Of course you are attacking the messenger instead of the message. Maybe that's what all true, deep down, committed, card-carrying English majors do! Thanks fo

Of course you are attacking the messenger instead of the message. Maybe that's what all true, deep down, committed, card-carrying English majors do! Thanks for confirming my suspicions about Shakespeare! Teachers for six years, four in high school and two more in college, not counting the drooling Shakespeare fans for decades on PBS, told me that he had such great insight into people, e.g., manipulation, duplicity, self-deception, gullibility, ambition, collusion, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, etc. Good to know that actually he didn't know anything at all about clinical psychology; that's just what I always believed! So, finally you dusted him off: There's nothing there at all! In my unique world of subtle hints, clues, creative ambiguity, hidden references (all that good literary stuff), a 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Now, now: In not being willing to 'understand' 'newsie', you are insisting on being thoroughly literal. You must have had a heck of a time with nearly everything in English literature! Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning of 'newsie' should be clear enough! Actually 'newsie' was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a "crippled newsie" took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made the newsie give the gun back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers! A big Shakespeare fan like you should be able, along with many millions of movie fans, to understand the vocabulary in an old Bogart movie! I'm open to still better insults for the target set, hopefully something really contemptible. I like a good movie, but I know that it doesn't mean anything. I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature. The teachers kept leaning back in their chairs, gazing at the ceiling, transporting themselves to old maid English literature teacher nirvana, and going all ecstatic about how "great", "the greatest writer who ever lived", he was, etc. May I have the airsick bag, please, right away? Oops, I guess in this classroom they are all gone; BYOB. I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. I like it enough that at a late age, with too little talent, got a violin, took lessons, and made it through Bach E major Preludio and most of the Bach Chaconne, especially the center D major section. I still needed to practice parts of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Massenet 'Meditation' from Thais. To me some really nice music is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE So, that's the Charles Laughton character, or me, lusting after the young Maureen O'Hara character!