Coriolanus & Help!

"There is a world elsewhere"--an exiled Coriolanus

For lunch today, I made a peanut butter sandwich from the white bread I baked a few days ago. (I do that about every three months.)

This afternoon Moira and I saw the first part of the Shakespeare movie Coriolanus.  It was a pretty cool adaptation, set in the 21st century amid urban unrest and hand-to-hand combat.  Ralph Fiennes in the title role and Vanessa Redgrave as his divaish mother Volumnia were well cast.  The political story was a bit complicated, and the play's no doubt worth reading in detail.  Kathrine arrived (with her and John's dog Caillou), so we'll have to finish it tomorrow.

This evening I saw Help!, Richard Lester's second Beatles vehicle, at the Event Screen with the Classic Movies Meetup.  It was frantic and a bit thin:  A Hard Day's Night definitely did more with less.  But some of its zaniness must have inspired the later school of British comedy exemplified by Monty Python.  Afterward we  hung out at the Imperial.

I read another chapter of Guns, Germs and Steel.  This one was about how prehistoric societies made the leap from hunter-gatherers living off local wild plants and animals to farmers raising domesticated strains descending from the same.