Why don't motorists take the right-of-way when they have it?

So you're on your bike, and you're coming to a stop sign. So you stop, because that is your duty as a vehicle-type thing. There is a car coming from your right, and heading straight on. It has reached the intersection before you. It has stopped. And then, for no reason in the world, except for some misbegotten sense of magnanimity, the driver waves you on.

In some ways, this is sort of cute. In some situations, it really is just nice. But if you're on an incline, this just wastes the motorist's time and makes you look like a moron as you start trying to go uphill from a dead stop. You can feel them chuckling at your wobbly, desperately pedalling frame.

None of this is necessary. All I'm asking is that motorists take the right-of-way when they have it, and not when they don't. Everything would be better. I would not risk my life, and I would not be embarrassed. Is there something inherently unreasonable about this?

(Yes, I have a lot of cycling rage. It's spilling over into other parts of my life. You can ask my friends about a pedestrian incident in Chicago.)

Why don't motorists stop at stop signs?

I have some sympathy, actually, with the so-called rolling stop, because as a cyclist I know that inertia is not my friend. Quite frankly, though, if all it takes to overcome that inertia is depressing the gas pedal, you could probably just stop.

My problem here is with people who cruise halfway into the intersection and then stop, thereby endangering the lives of any cyclists or pedestrians they have heretofore been ignoring. In the past week I have been almost hit while walking and while on my bike; in both cases I clearly had the right-of-way. This, I submit, is pretty poor.

Look, schmuckaroo banzai, the stop sign is where it is so that you pause before sticking your stupid hunk of junk around the blind corner. It was not placed there just to fulfill some traffic planner's insane whim. So stop.

Why did it snow yesterday?

March 24? SHENANIGANS.

Why are people such jerks about graduate students?

I was reading an article about the underemployment of college graduates, and it made a snide comment about how the figures don't show how bad it really is, because so many young people have fled to grad school to ride out the economic storm and escape the real world. Though I do not doubt that, for some, this is their rationale for making no money and ruining their constitutions with excessive coffee, bad food, and insufficient sleep, this is hoity-toity garbage.

Many of us--I know it will boggle your mind--went to graduate school because we want to be scholars. Not, in fact, because we can't tie our shoes or do simple arithmetic. We don't help ourselves by our self-deprecation, but this is largely a learned defense mechanism against patronizing swine who actually think we don't do anything useful. They're super nice, and tell me I'm wasting my life. It's basically the greatest.

You don't want to learn four extra languages, two of which are dead. It's not easy, after all. That's fine. I do. I actually do, not just as a stop-gap before I start wearing black pencil skirts every day and working in a bank. So you can get off your high horse and point your jackassery elsewhere.

Why is Paul Bettany cursed to play total creepers?

He is capable of more appealing things! He was cute in Wimbledon (which was otherwise fairly odious) and hilarious in A Knight's Tale (which was, in fact, a work of cinematic genius). And even though I have blogged about Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander, at least he didn't make your flesh crawl.

So whence come The Da Vinci Code, Legion, and Priest? The first of these is depressing because it had a large number of credible actors in it, despite being based on an atrocious novel compounded of strange prejudices, rampant misogyny, an inferiority complex, and an utter inability to compose readable prose. So we can perhaps accept its existence, because at least Mr. Bettany wasn't the only one suckered into appearing.

But Legion? Did anyone see that? Even I didn't see that, and I'll watch almost anything. It just looked stupid and gross. And Priest looks equally bad (Christopher Plummer is no longer any kind of guarantor of quality), even if Mr. Bettany is a good guy. With a creepy tattoo and evidently some severe mental problems.

Perhaps we can blame A Beautiful Mind. But even though he was there a figment of Russell Crowe's imagination, he was largely benign--more damaging by his absence than his presence.

Also, that movie was good. So if you're going to play creepers, Paul Bettany, at least play them in real films, not this endless parade of excruciating supernatural dross.

Why is there a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera?

And why can't Pandora accept that, no, in fact, I do not ever want to hear any show by Andrew Lloyd Webber? Especially not the ones that have been universally panned and ridiculed?

Honestly, how can you write a show about the Phantom on Coney Island, with a drunken, abusive Raoul and the frankly ludicrous title Love Never Dies? Don't we already have Carousel, to check most of those boxes?

I'm going to write a musical sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy gambles away Pemberley and Lizzie has a love-child with Wickham and it will all take place in some tawdry little hellhole in the south of Italy. It will be called Dicing and Dimwittery and it will be much better than Love Never Dies. Who wants to write the music and lyrics? I've been having trouble coming up with a snappy line to rhyme with "It is a truth universally acknowledged."

Why does Claude Chabrol make totally insane films?

So you see La Fleur du Mal. And it is off-putting, both because one knows that the main romantic pairing is incestuous, but one does not know to what degree, and also because it implies that, in France, if a woman accidentally kills a man who is making unwanted advances, this counts as murder. But it is only off-putting, and you move on.

In fact, perhaps you think, "Ah, I will also watch La Mademoiselle d'Honneur, because Benoît Magimel is handsome and I know vaguely what to expect." The cast is even the same. There merely appears to be less money around.

Well, my friend, you are incorrect.

You meet the girl (Senta), and she immediately starts talking about how the young man (Philippe) is her destiny and she is so in love with him. If this were real life, you'd be scared, but it's a film. And women often do this in film, and that's sort of all right. Because--and listen closely, because this is the important bit--generally these women do not kill people in order to prove their love.

And they almost certainly don't kill multiple people.

Why is it assumed that Sophocles can't write women?

Okay, bear with me.

We are willing to accept that Sophocles can write: a man who has killed his father and married his mother, a man who has had a psychotic episode and tried to kill all his comrades, a man who has been without human contact for ten years with a hideous ailment, and others besides. But we are not willing to accept that he can write women?

