Hasta La Gadget!

Senior year marks another big transition for every college student. But whether or not you’re prepared for the changes you’ll soon encounter, you can take comfort in the fact that the job market is looking up for new grads.

According to a new report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), “employers plan to hire 8.3 percent more new college graduates from the Class of 2015” than they did last year.

For soon-to-be new graduates, here’s some advice to help you explore your post-graduation options and leave college on a high note.

1. Join a club or activity you’ve always wanted to try.

Remember that it’s not too late to explore new interests, on or off campus. “Get involved with campus and community groups even if you’ve never been involved with them before,” urges Amy Gerretsen, director of constituent engagement and career services at Ripon College in Wisconsin. Join a club you’ve always wanted to try, enroll in a class you’ve always wanted to take, or try your hand at volunteering, Gerretsen says. Make the most of your final undergraduate year by checking those last few goals off of your bucket list.

2. Take graduate school entrance exams.

Some people wait a few years and gain real world experience before getting their master’s degree, while others jump right in after undergrad. But whether you plan to go now or later, “consider preparing for and taking graduate entrance exams,” says Alexandra Anderson, associate director of career services at Southwestern University in Texas. Your senior year is an ideal time to take the exams because you’ll already be in study mode. Anderson also says “most scores are good for three to five years.”

3. Set weekly goals for your job search.

Balancing your schoolwork with career planning is tough, which is why it helps to take your job search one step at a time. “Set a weekly goal to develop some aspect of your job or graduate school search,” says Sue Tarpley, career center director at Berry College in Georgia. This might include updating your resume, setting up informational interviews, or researching companies you might want to work for.

Carve out four to five hours outside of school to job search, recommends Jenna Azar, manager of academic transition and engagement at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Setting realistic goals in the short-term will make your post-graduation planning feel much more manageable.

4. Research where you’ll want to live after college.

Are openings for the job you’re hoping to land only in a specific city? Or are you an East Coast kid who has always wanted to live on the West Coast? Weigh your options and consider what’s most important to you after college.

“If you are thinking of moving far away, try to visit the area first to be sure this is something that will work for more than a vacation,” says Maureen Armstrong, assistant to the vice president for student affairs at the University of Connecticut. “Think about the transition to college and what was exciting and difficult about the experience. Try to apply this lens to the post-college move and make thoughtful decisions about your next steps.”

Make sure you also consider the financial costs of living in a new place.

5. Tell your friends and family about your post-graduation plans.

“Networking can sound scary, but start building your skills now with the people you come into contact with every day,” says Amelia Hurt, director of career services at Oklahoma City University. “Your friends, parents, a supervisor, co-worker and alumni are important resources that make up your first circle of networking.” Put the word out about the kind of job you’re looking for so that your friends and family know to refer you the next time they hear of a job opening in their network.

6. Take a deep breath and know there is life after college.

Realize that you’re prepared and that you’re going to be OK, says Azar, who sees many seniors get wrapped up in the stress of graduation and planning for the future. She says it’s important to reflect on your college experience and use what you’ve learned to navigate this new transition into adulthood. More importantly, she says, get excited about your future.

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Late in the Kneehigh production of Tristan & Yseult, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, a character says, “It’s hard to keep things white.” She’s referring to how easily white apparel can be soiled, often by blood.

I’d been thinking the same thing, since my attending the evening performance of Tristan & Yseult, followed my presence at a matinee performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II in the Theatre for a New Audience version, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. During the current run there, buckets of blood are being spilled daily.

And I mean the “buckets” reference literally. In this undertaking, a young boy carrying a bucket often arrives to pour (stage) blood over yet another of the marauding Tamburlaine’s victims. The soakings happen so often to any of the characters who unwisely choose to wear white that I’d made a note about it.

“Anything white,” I’d written, and that’s even before a figure in modern dress — a suit, tie and white shirt — showed up late in proceedings, where otherwise Tom Piper’s costumes were armor-era specific. Was the contemporary get-up intended as a reminder that such things go on today? Never mind. It’s just that before long the pristine white shirt was, you guessed it, covered with blood.

