Shakespeare In The Slammer

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A local company, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, put on a performance of "Macbeth" for inmates of the Patuxent Institution, a maximum-security Maryland prison that houses hundreds of violent offenders.

The actors were searched, stainless steel swords were replaced with wooden sticks and two roles for children were written out of the production for the prison version of Shakespeare's shortest play.

The show went on before about 150 inmates and another 200 family members and friends invited by the prisoners. The absence of any stage lighting meant the dead had to walk off stage rather than being discreetly removed in the shadows.

Nevertheless, the production's climactic fight scene seemed to go over well with the audience.

"I never seen anything like it," inmate Vouthynor Sovann told the Post. "I mean, it's nothing like TV or cable, you know? It's a whole other level when it's live."

Tickets were $5 each, a tidy sum for an inmate. Shiva Dayani, 25, a female prisoner who's in for murder, brushed up on "Macbeth" with a comic-book version of the play and then went forth to hawk tickets.

"I tried to sell it like a movie," she said. "I told them there's violence, witches, swords and kings. That it's like life but to the extreme. That in the end it's about the things people will do to get what they want and what that does to them."

Shakespeare in the slammer was the brain child of warden John Wilt.

"His work is universal. I mean, who else still has his stuff being performed 400 years later?" said Wilt.

GPS Addicts Beware

The Los Angeles Times reports on a major drawback to life in sunny Costa Rica.

It turns out that the prosperous Central American nation of four million has never bothered to switch to the use of streets and numbers for addresses. Many streets are unnamed, and street signs are virtually non-existent. Forget about numbers, too. Instead, Costa Rica uses a colonial-era system in which the location of your house is expressed in relation to the nearest landmark, which might be a church or a fast-food restaurant.

The result, predictably enough, is that until recently, letters take an average of nine days to be delivered, with one in five pieces of mail never delivered at all. And as you might imagine, getting an ambulance, police or firefighters to your house can be a potentially fatal problem.

"It's total chaos," compained Claudio Gonzalez, 73. "I could find my way easier in a foreign country."

Costa Rica is taking steps to correct the problem, with postal officials assigning a street name, number and zip code to every building in the country. That has cut letter delivery time to two days.

Still, Costa Rica is no GPS paradise. Street signs, for example, are still as rare as unicorns.

Early Retirees Get Scammed

Retirees are being ripped off by greedy financial advisers who promise far more than they can deliver, USA Today reports.

The target is workers who want to retire early. They are persuaded to place their retirement savings into the hands of financial advisers who promise a fantastic return. But the reality is often very different, with risky investments wiping out the retirement nest eggs.

Ray Lirette, an oil field worker for Chevron, turned over his savings of $335,000 to an investment broker and retired at age 52.

"He showed me this projection that I'd have $1.3 million in 10 years," Lirette, 63, tols the newspaper. "I thought, 'I guess we can retire.'"

But retirement didn't last long. A string of risky investment reduced his savings to $43,000. About five years aog, he and his wife returned to work at a job that paid a fraction of what they previously earned,

"It makes you feel sick," Lirette said. "At our age, we should be sitting back. But … we're fighting to pay bills."

USA Today says the advisers often use the companies where the workers are employed.

"Advisers are crashing company retirement parties, holding seminars in the workplace - sometimes with little oversight by employers - and persuading employees to pass along their co-workers' contact information," the newspaper says.

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