Chuck Lorre is Shakespeare with a Laptop - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Chuck Lorre is Shakespeare with a Laptop

 

Chuck Lorre is Shakespeare with a laptop

Bill Prady is Wodehouse at a whiteboard

Their Pasadena is the Forest of Arden

Or Totleigh Towers at a city bus stop

 

They have built for us an unfallen world

Of Woosterian plots and app-crossed lovers

At play in the laboratories of the Lord

Where the magic works but the elevators don’t

 

Chuck and Bill’s stories are always well-wrought

And they end each one with a provocative thought

 

 

(Nothing rhymes with “l’envoi.”)

Coach Sheldon Cooper Gives the Chess Team a Pep Talk - weekly column 8.15.19

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Coach Sheldon Cooper Gives the Chess Team a Pep Talk

“Now guys, today’s the big game against M.I.T., and before we thunder out to the table I want to review with you the new rules of the league.

“Before the match I don’t want to see any of you taking a knee when the band plays the theme to Big Bang Theory. We stand in unity, okay? When that song is played we are ONE team, the mighty, mighty SACRIFICIAL PAWNS! We are no longer divided by our Star Trek backgrounds or our Star Wars backgrounds. When our sacred Big Bang Theory song is played WE BEAM DOWN AS ONE and we STAND AWKWARDLY AS ONE like the all-American nerds we are. No one is either Captain Kirk or Han Solo; we are all SACRIFICIAL PAWNS! OOOOH-RAH! Gimme an OOOH-RAH!”

“…um…oooh-rah?”

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

“(squeak) ooh-rah?”

“Okay, fine, fine. Now, then, if the other team offers a prayer, just go with that, okay?”

“But Coach,” said Trevor, “we’re chess players. We see existential reality only in the Spanish Opening, El Ruy Lopez, and nothing more.”

“Au contraire,” replied Neville. “Who can consider the symmetry, the logic, the elegance of the Giuoco Piano and fail to understand that only the Creator of the universe could make that opening?”

“But then how do you explain the Pirc Defense, which is obviously from the Dark Side?” asked Ponsonby.

“Focus, men. If we get into all that theology stuff someone will think we’re…ugh…liberal arts students.”

Team: “EEEEyewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!”

“Now, when you make a capture, remember that under the new rules we’ll be penalized two pawns and a cheerleader if you spike a rook, knight, or bishop.”

“Okay, coach, but can we spike the punch, haha?”

“You’re getting a penalty for that bad pun, Vladislav. One more thing, men. You’re going to have to clean up your language around the cheerleaders.”

“Awwwwwwwwww, mannnnnnnnnnn,” whined Clive. “Whenever I’m around Chloe Zoe, well, she just makes my Rubik’s Cube whirrrr out of sync. She makes me want to whisper a Shakespearean sonnet to her.”

“Now THAT is just the kind of language we just DON’T need, not even in our manly-man locker room. Shakespeare! If I had said “Shakespeare” or “Keats” my old physics instructor would have washed my mouth out with H202.”

“Yessss, Coach.”

“Now then,” concluded Coach Sheldon, holding up a regulation chess clock: “Out there on the field of mental battle you’ll have only two friends, your superior left-brained intellect (dramatic pause) and this. Now let’s go out there and kick some serious quantum entanglement and non-locality! Yeahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

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Book Burn Theory

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Book Burn Theory

                                                                                     

In a recent Orwellian telescreen episode of Big Bang Theory one of the lead characters arrives at a crisis of scientific faith.  Having long worked at an obscure theory of something-ness, the character concludes that all his years of research have been for naught.  In a sort of intellectual purge the young scientist decides to give away all the books he has accumulated on the failed theory.

 

When someone asks him why he doesn’t simply throw away the books, the young man replies with (the quotation is from memory, and might not be exact) “I don’t like the smell of burning books; they remind me of church picnics in East Texas.”

 

Yes, how sad to live in intellectual darkness in East Texas when we could all emigrate to enlightened New Jersey where Snooky and Governor Christie play bridge tag among the abandoned casinos.

 

This is not to say that the telescreen character might not have a small point, despite his bigotry.  Visits to several colleges in East Texas suggest to the observer that the amount of tax revenue flung at rock-climbing walls, swimming pools, foosball parlors, handball courts, and indoor jogging tracks might be higher than the investment in the science program.

 

How curious that on election day this November there might be people sweating on fake rocks who (the people, not the rocks) later won’t have the energy to vote.  Energetic play might be (one doesn’t want to stereotype) easier for some than voting for the legislators who through appointed boards are the controlling authority for public colleges and universities.

 

In The Sand Pebbles Petty Officer Holman has difficulty explaining the theory of steam power to a young Chinese sailor.  Holman develops as an instructional aid the imagery of little dragons running up and down the steam pipes in the engine room, and that works fine.  In our time a petty officer in the Chinese navy might have to explain nuclear power to an American non-voter as little rock stars, fashion designers, and cooking show hosts colliding against each other in the reactor. 

 

In East Texas we have all attended church picnics and other after-the-liturgy social occasions hosted by many religious groups, and there are no reports of either books or heretics being burned as part of the merriment.  Truth, however, is no obstacle to a cheap and easy laugh on the Orwellian telescreen.

 

Recently I read a fifty-year-old book of essays by a Christian writer. The stamps inside the cover reveal that the book had been owned, in turn, by the library of a Catholic seminary, the library of a Catholic church, and the library of a Protestant grade school, all in East Texas, before being remaindered via Goodwill (my book store of choice). 

 

The book was written by a Catholic writer, and so the librarian of the Protestant grade school had affixed to the title page a memo to the students that while there was much in the book not in agreement with that denomination’s teachings and usages, there was much good in it, and that in a spirit of intellectual inquiry and the freedom to disagree the book was available to all. 

 

In sum, three religious institutions in East Texas offered to their faithful the free circulation of this sometimes controversial (and often tiresome) volume for fifty years.  Underlinings, penciled markings, and much wear indicate that many people read this book, both in agreement and disagreement.  St. Vincent’s Seminary did not burn it.  St. Leo’s Church did not burn it.  Cathedral Christian School did not burn it.

 

Further, one can validly assume that the three institutions taught that stereotyping of others is wrong.  The producers and writers of Big Bang Theory might want to think – think, not feel – about that.  That a current stereotype is fashionable doesn’t make it any less a stereotype.

 

Still, no one should ever feel obligated to think well of New Jersey.

 

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