Director Michael Boyd has conflated Marlowe’s plays into one three-hour treatment interrupted by a single half-hour intermission. A patron can’t help thinking the interval is that long in order to afford stagehands time to wipe up the blood spilled in the first half. After all, in the second act so much more will drench the floor and the long transparent plastic curtain hung at the back of the thrust stage that another intense cleaning will be necessary.

Let’s just say director-editor Boyd has the courage of his theatrical convictions. Wars are marked and marred by bloodshed, and he’s out to get that across as graphically as he can. Keep in mind that Boyd headed the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2002 to 2012 and during his reign offered Shakespeare’s history plays at Stratford-upon-Avon and North London’s Roundhouse in some of the most stunning productions I’ve ever seen.

So, not so much despite the bloodbath on view here as because of it, he’s perpetuated another stunner in this Tamburlaine. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in what a top-flight director can do with a two-part classic that few directors even want to take on. Certainly, the works don’t often show up on these shores.

One reason for the infrequent appearance is that while the plays are bold and shocking, they’re not multi-dimensional. The brilliant Marlowe (1564-1593) was only 23 when they were first presented in 1587. They’re a young man’s flights of fancy. You might say they’re full of sound and fury but signifying if not nothing, then not a great deal of emotional depth.

In the course of the two parts, Tamburlaine (John Douglas Thompson) begins by abducting Zenocrate (Merritt Janson), who’s meant to be another’s bride, before he sets out to depose every monarch ruling in a wide swath around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. On he goes trampling over everything and everyone in his path through the Ottoman Empire, Persia and Central Asia. Before he’s finished in this outing, he’s perched atop a carriage that contains a lower cage heaped with gold crowns.

To say Marlowe is repetitious only suggests the problem. On the other hand, the iambic pentameter in which Tamburlaine expresses himself is mesmerizing. The crude warrior definitely has the gift of gorgeous gab. As he approaches each realm he plans to conquer, he addresses the rulers he’s about to bloody with irresistible rhetoric. He’s even high-toned when insisting that Calyphas (James Udom), the eldest of his three sons, is cowardly and deserves to be done in.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is so infallibly victorious — with percussionist Arthur Solari, in a niche above the stage, accompanying his destructive path with unceasing cacophony — that he meets no foe worthy of him. He’s only vanquished at last by illness. When onlookers are longing to see him get a comeuppance, this demise feels like a cheat. But apparently Elizabethan audiences were thrilled with it just as it is.

The imposing Thompson, who’s become one of today’s most accomplished classical actors, is astonishing for both stamina and declaratory prowess. How does any actor remember the order in which Tamburlaine’s speeches go, let alone memorize them? Thompson has no problem with his myriad lines.

Many of the other cast members, all doing Boyd proud, take on several roles. This means that Saxon Palmer, for one, gets to be bloodied again and again. After a while, the bloodstained actors become a metaphor for Marlowe repeating himself. More than that, the violence in Tamburlaine takes on the air of Marlowe’s foreseeing his own death. When he was 29, he was slain in a barroom brawl.

Listening to this bard’s poetry throughout the Tamburlaine parts and aware that Shakespeare and Marlowe were great pals and influences on each other, anyone might entertain the thought that had Marlowe lived longer, his output as he and friend Will continued to challenge each other, would likely have been more memorable than his still exciting Tamburlaine dramas.
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The blood in Kneehigh’s Tristan & Yseult is less than what’s in Tamburlaine Parts I and II and is stylized. Emma Rice, the company founder and adapter here of the Cornish myth — with writers Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy — has something other than seeing red about which she wants to discourse.

Like Boyd, she’s greatly theatrical with the matter. On a Bill Mitchell set that conjures a one-ring circus, she begins by having Yseult (Hannah Vassallo) and her French-speaking Tristan (Dominic Marsh) enjoy their infatuation, despite Yseult’s obligation to older, less buff King Mark (Mike Shepherd). In one sequence, the young lovers swing from separate ropes in giddy infatuation.