So therefore he can get into the heads of men who are actually insane, but not into the heads of women? Are women really so defective and incomprehensible?

The women he writes are pretty darn bonkers, it's true. But, get this: so are the men. Would an Antigone written by a woman necessarily be less steadfast? Would you write off Oedipus as the fevered, impossible imaginings of a sad old spinster if he were not written by a man?

Yes, fifth-century Athenian women faced systematic societal oppression. Thank you. Well done. So did incestuous parricides and lunatics. That Electra is exceptional is not entirely--nor even primarily--decided by her sex. Her position (at home, at the mercy of her various deranged relatives, alive) may be, but her personality is not.

I'm not willing to accept that literary genius is gender-specific, because that is piffle. So stop whining and stop writing seriously asinine books full of offensive special pleading. Please.

Why are church ushers so officious?

Communion is not that hard. You go up, pew by pew, and sometimes there are queue-jumpers, and that's rude, but rarely does it degrade into a mad, free-for-all scrum.

In major metropolitan parishes, there are sometimes a lot of people in the congregation, and many of them are likely tourists who are not too familiar with church etiquette. In these parishes, it is acceptable and perhaps necessary for the ushers to direct the parishioners on their way to communion. This ensures a steady flow of people and no rugby flashbacks.

In small parishes, however, this ushering is pointless. Also, it is often badly done. The point is to keep the line from getting absurdly long, not to make the people in the back pews sprint up to the altar to get there in time. So, either do it better, small parishes, or get over yourselves, and don't do it at all.

Why did the NBA have those stupid pseudo-Spanish jerseys?

"El Heat?" Really? "Los Bulls?"

In the first place, there's an asinine inconsistency here: the standard jerseys do not say "The Heat," so this is obvious and bizarre pandering.

In the second place, why not go for the gusto? "Los Toros" would be great, and not all that confusing, because uniforms are helpfully color-coded. In baseball, San Francisco's Spanish-language vibe is all about "Los Gigantes," and I don't think this has caused mass panic and destruction.

You can either have "the Heat" or "el Calor." Anything in between is illiterate, meaningless, and condescending.

(Also, the "Heat" is still a stupid name for a sports team. Just saying.)

Why do people confuse blank verse with free verse?

This happens all the time, and is mostly perpetrated by people who bandy the term "poetry" but wouldn't know it if Sophocles himself came up and danced around naked, as he is prone to do.

The thing about blank verse is that it doesn't rhyme. It does, however, have a meter. In English this meter is usually iambic pentameter; that is: five iambs in a row. An iamb is a metrical unit of two syllables in the pattern "short-long." This metrical form is often used for longer, narrative poems, such as Milton's Paradise Lost, and is essentially the English replacement for the classical dactylic hexameter.

The thing about free verse, of course, is that it isn't verse.

Why is "Castle on a Cloud" the worst song?

Cosette has almost literally no personality at all, so it's not that surprising that she has the show's worst song. At least Éponine has guts, even though she's irritating and her crush on Marius is blown slightly out of proportion (although "Et puis, tenez, monsieur Marius, je crois que j'étais un peu amoureuse de vous" is one of the better lines in the novel and certainly among the least useless things that any character says). And Fantine, while she could make some better choices, achieves some things. Most of them are negative, like the loss of hair/teeth/virtue, but she's not just sitting in a garden so some dopey young man can fall for her and go a little pretentiously bonkers.

It's true that Cosette is very young when "Castle on a Cloud" happens, and that her life is rather a wasteland. But even when I was taught that song, which is taught to young ladies as at an early age (for unknown reasons), I thought it was insipid rubbish. Probably because it is. She doesn't even have interesting dreams. No floors to sweep? Dream big, honey.

And, for the love of Pete: "There is a room that's full of toys/There are a hundred boys and girls?" Why does that not rhyme? Can't you say "girls and boys?" I have never understood this.

Why are films reluctant to give Xerxes a beard?

This has only, I think, been a problem lately. In The 300 Spartans, Xerxes had both a beard and a funny hat, which is, coincidentally, how he is generally portrayed in the historical and artistic record. It is of course possible that there was a giant conspiracy in antiquity to make us all believe that Xerxes was tall and manly and bearded, when he was actually sickly and effeminate, but if I had to lay money I'd bet not.

Recently, however, we appear to have decided that such beards as Persians wore 2500 years ago are just not sexy. And, to be fair, they kind of aren't. I'm not sure our solution is the right one. For starters, it's not obvious why Xerxes has to be particularly sexy.

Well, I suppose in One Night with the King, which you should not see because it is awful (I provide you a valuable service in the vetting of terrible films; you should be grateful), Xerxes (or Ahasuerus, right, right) needs to be a dreamboat so that we can have a stupid thing about how he and Esther have a love that is so pure and there are no harems or anything of the kind à la Jodhaa Akbar. So he has a fussy little goatee and shoulder-length greasy hair. He looks like he's off the cover of a dubious novel set in an indeterminate and probably imaginary historical period, chiefly distinguished by a general reluctance to wear shirts. There are, at least, funny hats.

And, yes, I've already complained about 300, but only because I'm bitter that they made Rodrigo Santoro unattractive. Now I'm complaining that they made him unattractive and because, being completely hairless, he did not at all resemble any Xerxes not produced in the fevered imagination of Frank Miller, who also appears to believe that the Persian Empire was in Mordor.

Come on, people. You could give him a beard that was attractive. They managed it on Eric Bana in Troy. Or at least you could not make him the biggest sissy of all the sissies. I mean, the man built a bridge across the Hellespont, made of spit and chewing gum. That takes guts.