More Shake Spirits

7 Filthy Jokes You Didn't Notice in Shakespeare

By Grace McCarthy July 04, 2013 611,346 views

Add to Favorites

Let's face it: The percentage of our audience who will just sit down and read a bunch of Shakespeare without being forced to by a professor is pretty damned small. And that's too bad, because what most non-English majors don't realize is that under Shakespeare's flowery language and incomprehensible old-timey wordplay is a whole lot of sly references to boners, anal sex, masturbation, and much worse.

#7. Romeo and Juliet -- Mercutio Tells Romeo to Find a Girl Who Leaves the Back Door Open

Frank Dicksee

At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo's sex life is as barren as Frank Herbert's Dune (though judging by how the play ends, it really doesn't get that much better once he meets Juliet). As he laments this fact, his motor-mouthed friend Mercutio shares this timeless bit of wisdom:
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
O Romeo, that she were! Oh, that she were
An open arse, and thou a poperin pear
(Emphasis ours)

James Brydges
"Emphasass mine."

Mercutio is talking about a medlar fruit, which was colloquially referred to as an "open arse," for reasons that can never be adequately explained. However, there is no such thing as a poperin pear -- it's another old-timey play on words. Separate "poperin" into its three syllables and you get an Elizabethan penis euphemism -- "pop 'er in."
Yep. Mercutio is saying, "What you need, my friend, is a chick who does anal."

Nicholas Joseph Crowley/Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
Mercutio, the original Dude-Bro.

#6. The Taming of the Shrew -- Playful Banter About Cunnilingus

Washington Allston

In The Taming of the Shrew (more commonly known by its Latin name, 10 Things I Hate About You), Petruchio is trying to woo the frigid ice queen Katherine so that her insane father will allow her younger sister to get married. Luckily, Petruchio's preferred method of wooing is to engage Katherine in playfully sexual banter while wagging his eyebrows like Groucho Marx:
PETRUCHIO
Come, come, you wasp, i'faith you are too angry.
KATHERINE
If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
PETRUCHIO
My remedy is then to pluck it out.
KATHERINE
Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
PETRUCHIO
Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
KATHERINE
In his tongue.
PETRUCHIO
Whose tongue?
KATHERINE
Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
PETRUCHIO
What, with my tongue in your tail?

George Henry Hall/Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
"STAGE NOTE: PETRUCHIO should immediately turn to the audience and start flicking his tongue whilst pelvic thrusting."

In his defense, she started it. Katherine takes his simple analogy about pulling out a wasp's stinger and twists it into that age-old indictment about men being thoroughly unable to locate key parts of a woman's anatomy. Petruchio smartly counters by offering to lick her asshole, and the game is afoot.

Smatprt
"Your feet, tail, ears, whatever. I'm down for anything."

Or at least that's what it looks like to us. But back in Shakespeare's day, "tail" was jack-jawing street talk for "vulva." So in actuality, Petruchio is merely building upon Katherine's barbed quip by offering to shove his face into her crotch. This is truly a battle of wits.

#5. The Comedy of Errors -- A Single Fat Joke Gets Stretched Out for an Entire Page

McLoughlin Brothers

In The Comedy of Errors, two of the characters begin a protracted discussion of the physical characteristics of a woman named Nell. This is another way of saying that they call her a globular fatass for 23 lines of dialogue:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
What's her name?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Nell, sir; but her name and three quarters, that's
an ell and three quarters, will not measure her from
hip to hip.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Then she bears some breadth?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out
countries in her.

DEA Picture Library/De Agostini Picture Library/Getty
"Her measurements are in longitude and fatitude."

Realizing they have just struck comedic gold by comparing this woman's corpulent roundness to the planet Earth, the two men proceed to describe where on Nell's undulating ocean of obesity the countries of the world would be located. They start by declaring Ireland to be resting directly on the muddy banks of her asshole, because Shakespeare was English, and as such was required to hate the Irish at least as much as he clearly hated fat women:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.

Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
"This was my Hit 'Em Up."

Get it? "Bogs." Meaning "shit." Anyway, they continue playing Carmen Sandiego with Nell's anatomy, doing their best to insult both her and other nations, including lines about Nell's big chin and nose, until this vaudevillian routine finally comes to a close on this blazing punchline:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Oh, sir, I did not look so low.

Thomas Newland/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
After writing this line, he dropped the quill like a mic and pimped out of the room.

Yep. They're talking about her vagina, and how Dromio would rather punch his own face inside out than deign to look upon it. Incidentally, this conversation does nothing to advance the plot in any way, and Nell is never mentioned again.

