad debuted in early April. It’s well done, for the most part, but one portion of it bugged me. Specifically, this:

This graph is, essentially, meaningless. According to the caption, the iPad sold an estimated 300,000 units “this weekend,” which is a vague timeframe (two days? three days? according to the graph it’s one) that includes preorders. Meanwhile, the iPhone sold 1 million units in “over 70 days.” Which means there’s no commonality between the variables. Which means it might as well be comparing apples to lightning strikes, let alone oranges, in terms of being able to draw any conclusions. I wondered if the size of the half-circles might indicate some sort of accurate info, but their scale (diameters 190 vs. 270) relative to each other is meaningless.* As it stands, it’s a pretty picture drawn to make a couple numbers more interesting to look at.

For this chart to mean anything at all, we need some frame of reference. In order to compare the sales numbers on a chart or graph in a meaningful way, we need to standardize either according to number of units sold or number of days elapsed — or both. This chart does none of the above.

I’ve done a bit of reworking on it — read all about it on Weightshift MEMO.

Yesterday afternoon, I was brainstorming short URLs to use for Gapers Block tweets; I was hoping to use http://g✶b.ws, but the unicode character breaks the URL in most Twitter clients. So, I was idly trying stuff in Domai.nr and came across the .ky TLD. Intrigued, I tested stc.ky and found that it was available (st.ky and stic.ky were not).

After digging a little deeper, though, I discovered that to register a .ky domain, you have to be a resident of the Cayman Islands. Many TLDs allow registrations by non-residents, but not this one. So instead I tweeted the idea:

I figured I’d get no response, like usual, but instead I heard from a user named caymaniac expressing interest. He’s a Cayman citizen who runs a site about the Cayman Islands, and he registered stc.ky — and sti.ky for good measure. We traded a few tweets back and forth about how to create an URL shortener; I suggested he look into LESSN, Shaun Inman’s roll-your-own shortener code. I figured that was it for awhile.

This morning I got a tweet from @caymaniac, letting me know Stc.ky is now live. *

It’s not that pretty yet, as he notes, but it’s functional. Links go in, a shorturl comes out. Pretty sweet. And at least for now, the urls are truly short: they’re created sequentially, so the one I created just now for the The Westin Casuarina Resort & Spa, Grand Cayman is stc.ky/6. You can customize the outcome, too, ICANHAZ-style. Hilarity is sure to ensue.

So there you go — from tweet to thing in about 18 hours. How cool is that?

* I’m a little disappointed to see caymaniac trying to limit its use to Cayman-related links only — hopefully he’ll see the light and find other ways to promote the Cayman Islands with the domain. I did create a couple shorturls before the disclaimer went up — one for Gapers Block (stc.ky/GB) and one for me3dia (stc.ky/me). ↑