Thomas Ouphe

Imagine this four times over but with letters instead of conversations and Elizabethan hygiene standards. I was quite excited to read Love's Labour's Lost, it starts really well.  The king and his three mates all swear off women for three years to pursue academic interests and higher purposes.  Oh, and the king makes it law that everyone else has to do the same for ease of plot development.  It's all going well until a princess / potential queen shows up with her exactly three friends. There's a lot of potential here, and we see an immediate step up in terms of the quality of writing.  You know those nut jobs who think all Shakespeare's plays were written by different people? Well, I almost thought they had a point for a minute.  Almost every phrase the king utters is profound and well-composed.  This can't be written by the same bloke that wrote Two Gentlemen of Verona, I erroneously posited. Then we get Costard (a clown).  Costard has already broken ...

Whilst there is room to debate the issue within the creation of matter, humanity as we know it begins with language. In the beginning, reads   The Bible , was the word and the word was with God. Not only that but the word is so powerful that God only has to use a few more words to create light, the universe and all life as we know it. The Bible holds words in pretty high regard and so it should, the Bible is all just words. Seems like a simple point to make, most books primarily consist of words. However, take a minute to stop and think about the profound effect that one collection of words has had on the world. Think about the wars, the conversions, the cultures lost suppressed and destroyed. Think about the personal sacrifices it inspired, the acts of compassion, of heroism and of generosity. Feel free to stop and make a cup of tea if you want, it always hurts my head to think about it too. The Bible   is only one book in one branch of literature; its influence on the world,...

If this building existed, it was never as good as its story . When I was nineteen years old, I dated a mildly attractive and thoroughly surly girl by the name of Petunia.  OK, I have forgotten her real name but Petunia will serve well enough for this story.  She was a scientist in training who looked at everything in the world and asked two significant questions:    Why had it been created? What possible use was it to her? Petunia and I were not together long before she figured out that in regards to myself the answers to those questions were “out of spite to her principles,” and “none at all.”  After two months of sparse and abrasive contact, intermittently peppered with a kiss or two, the relationship fell into death throws in a popular   Birkenhead   drinking establishment where she told me that her father had warned her about boys like me.     What she meant by that was not that I was a sexual predator but rather that I was an idiot ...