IN: Marvin Neil Simon (born July 4, 1927) is an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He has written more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly adaptations of his plays. He has received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer. Simon grew up in New York during the Great Depression, with his parents' financial hardships affecting their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood.

Simon's characters are typically portrayed as "imperfect, unheroic figures who are at heart decent human beings", according to Koprince, and she traces Simon's style of comedy to that of Menander, a playwright of ancient Greece. Menander, like Simon, also used average people in domestic life settings, the stories also blending humor and tragedy into his themes. Many of Simon's most memorable plays are built around two-character scenes, as in segments of California Suite and Plaza Suite.  Before writing, Simon tries to create an image of his characters. He says that the play, Star Spangled Girl which was a box-office failure, was "the only play I ever wrote where I did not have a clear visual image of the characters in my mind as I sat down at the typewriter." Simon considers "character building" as an obligation, stating that the "trick is to do it skillfully". While other writers have created vivid characters, they have not created nearly as many as Simon: "Simon has no peers among contemporary comedy playwrights," states biographer Robert Johnson.  Simon's characters often amuse the audience with sparkling "zingers," believable due to Simon's skill with writing dialogue. He reproduces speech so "adroitly" that his characters are usually plausible and easy for audiences to identify with and laugh at. His characters may also express "serious and continuing concerns of mankind ... rather than purely topical material". McGovern notes that his characters are always impatient "with phoniness, with shallowness, with amorality", adding that they sometimes express "implicit and explicit criticism of modern urban life with its stress, its vacuity, and its materialism." However, Simon's characters will never be seen thumbing his or her nose at society."
QUESTION: What is another interesting aspect of his characters?
IN: Nicholas Culpeper (probably born at Ockley, Surrey, 18 October 1616 - died at Spitalfields, London, 10 January 1654) was an English botanist, herbalist, physician, and astrologer. His published books includes The English Physitian (1652), i. e. the Complete Herbal (1653 ff), which contains a rich store of pharmaceutical and herbal knowledge, and Astrological Judgement of Diseases from the Decumbiture of the Sick (1655), which is one of the most detailed documents known on the practice of medical astrology in Early Modern Europe. Culpeper spent the greater part of his life in the English outdoors cataloguing hundreds of medicinal herbs. He criticized what he considered the unnatural methods of his contemporaries, writing: "This not being pleasing, and less profitable to me, I consulted with my two brothers, Dr. Reason and Dr. Experience, and took a voyage to visit my mother Nature, by whose advice, together with the help of Dr. Diligence, I at last obtained my desire; and, being warned by Mr. Honesty, a stranger in our days, to publish it to the world, I have done it."

Influenced during his apprenticeship by the radical preacher John Goodwin, who said no authority was above question, Culpeper became a radical republican and opposed the "closed shop" of medicine enforced by the censors of the College of Physicians. In his youth, Culpeper translated medical and herbal texts such as the 'London Pharmacopaeia' from the Latin for his master. It was during the political turmoil of the English civil war, when the College of Physicians was unable to enforce their ban on the publication of medical texts, that Culpeper deliberately chose to publish his translations in vernacular English as self-help medical guides for use by the poor who could not afford the medical help of expensive physicians. Follow-up publications included a manual on childbirth and his main work, 'The English Physician', which was deliberately sold very cheaply, eventually becoming available as far afield as colonial America. It has been in print continuously since the 17th century.  Culpeper believed medicine was a public asset rather than a commercial secret, and the prices physicians charged were far too expensive compared to the cheap and universal availability of nature's medicine. He felt the use of Latin and expensive fees charged by doctors, lawyers and priests worked to keep power and freedom from the general public.  Three kinds of people mainly disease the people - priests, physicians and lawyers - priests disease matters belonging to their souls, physicians disease matters belonging to their bodies, and lawyers disease matters belonging to their estate.  Culpeper was a radical in his time, angering his fellow physicians by condemning their greed, unwillingness to stray from Galen and their use of harmful practices such as toxic remedies and bloodletting. The Society of Apothecaries were similarly incensed by the fact that he suggested cheap herbal remedies as opposed to their expensive concoctions.
QUESTION:
what did he do to show his opposition?