#4. Hamlet -- Hamlet Tries to Go Alanis Morissette on Ophelia

John William Waterhouse

Shakespeare's Hamlet is about a guy (named Hamlet) who comes home from college to find out his uncle has murdered his father and married his mother. Hamlet responds by literally killing everyone around him. Except for Ophelia, his kind-of girlfriend, whom he merely decides to drive insane by doing his best to confuse, embarrass, and insult her in every conversation they have, for the sole purpose of cracking himself up. Like in this exchange, when he sits down next to her in a theater:
HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA
No, my lord.
HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap.
OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.
HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA
I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET
That's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs.
OPHELIA
What is, my lord?
HAMLET
Nothing.

Agnes Pringle/Chiswick Town Hall
"Now quiet, the curtains are opening and I want to see if they match the drapes."

Ophelia is doing her best to be polite, and Hamlet is taking every single one of her responses and twisting them to be about her vagina. See, when she first declines his offer to put his head in her lap, presumably on the grounds that it is a totally insane thing for a grown man to suggest in a formal public setting, he clarifies, "No no, on your lap, not inside it. Did you think I meant country matters?" Drop the second syllable from "country" and you'll see what Hamlet is talking about.

Again, Ophelia politely tries to deflect his infantile japes by simply saying, "I think nothing," but Hamlet immediately quips, "Nothing, eh? 'No thing' is pretty much what I'd expect to find between a woman's legs." At this point, Hamlet presumably dons a spinning bow tie while someone in the orchestra pit plays a slide whistle.

George Clint/Victoria and Albert Museum
"Tell me, do you smell something fishy in the state of Denmark?"

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20501_7-filthy-jokes-you-didnt-notice-in-shakespeare.html#ixzz2YJFqKoEn

 

 

 

 

7 Filthy Jokes You Didn't Notice in Shakespeare

By Grace McCarthy July 04, 2013 613,817 views

Add to Favorites

#3. Venus and Adonis -- Venus Commands Adonis to Go "Downstairs"

Annibale Carracci

In addition to scribbling out plays laced with innuendo, Shakespeare would occasionally write poetry, also laced with innuendo. His poem Venus and Adonis, about the goddess of beauty falling in love with the sexiest man on the planet, reads more like one of Shakespeare's Red Shoe Diaries than something you'd find in a literary textbook. Check out this line, when Venus is speaking to Adonis:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Pieter Borsseler
"STAGE NOTE: VENUS should immediately turn to the audience and start flicking her tongue whilst pelvic thrusting."

Yep. She's talking about country matters. Venus is essentially saying, "We can make out for a bit, but then it's time to go downtown."

Francois Lemoyne
"And none of this 'I owe you one' bullshit."

Being a goddess and all, she pretty much has her way with Adonis like this for most of the poem, until he gets killed by a boar. It's something you would write in a feverish state of bitter, premasturbatory frenzy if you had a really extensive vocabulary.

#2. Twelfth Night -- Shakespeare Sneaks the Word "Cunt" into Dialogue

Johann Heinrich Ramberg

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, recently rediscovered by archaeologists in a discount-bin excavation of an ancient Blockbuster as She's the Man starring Amanda Bynes, is about a shipwrecked woman named Viola pretending to be a man for the purposes of hilarious comedy.

William Hamilton/Theatre Royal, Bath
Like Tracey Ullman, but funny.

A good deal of the play is devoted to a completely inconsequential subplot wherein several ancillary characters play an elaborate practical joke on a stuffy old butler named Malvolio by presenting him with a forged love note from the young lady of his house:
By my life, this is my lady's hand, these be her
very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus makes she her
great P's. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.

Henry Andrews/Theatre Royal, Bath 

"Alas, later tonight, the hand in use shall be my own."

Shakespeare was fond of all types of puns -- literal puns ("This ghost has made a grave mistake!"), visual puns, and wordplay that required the dialogue to be spoken aloud for the joke to make sense. Malvolio's line here is an example of that last type -- when the line is performed, it would sound phonetically like this:
"These be her very C's, her U's, 'n' her T's."
The stuffy old butler spells out "cunt" onstage, and immediately follows it by (phonetically) saying "and thus makes she her great pees." Essentially, Malvolio is telling everyone, "This is unquestionably my lady's vagina, with which she makes giant toilet."

Daniel Maclise/Tate
"And somehow you're still single?"

There are also some vague masturbation jokes hidden in there, as Malvolio makes it a point to emphasize that "my lady's hand" is responsible for making those C's, U's, and T's end with a great gushing P.

