30th Edmonton Fringe Festival: Day One

Little Room: This intense one-man show, starring and written by Jon Lachlan Stewart, is a great introductory play to anybody wanting to know why you bother dealing with the Fringe Festival. Not surprisingly its a few years old now, as it harkens back to the 'good old days' of the early 2000s Fringe.

It has energy, a unique storytelling style, and emotional resonance as Johnny struggles with growing up and fitting into high school with the debilitating disability wherein he's...well, batshit crazy. Just not there enough to be on the fringes, but not out of it enough to require being placed in an institution, he instead gets the ADHD treatment (a brief anachronism, as when he was a child the condition was still dubbed ADD). Later on, he befriends another antisocial little lout and the two of them muddle along aimlessly. However, Johnny lives with a curse: he sees what he believes to be a day in his future. As he fights, feuds, falls in love, and tries to separate from his parents, that threat looms (very vaguely) over him until...well, it's a fringe play so of course there's a collision.

Well acted, well paced, and with only a few small technical flaws, Little Room is definitely worth your time.

Fringeopolis: the 2011 Edmonton International Fringe Festival

Well, the 2011 Fringe is already approaching its final weekend. And where the hell was I? Well, I fringed over the weekend but nothing since. Hey, I just came back from a big vacation, I'm not going into debt President Monkey-style or anything.

I did see a couple-three shows already though, and there is talk that I'll be attending another one or two over the weekend. It's a slow fringe year, but on the bright side I have been exposed to weather over 30 degrees Celcius.

This portal page, which will remain up until Sunday evening, will be the summary of all fringe-related writings on this blog, same as in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and (very briefly) 2006. And, as always in the Edmonton Fringe Festival, I have the one prevailing rule:

No fags.

Day 1: Little Room

SteynOnHybrids

Er, people, not vehicles. From Mark Steyn's latest Happy Warrier column:

From London’s Daily Mail: “Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.”

You don’t say. Now why would they do that? Don’t worry, it’s all perfectly legit, the fruits of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act. So some scientists have successfully fertilized animal eggs with human sperm, and others have created “cybrids,” using a human nucleus implanted into an animal cell, or “chimeras,” in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.

Steyn launches from here onto a bit about demographics [sit down before the shock knocks you down! -ed] but somehow I think another point got missed.

British scientists are creating creatures that are part-human, part-beast. What, England doesn't have enough of them already?

Twitter Lied to Me

Chairman Mar? The reddest, most tax-spend-happy, of all the PC leadership candidates? What on earth does he have in common with Scott Hennig of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation? They both breathe oxygen?

It's the 1970s all over again

Soon after the British/Dutch/French/Spanish holdings in Africa started getting their independence, you started seeing these stories, most recently from Zimbabwe.

Last weekend it's happened again: a black Marxist, busy running his country's economy to the ground, refuses to accept the world consensus about what economic policies need to be enacted. In response, an organization (usually the International Monetary Fund, this time credit org Standard & Poor's) issues a scathing indictment of the long-term financial well-being of the nation, making it clear what needs to happen. In return, the incompetent black Marxist angrily addresses the people and insists that, despite what some silly bunch of people more rational than him insist, his country is strong and continues to be enriched by the daily meddlings of his government.

Which African nation was it this time? Errrr...