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"Have either of you two clowns read the assignment?"
"Are either of you taking this seriously?"
Burchfield calls this "a clash between notional and actual agreement."*

The conjunction or does not conjoin (as and does): when nor or or is used the
subject closer to the verb determines the number of the verb. Whether the
subject comes before or after the verb doesn't matter; the proximity determines
the number.

 Either my father or my brothers are going to sell the house.
 Neither my brothers nor my father is going to sell the house.
 Are either my brothers or my father responsible?
 Is either my father or my brothers responsible?
Because a sentence like "Neither my brothers nor my father is going to sell the house"
sounds peculiar, it is probably a good idea to put the plural subject closer to the verb
whenever that is possible.

The words there and here are never subjects.

There are two reasons [plural subject] for this.
 There is no reason for this.
 Here are two apples.
With these constructions (called expletive constructions), the subject follows the verb but
still determines the number of the verb.
Verbs in the present tense for third-person, singular subjects (he, she, it and
anything those words can stand for) have s-endings. Other verbs do not add s-
endings.
He loves and she loves and they love_ and . . . .
Sometimes modifiers will get betwen a subject and its verb, but these modifiers
must not confuse the agreement between the subject and its verb.
The mayor, who has been convicted along with his four brothers on four counts
of various crimes but who also seems, like a cat, to have several political
lives, is finally going to jail.
Sometimes nouns take weird forms and can fool us into thinking they're plural
when they're really singular and vice-versa. Consult the section on the Plural
Forms of Nouns and the section on Collective Nouns for additional help. Words
such as glasses, pants, pliers, and scissors are regarded as plural (and require
plural verbs) unless they're preceded the phrase pair of (in which case the
word pair becomes the subject).
 My glasses were on the bed.

 My pants were torn.
 A pair of plaid trousers is in the closet.
Some words end in -s and appear to be plural but are really singular and require
singular verbs.
 The news from the front is bad.