#1. Sonnet 151 -- Shakespeare Writes a Poem About His Boner

John Taylor/National Portrait Gallery, London

Sonnets in the 13th and 14th centuries were traditionally short 14-line odes to beautiful women. When Shakespeare came along, he stayed mostly faithful to that tradition, writing numerous sonnets about his love for gorgeous females. However, he would occasionally shift the focus of the narrative over to his bonerific wang, as seen in this excerpt from Sonnet 151:
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love: flesh stays no further reason
But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize.

Gerard Soest/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
"It's the thinking man's 'Dick in a Box.'"

He literally says that his body "rises" at the sound of a girl's name and "points" to her. That is, his fully erect man saber is courageously battling against the laces of his breeches to leer at her through a wall of fabric like the ghost from The Frighteners. The undeniable DTF-ness of Sonnet 151 (and many of his sonnets in general) has frequently been used as a counterargument to the theory that Shakespeare was gay, second only to the sobering rejoinders "Who gives a shit?" and "What difference does it make?"
Regardless, Sonnet 151 makes it pretty clear that on this particular day, the bard really wanted to dip his quill in some lady's inkwell.

Richard Westall/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
"Come now, ladies. You can't leave Willie Shakes shaking his willie."

Related Reading: For more Shakespearean insanity- including random-ass bear attacks- click here. And did you know that old Willy S invented many of the words we use every day? We owe eyeball, puking, alligator and many more to the author of Hamlet! Finish your bard binge by reading Swaim's argument for why Shakespeare would write for Cracked.com if he lived today.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20501_7-filthy-jokes-you-didnt-notice-in-shakespeare_p2.html#ixzz2YJGNlrzr

 

 

 

 

 

Negatory into Positerritory

Anytime you feel negative emotion, stop and say: Something is important here; otherwise, I would not be feeling this negative emotion. What is it that I want? And then simply turn your attention to what you do want. . . . In the moment you turn your attention to what you want, the negative attraction will stop; and in the moment the negative attraction stops, the positive attraction will begin. And—in that moment—your feeling will change from not feeling good to feeling good. 



That is the Process of Pivoting.

---Abraham

Excerpted from the book - Money and the Law of Attraction

Speak English!

22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6?op=1#ixzz2VSMiLIQA

Everyone knows that Americans don't exactly agree on pronunciations.  Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect.
Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Vaux and Scott Golder's linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words. (via detsl on /r/Linguistics)
His results were first published on Abstract, the N.C. State research blog. 
Joshua gave us permission to publish some of the coolest maps from his collection.

Click here to see the maps >

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6?op=1#ixzz2VSMo2p8z

Are you Divine?

http://youtu.be/Vnbi2tiTHAk

Bloodletting

My Life as a Screenwriter You've Never Heard Of (Guest Column)

10:00 AM PDT 5/15/2013 by Justin Marks

Justin Marks has written over 20 movie screenplays and seen his TV pilots greenlit — but as he explains, the life of a Hollywood scribe is far more lows than highs if your name isn't Aaron Sorkin.

'Buffy' Reunion: Joss Whedon's Surprising Response to Young Female Fans

Here’s a day in the life of a writer that you don’t always get to hear about.

It was 5 p.m., and I was playing Call of Duty. Why? Because I wanted to. The phone rang; it was a producer with whom I’d just spent the past two years laboring over a cable pilot, a time-travelly science fiction thing. We’d delivered the final cut to the network, and we were awaiting The Call — the one where you hear that your show, which tested well, is being picked up, that your life is about to change.

But the producer had That Voice. Any experienced writer knows That Voice. Because That Voice means one thing: The network passed. “Hey,” the producer said, “we fought for it till the end. We’ll find something else.” I agreed. And that was that.

Probably not three minutes had elapsed in my game of Call of Duty. Two more minutes to go upstairs and erase my now-dead pilot’s name off the list of projects on my dry-erase board. Two years of effort gone in five minutes.

PHOTOS: From 'Buffy' to 'X-Files': TV's Greatest Writers Rooms of All Time

As I wiped the board clean, I saw another project listed below. Kind of a back-burner thing — I was busy at the time — but I owed the producer a call. So I picked up the phone. Told him I was in. By the next morning, I was back at the keyboard, as if yesterday’s pilot had never happened.

And that, my friends, is what it means to be Just Another Working screenwriter.

During the past decade, I’ve been paid to write just shy of two dozen screenplays. Some scripts get made, but most don’t. My name has only remained on one. I’ve been lucky enough to write originals and adapt comic-book properties (Green Arrow) and popular toys (He-Man, Voltron). I make a decent living, but it’s not all glitz and glamour. My wife and I live in a comfortable house in Los Feliz. I drive a Prius, a car they might as well hand out with WGA cards.