Their fun is augmented by a good deal of cast buffoonery, so much so that before the first-act ends, the goofiness has become attenuated. The cuteness, which is narrated by a character identified as Whitehands (Kirsty Woodward, in an Igor Cassini-like suit, pillbox hat and gloves), goes on too long.

This isn’t to say the clowning by Niall Ashdown as Yseult’s nurse Brangian, Damon Daunno as King Mark’s right-hand man Frocin, along with Robert Lukay and Tom Jackson Greaves doesn’t continue to amuse, often as they scamper about in knitted hoods reminiscent of chain-mail head coverings.

The second Tristan & Yseult act is when Rice comes to her deliberate point. Whitehands has been talking about her place among the unloved. A neon sign above the set reads “The Club of the Unloved.” (The band on an upper level plays, among other songs of love-gone-wrong, “Perfidia” and “Love Hurts.”)

The message Rice forcibly wants to stress is that the passion shared by Tristan and Yseult isn’t available to everyone, is perhaps available only to the few. Others, like Whitehands, may witness it but never get to share in it. They’re condemned to one-sided romances. The white-gloved woman asks, “What becomes of so much wasted love?” While she’s imploring, Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod” roils, an homage to the Tristan-Yseult devotion, even if their love has been consummated but not fully requited.

Love both requited and un- is apparently an abiding theme for Rice, whose inventive Brief Encounter pastiche is what first earned her and Kneehigh stateside praise. (How personal a condition is unsatisfying love for Rice, a spectator could wonder?) Again in her Brief Encounter and against musical underscoring — Rachmaninoff, as Noel Coward used in his film — a pair of lovers have a short-lived but all-encompassing affair.

So at this point Rice, like Marlowe, has two companion parts. It’ll be interesting to see if she comes up with another to complete a love trilogy. Maybe Rice fans can second-guess her by combing through accounts of lovers who live out their mutual feelings while classical music throbs away in the background.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Roberto Gomez Bolanos, the iconic Mexican comedian who wrote and played the boy television character “El Chavo del Ocho” that defined a generation for millions of Latin American children, died Friday, the Televisa television network said. He was 85.

Known as “Chespirito” (chess-pee-REE-to), he changed comedy in Latin America, taking his inspiration from Laurel and Hardy as well as Mexico’s other transcendent comedian who eventually made it to Hollywood, Cantinflas. The cause of death was not immediately announced. His two most famous characters were “El Chavo del Ocho,” who lived in the homes of Latin America and beyond with his barrel, freckles, striped shirt and frayed cap, and the naive superhero “El Chapulin Colorado,” or “The Crimson Grasshopper.” His morning show was a staple for preschoolers, much like “Captain Kangaroo” in the United States.

He warmed the hearts of millions with a clean comedy style far removed from the sexual innuendo and obscenity-laced jokes popular today. In a career that started in the 1950s, he wrote hundreds of television episodes, 20 films and theater productions that drew record-breaking audiences.

His prolific output earned him the nickname “Chespirito.” It came from the Spanish phonetic pronunciation of Shakespeare — “Chespir” — combined with “ito,” a diminutive commonly used in Mexico that seemed natural for Gomez Bolanos because of his short stature.

“Nicknames are the most essential in life, more valuable than names,” the actor said in 2011.

On Friday, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted, “Mexico has lost an icon whose work has transcended generations and borders.”

Born Feb. 21, 1929, he trained as an engineer, but he was dedicated to writing from a young age.

Talented both on the screen and behind it, he achieved smashing success in 1970 with the creation of “Chespirito,” a television show that included segments about “The Crimson Grasshopper.”

The goofy superhero dressed in a red bodysuit and hood with antennae that helped him detect danger miles away. He completed the outfit with yellow shorts and boots, giving him the look of a red bumblebee. The character, whose superpowers included shrinking to the size of a pill and dodging enemies, constantly repeated his signature phrases, “You didn’t count on my cleverness” and “All the good people, follow me.”

