Dr. Who's David Tennant attempts the indecisive Danish prince and other gob-smackers

Cam tries to avert blogertia today. Dovegrey introduced me to the meaty Mookse. And, OMG, cute-as-a-button BBC television star David Dr. Who Tennant attempts Hamlet and this review (thanks again Dovegrey) is hilarious. Then again, if you're a fan of Dr. Who, Tennant, the RSC, or Hamlet, maybe you won't find it so funny. But anyone else...

And I just came across an advertisement for a new novel - In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal who, I believe, was this very cool, very smart young woman, a Brown student at the time, who assistant directed a show of mine at my theater company in Milwaukee! I'm going to have to read it on that basis alone even though the ad threatens me with its being "A subtly resonant masterpiece."

BBC television did a three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty about 1980's politics, hypocrisy, and the lure of the superficial. I reviewed the novel here and, while the adaptation lacks some of the psychological complexity and the grace that is afforded it by the quality of the writing, it's not bad at all. Thank you New York Public Library (my Netflix).

Meanwhile, The Neuroscience of Cognitive Development - The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain continues to impress me for its conciseness and George Eliot has this to say on the subject of human psychology in Middlemarch:

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

And this:

The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

Her certainty is, at times, shattering.

One last question: can one eat too many blueberries? I hope not. Off to class.