Month: June 2008

http://www.chasingthebard.com I may have mentioned this podcast/podiobook in passing when I first tripped over it. Let me now get back to it. I love it. I love it love it love it, I think it might well be my favorite podiobook yet (and that’s saying something, as I’ve gone through several dozen of them). Imagine a fantasy story that opens with the birth of one William Shakespeare. The event is attended by none other than Robin Goodfellow (aka Puck) himself, who witnesses it as a magical event of great significance. Thus begins this crossover story between the world of the “Fey” (the fairies), and the human world in which Shakespeare, gifted with “bardic” fairy powers, lives. If that’s not enough to hook you, I’ll say more. It’s not just good because it’s got Shakespeare in it (sounds like a Monty Python skit, “It’s all got Shakespeare in it!”) It’s good because it’s well written and well produced, too. There’s the appropriate amount of sound effects and music. The voice acting is appropriate. The narrator/author, with her New Zealand accent, is just exotic enough. She writes very well. The characters are excellent. She writes Elizabethan London well. She writes the fairies well. She even writes the battle scenes well. Perhaps the best thing of all, as far as I can tell, is that she hasn’t rewritten any of Shakespeare’s bio yet. She’s actually working inside the missing pieces. She still has him raised in Stratford, married to Anne Hathaway, and then heading off to London leaving behind her and the kids. She’s showing respect for the source material, she’s not just borrowing it where it suits her. Why are you still reading? Go get it, right now, so we can discuss it. Disclaimer! She’s up to chapter 14. It is a serialized work, so you cannot get the whole story yet (although I believe you can buy the completed print book if you like). Also note that there’s a sex scene in Chapter 13, which comes with a great deal of warning ahead of time, in case you like/loathe that sort of thing.

More from this morning’s conversation:  (it helps to know that my daughters are Katherine, 6, and Elizabeth, soon to be 4.  Elizabeth is doing the questioning.) “The star of that one (AYLI) is a girl named Rosalind.  I hear it’s very good.”

“Daddy, did Shakespeare write any more stories with girls?”

“Oh, sure, lots and lots, Shakespeare wrote some very good stories with girls.  There’s Juliet, and Miranda, and Cordelia…

“I like Cordelia!”

“I know you do!  There’s also a couple of Katherines!” 

(Elizabeth looks very impressed.)

“I’m afraid Shakespeare didn’t write any Elizabeth stories, though.” 

(Bummer.) 

“But there’s a reason for that.  You want to know why?”

“Why?”

“Because back when Shakespeare was writing all these stories?  Elizabeth was actually the *queen*.” 

(I swear, my daughter sat up straighter in her chair at that, it was the funniest thing.  Oh, well, I’m the queen?  Well then, that’s ok!)  

“He couldn’t really make up any stories with Elizabeth in them, you see, because if the Queen didn’t like it?  Bam, right in the dungeon.” 

(Elizabeth contemplates this and seems to decide that yes, that would be the appropriate thing for a queen to do.  If you don’t like the story, then the teller of the story goes to the dungeon.)  “And who is the queen now?”

“Actually, it’s kinda funny that you ask, but believe it or not it’s still Elizabeth!” I didn’t bother explaining that it’s a different Elizabeth, because she wouldn’t have gotten it or cared.  She’s still got the sense of time where “last week” means a long time ago, and “tomorrow” means “soon.”

“Don’t forget the As You Like It is playing from July 18 – Aug 3, we have to pick a date we want to go.”

“We have the babysitter already for July 26, we were gonna go to a movie with Sara and Brian but I can see if they want to go see Shakespeare instead.  Would you want to go with them?”

“That’s fine.  Can we do like we did last year, and one night during the week I’ll just go by myself, and then on the weekend we can go with people?”

“Why do you need to see it by yourself?”

“You have to remember, I’m going to be walking past this show for weeks.  Every day I’ll see it built up, I’ll see them rehearse.  I will hear it in the wind as I walk by.  It is very important to me as a Shakespeare geek to enjoy that feeling of simply walking into the middle of the park, sitting down, and being surrounded by that stuff.  Plus, remember that time we went to Taming of the Shrew with Liz and Joe and at intermission she told me she thought it was better than Hamlet?  I had to spent the second half of the show trying not to kill her.”

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/science-channel/4972-what-are-the-odds-shakespeare-monkey-video.htm# We all know the whole “infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare” thing, it’s been done to death.  But on How Stuff Works they use a video presentation for a discussion of statistics.  Hey, whatever works.

Ok, ok, ok.  I saw Wordle come across my radar, but chose not to post about it, because it seemed more art than tech.  Wordle takes tag clouds and allows you to manipulate them graphically by altering shape, color, font and so on, to produce word art.  It’s cool, no doubt, but personally I’m more interested in what the cloud shows about the text, rather than why the artist chose to lay the words out in the shape of a fish.  There’s no Shakespeare in your color choice.  Know what I mean?
But it seems I’m in the minority, as at least one person’s done Sonnet 18 already, and Rebecca over on Shaksper_Random is doing t-shirts, including the uncommon choice of Richard II. I may not play with it myself, but who knows, maybe I’d buy a t-shirt.