In 1971, Gomez Bolanos wrote and acted as “El Chavo del Ocho” (“The Boy from the Eight”), a reference to the channel that broadcast the show.

“El Chavo” proved so popular that reruns are still shown in multiple countries in Latin American and on Spanish language television in the United States. Many Latin Americans, living under dictatorships during the height of the show, found his underdog triumphs heroic in the face of authority.

In a 2005 interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Gomez Bolano said he always wrote with working class people in mind.

“There are writers who pour out words, concepts that sound really important but that basically say nothing,” he said. “I always tried to be as concise as possible, all to try and reach everyone, but especially the simple people, those who needed to be reached more than anyone else.”

He also delved successfully in theater for adults. In 1992 he produced, directed and acted in “11 and 12,” the story of a man who loses his genitals in an accident and wants to impregnate his wife. The play set a record in Mexico, surpassing 3,200 performances.

Proof of his wide popularity came when he opened a Twitter account in 2011 with a simple message: “Hello. I’m Chespirito. I’m 82-years-old and this is the first time I tweet. This is my debut. All the good people, follow me!”

In less than two months, he had 1 million followers. By the time of his death, there were 6.6 million.

Gomez Bolanos is survived by his second wife, actress Florinda Meza, as well as six children from his first marriage and 12 grandchildren.

Kate Hudson and Cara Delevingne are our new favorite Hollywood BFFs.

The duo accepted Julianne Hough’s Thanksgiving Dance Wars challenge and recruited Hudson’s family members Kurt Russell, Oliver Hudson, Boston Russell and Wyatt Russell to boogie alongside them in a four-part Instagram post. Goldie Hawn counted the group in as they danced an original routine to Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk.” The dance included wine, a stuffed dog and “synchronized” foot moves.

“We gladly accept @juleshough #thanksgivingdancewars challenge,” Kate wrote on her Instagram account. “Let’s make this happen @caradelevingne #oliverhudson #wyattrussell #bostonrussell #pa #dancebattle #UptownFunk And that’s my Mom counting us in in the background.”

We gladly accept @juleshough #thanksgivingdancewars challenge Let’s make this happen @caradelevingne #oliverhudson #wyattrussell #bostonrussell #pa #dancebattle #UptownFunk And that’s my Mom counting us in in the background PART ONE…

A video posted by Kate Hudson (@katehudson) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:09pm PST

PART TWO… #dancebattle #thanksgivingdancewars @juleshough @caradelevingne

A video posted by Kate Hudson (@katehudson) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:11pm PST

PART THREE… ❤️ #dancebattle #thanksgivingdancewars @juleshough @caradelevingne

A video posted by Kate Hudson (@katehudson) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:13pm PST

PART FOUR…. Happy Thanksgiving everyone! From our family to yours, peace and love @juleshough @caradelevingne #lovemyfamily #UptownFunk #markronson #thanksgivingdancewars #dancebattle #SuchABlast

A video posted by Kate Hudson (@katehudson) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:19pm PST

Hough challenged Hudson, as well as other celebrities including Jimmy Fallon and Taylor Swift, to compete in the dance battle. Her family shared some amazing videos on Instagram, proving that Thanksgiving is a whole lot more fun when you dance the holiday calories away.

TURKEY MAN SAYS DANCE!!!! #thanksgivingdancewars #dancewars #dancebattle #turkeyman @michaelpoole47 @marabethpoole #fireball #pittbull @katherineh82 @mariamenounos @markballas

A video posted by juleshough (@juleshough) on Nov 11, 2014 at 7:54pm PST

Market share is a fun metric for comparing a product’s popularity, but there is a better way to gauge if those who own a device actually use it. Data regarding online shopping is a really good way to see who is putting devices to use, and IBM has compiled some shopping and purchase stats for Thursday shopping. Apple iOS device … Continue reading