“Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad.

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Burt Katz drove home. It was the middle of the day. He worked downtown but lived in Skokie. His wife, Sharon, watched him come through the door. She was throwing a birthday party for their son, who was 5. “What are you doing home?” she asked.
Burt, who was in his early 30s, explained that he had words with his boss, that he threw the guy up against a wall and shouted at him, and so, though fascinated with business, he hated the institutional sensibilities of white-collar work and abruptly quit. He had three kids, a mortgage and no plans. He also stopped shaving on that day, slightly longer than 40 years ago — April 12, 1971. He has not shaven since.

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After absorbing a series of historic shocks during the summer, the edifice could take a long time to fix, and its future is uncertain. Congress? No. The Washington Monument, a 555-foot, pointed metaphor for what ails the nation’s political system.

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INSIDE an unmarked warehouse here, not far from a depressing stretch of fast-food joints and the Southern X-Posure strip club, Robert MacDonald — nickname: Maximus — is torturing a group of people. Or at least that’s how it looks. One man, howling in agony a second ago, has collapsed in a pool of sweat. A woman wipes away tears. A few of the rest are limping.

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I have a belt of adipose tissue lodged around my middle. I’m a bumper car, protected from unwarranted bumping. Need a gently sloping shelf on which to display historical thimbles or wee porcelain Scotties? Call me. The Alford steaks, they are marbled.

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Welcome to Blue Springs Creek, in the Ocala National Forest, where Lee Allen Young lives on a raft he calls the Huckleberry Finn with a faithful mutt he has named Becky Thatcher. A barefooted man of 59, he says he is looking for Tom Sawyer — that is, he is looking for the kind of free and irresponsible life all but gone in modern Florida. He has no bank account, no credit cards, no telephone. “Civilization,” Mark Twain once declared, “is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.” Young has no spouse, no commitments, no immediate plans except to fry a few fish for supper.

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Please, spare me your tales of testosterone-fueled adventure, your cage matches, your bull riding, your BASE jumping. You want to prove your manhood? Drive the new Fiat 500 through parts of South Carolina. Extra points if you wear bronzer and complain to your waitress at the Waffle House that your macchiato is uninspired. You ain’t from around here, are you, dude?

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More polyester. Thinner shirts. Smaller buttons. The fallout from the cotton crisis looks like 1970s disco with way higher prices.

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Here is a small strip of Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, and what lies beneath this ordinary patch of asphalt and concrete is a 40-yard boulevard dedicated to murderers, gangsters, villains, thieves, scoundrels. You can stand there all day in sunshine and shadow, never realizing that a river of wickedness runs three stories below your feet.

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In the next two months, Laurie MacDougall needs to eat 10 pizzas, take two beading classes, get at least one picture framed, have her car washed twice, drop off $30 of dry cleaning, visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with three friends, eat at Johnny’s Luncheonette in Newton and Deep Ellum in Allston, and schlep over to Burlington to buy books at the Used Book Superstore. Otherwise, $250 of discount coupons she bought from Groupon and other online daily deal sites will expire, unused.

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