I had the fantasies of what this life would be like — a life that, for most, never will be a reality. I’ve wanted to write movies since I was 12 years old. I wanted trips to backlots, premieres, moments of seeing my movie on the shelf at the video store. That’s what we sign up for.

Then there’s the other 90 percent: waking up, walking the dogs, grinding away at my computer in the clothes I slept in. Occasional fits of creative euphoria interrupted by phone calls from agents, arguments on Twitter or the dogs barking at squirrels in the yard. But when it picks up — when there’s a movie being made or a star being attached or a deal being closed — man, that high feels like it’ll last forever.

STORY: Star Trek's' Damon Lindelof on Brad Pitt, Having Power as a Writer and His Agony Over 'Lost'

Until it doesn’t.

We learn to numb ourselves to the ups and downs. Especially the downs. No one likes to linger on failure in Hollywood — not execs, not agents, not us. We erase the failure in our minds. We move on to the next great hope.

But I’m a screenwriter, and it’s my job to be sentimental. So to remember why I do what I do, here’s a little something I hold on to, just for me …

It was a few days before we wrapped the pilot, up in Toronto, and I was leaving the set. I said good-night to a handful of actors who were rehearsing in a make-believe particle collider. I walked past a 1928 Buick Touring being painted for tomorrow’s scene. I crossed through a greenscreen stage being lighted for pickups. And I smiled at an extra in a wedding dress on her way to being photographed for inserts. Then I stopped because I realized that for a moment, I’d been privileged to walk through my own imagination. I was 12 again.

For those of us who aren’t Aaron Sorkin, that’s what carries us into the next day. Everything else is just stuff we try to forget.

Snuff TV?

TVBizwire

Death on Chinese TV Show Could Have Repercussions for U.S. Series -- Both Shows Are Based on the Same Dutch Format Deadline, NY Daily News

The death of one of the personalities participating in a Chinese television program could have an impact on a troubled U.S. series.
Deadline.com reports that Peng Jiaxuan, assistant to martial artist Shi Xiaolong on China’s "Celebrity Splash China," drowned Friday during a training session for the show. Both the Chinese program and ABC's “Splash” are versions of a show that originally aired in Holland.
“Splash” has had its own problems lately, with the most recent being an injury last week to contestant Nicole Eggert. The New York Daily News reports that the former “Baywatch” beauty, 41, had a bad landing while trying a complicated maneuver that included multiple backflips. Eggert tweeted later that she suffered swelling and bruising on her back and kidneys.
"’Splash’ has lost two cast members to injury over its run. Swimsuit model Katherine Webb, 23, quit the show over a back injury, and ‘Chelsea Lately’ sidekick Chuy Bravo backed out of the program because of a fractured heel,” the Daily News report notes. “Skier Rory Bushfield remained on the show after rupturing an eardrum during a dive. Former Playboy star Kendra Wilkinson left 'Splash' over her fear of heights.”
Additionally, Deadline reports that participant Louie Anderson suffered bruised ribs during training for “Splash.”
This is all on a freshman ABC reality show that has been sinking in the ratings, as we reported last week. Tuesday’s installment hit an all-time low with an anemic 1.1 average rating in the key 18-49 demo, based on Nielsen overnights.
Whether the death on the Chinese diving show will convince ABC to rethink its seemingly doomed series remains to be seen, but the news appears to be generating increasingly harsh criticism of “Splash” in online comments.

“Splash’s” Nicole Eggert

Gavin, darling!

Editor's note: Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, is the founder of NewRepublican.org. Follow him on Twitter: @alexcast.

(CNN) -- One hundred and sixty-five years ago, in Coloma, California, a carpenter named James W. Marshall built a sawmill to harness the power of the American River. Below the waterwheel, he saw flakes of metal where the spent water flowed. Marshall marked the moment saying, "I have found it." He had discovered gold in California and more: For the next century, our nation would mine its future in the Golden State.

By the 1950s, California had manufactured an optimistic nation's dreams, brought them to life in the steel and smoke of industry and then captured them on celluloid. Business bloomed in deserts, nourishing one of the world's great economies. A green Eden of farmland, the Central Valley where the sun shone 300 days a year, grew one third of America's produce. Innovation followed discovery: Silicon, it turned out, was even more valuable than gold.

California's public sector also boomed. The state built a web of roads, bridges and aqueducts that shamed their Roman inventors. It funded world-class universities to prepare beach boys and California girls for lives of endless promise.

Alex Castellanos

To see where the rest of the country would be in 20 years, we could look at California. But the roads to success and failure are often almost the same.

As the state gorged on its success, California's transportation arteries grew clogged. The public sector's blood began to thicken.

