Mark Steyn has a couple of must-read play reviews of don't-bother-to-see plays. He endures this, so you don't have to.

Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I had a grand old time at Tim Robbins’s Embedded. By the midway point, I was laughing so much that my neighbors at the Public Theatre were beginning to stare. They were, by this stage, feeling not so much embedded as embalmed, in Mr. Robbins’s burial of his own play. The audience’s dissatisfaction arose from a simple confusion: they’d assumed Mr. Robbins’s work was a satire on the way the Bushitler and his lying liars lyingly lied the country into a war with Iraq. In fact, it’s a delightful satire on the left’s inability to satirize.

On a very tangential note, what does the "^H" stand for? I see it all the time, and I have a general idea of what it's used for (pseudo-corrections), but what's the provenance?

Thanks.

It's the traditional VT100 terminal code for backspace. I suppose in this modern world of the web, I should have used the HTML strikeout tags, but I don't know if HTML works in post titles.

Ah, thanks, that makes sense.

I use HTML in my post titles frequently, including strikeout type. It works.

That's funny. "^" is used to denote "Control" and Control-H is the standard ASCII code for "backspace." On old terminals running at 300 BPS it used to be possible to see the text print then disappear as the cursor rolled back over it, just as if you hit the backspace key while entering text today. That usually worked even on dumb terminals.

It just wouldn't occur to me that the "^h" term would be falling out of favor. One of the effects of the rapid development in this industry is that people have their own "grandfather stories" - my top end computer less than 10 years ago had a 133 mhz cpu, a few megs of ram and a few hundred megs of hard drive capacity (it was a very big deal when I bought my first 500 meg hard drive).