drafting table"to write is human; to publish, divine"

Shakespeare’s plays have been performed for over 400 years. Think about that for a moment. It stands to reason there is a diminishing number of ways to breathe new life into these productions. Ian McKellan’s Richard III and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet are just a couple of examples of the lengths one needs to go in order to do anything new with the plays. Tom Stoppard wrote a version of MacBeth specifically for staging in the living room of homes within totalitarian states. Hamlet has been translated into Klingon. You get the picture.

I’m not sure if anyone has thought about the possibilities of non-humanoid Shakespeare. Which plays lend themselves to animal performance? I believe Shakespeare foresaw the problem and with his typically cryptic genius sketched out the solution for the generations that would follow. The key lies in the titles. Here are six of the immortal bard’s plays that would be suitable for barnyard production:

1. Hamlet (duh!)
2. Much Amoo About Nothing
3. Hen-ry V
4. Rameo and Mooliet
5. A Winter’s Tail
6. The Merchant of Venison

I could go on, but I believe I’ve made my point.

Farm animal adaptations of the Great Works could see novelty introduced to productions for decades to come. Add in a little kid-friendly retooling of the basic plots and run the whole shebang through the CGI filters that have already done so much to improve Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the works of Dr. Seuss and you’ve got box-office GOLD.

A moratorium on distilling spirits (legally) in Tasmania was in place from 1830 until 1990, but Bill Lark managed to get the ban overturned in 1992 and he and his partner Liz started a single malt whiskey operation with a boutique bar located by Sullivan’s Pier on the Hobart Waterfront.

The bottles aren’t cheap but they’ll let you taste all four varieties on offer for $10. It’s worth it for the whiskey alone, even if it is a little sharp for my taste, but add in the novelty factor of drinking Tasmanian whiskey and the character of the bar itself and you’ve got yourself a memorable tipple.

…when the gales of November come early?

The greenhouse is no more. We never used it much but had thought about putting it into service next Spring to get some of our plants started It was a homely thing but would have been functional enough once the various holes were covered over by tough, clear plastic.

On Thursday a wicked wind storm + lots of rain knocked out our power from about 4 PM to 4 AM on Friday. We sat near the warmth of the gas fireplace in the living room and listened to the wind howl all evening. At one point a few exceptionally-strong gusts shook the whole house I took a walk out to the new feed shed/dog house to make sure it was still intact. No problem there. But when the morning came I walked out the back door to give the dogs a morning run-around and noticed a…problem.

dp figures a blast of wind tore the structure off the rotten logs that had acted as a foundation, and then wrapped it around our fence. Given that nothing else on the property seems damaged it really does look like the Hand of God came down and made an example of our little greenhouse. Cripes.

With only a couple of days to go before we leave for Tasmania the challenge will be cutting the aluminum studs and beams into sections so we can hustle the wreckage off to the dump by Tuesday.

We’re lucky at the farcical farm to have a large animal that excretes a wheelbarrowful of poop every two days. The poop gets deposited in bins under a large pine tree near the back of the property where time, moisture and a quadrillion worms convert it to black, black soil. We built 8′ x 4′ planter boxes last summer and added composted manure to them in the fall; in May we topped up the boxes with more composted manure and then planted a range of vegetables. The results have exceeded our expectations. The tomato plants in particular seem to be possessed by supernatural forces. Six individual plants, none more than a foot high when they were planted, have spread to cover the box and a lot of the ground around the box and have produced hundreds of tomatoes already.

Returning from three weeks away I was amazed at the density of ripe fruit still on the vine, with an even greater number of green tomatoes in the pipeline. At the ends of a couple of the plants there are even fresh flowers, signaling still more growth to come.

On the phone with my father I learned that the plants won’t stop flowering and producing fruit until they run out of a) nutrients, b) water, c) heat or d) sunshine. The first two items aren’t hard to come by, and we’re probably safe from frost for another six weeks, but as the mornings start later and the evenings come earlier every day I guess the days of fresh tomatoes with breakfast, lunch and dinner are coming to a close.