Californians moved faster, their problems grew more complex and their demands on government accelerated. The state's aging public sector could not respond with matching dynamism and flexibility.

Newsom: What to look for in Prop 8 case

Even as the state poured more money into education, transportation and public safety, it delivered less value in them. Government grew larger and more expensive, with less and less to show for it. Finally, when the housing bubble collapsed, state revenue did too. California's river of gold dried up. The waterwheel would not turn.

Today, California owes hundreds of billions: $300 billion alone in pension obligations. Even after Gov. Jerry Brown's effort to pay down $28 billion of immediate debt, California's liabilities for retiree pensions and health care exceed what it spends for all state programs combined.

California's future looks anything but golden. Taxpayers who don't want to be left footing the bills are in exodus. The state's politics is as paralyzing as Washington's. To see our nation's bright future in 20 years, can we still look at California?

Become a fan of CNNOpinion

Stay up to date on the latest opinion, analysis and conversations through social media. Join us at Facebook/CNNOpinion and follow us @CNNOpinion on Twitter. We welcome your ideas and comments.

Maybe so. Sometimes, the first green shoots emerge in the forest where everything burned.

---

Gavin Newsom is difficult to classify. Tall, slim and rakishly elegant, he could be the American reincarnation of British actor David Niven. A contradictory combination of left and right, he is a liberal hero for legalizing gay marriage in his city and a liberal villain for reforming its overly generous welfare cash payment program.

The 45-year-old Newsom, a Democrat who is now California's lieutenant governor, is more than a government theorist, however. He owns 17 small businesses with about 1,000 employees. His confederation includes three wineries that make luscious, fruit-forward elixirs. In business, he is a swashbuckling entrepreneur whose motto is "anyone who is not failing isn't trying hard enough." What is most revolutionary about Newsom is that in government, he's an entrepreneur as well.

When Newsom became mayor of San Francisco, he found a city with little money to meet social needs and behind Estonia and South Korea in digital governance. His push to modernize San Francisco without expanding its dysfunctional public sector is the launching point of his new book, "Citizenville." It is a fertile garden of original thinking.

The lieutenant governor argues that government's biggest problem is not that it is misguided but that it is archaic. Newsom cites open-source software pioneer Tim O'Reilly's analogy for government. "We think of government as a vending machine: You put money in, services come out." When something goes wrong, Newsom points out, we shake the vending machine out of frustration. If we feed it more money, it is to little effect: Vending machines are not particularly innovative or adaptive.

Our government is still built on that model, Newsom reports, the outdated, industrial-age paradigm of the factory, though everything else in our personal lives and our private sector has moved past it. Simultaneously, an explosion of technology, social media and e-commerce has created a more informed and empowered citizenry.

A "citizenville," Newsom writes, now has the power and connectivity to solve problems in new ways, e.g., determining where tax dollars are spent, how crime is fought and where garbage trucks go. Speaking through their laptops and iPhones, people are increasingly able to organize themselves and solve social problems, independent of the old, creaky, public-sector industrial plant.

"Technology changes the very nature of government -- from a top-down entity to a bottom-up one. From one-way hierarchy to two-way democracy. From vending machine to the cloud," he explains.

If we open the doors of government to the private sector and make data accessible, we can jump-start a new era of social innovation. Open up the doors of government satellite data and you get Google Earth. Give Web designers in Chicago and Oakland access to public police data, and they create innovative crime-mapping tools that prevent muggings. Invent a digital "currency" to reward citizens for participating in their own governance, and small town decision-making becomes as interesting and involving as Farmville. "The future is sharing -- open data, open participation, open source, open everything," Newsom writes. "And it must happen at every level."

Our old, marbled shrines to bureaucracy have grown unserviceable and unaffordable. Can we continue to justify them when mayors are using Twitter to address constituent needs instead?

The lesson: The public sector no longer has a monopoly on government. We are in a new world of revolutionary and empowering technologies. Americans aren't waiting for Washington or Sacramento to reinvent government for the next century; they are creating an app for that. With it, they are creating a new path for democratic vitality. Now, people-to-people government is an alternative to one that flowed only to people from the state.

With new tools and technologies, Newsom contends, it is time to redefine "government" to seize the opportunities of a new day. Would we still rather be governed the old way, top down, politically and artificially by plant managers? Or bottom-up, authentically, naturally and organically, through our own decision making and handiwork?

Perhaps this has been the promise of the American experiment in self-government all along, and we have only been waiting for the powerful and democratizing technology of the communications age to seize it.

Once more, when we need it most, maybe California has discovered gold again.

Follow @CNNOpinion on Twitter.

Join us at Facebook/CNNOpinion.