http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/shakespeare-is-in-for-a-spanking/ Don’t know what to make of this.  Based on the debut work of Jake Wizner, the feature will tell the story of Shakespeare Shapiro, who chronicles his quest to get into college and find a girlfriend in his memoir, a writing project that every high school senior must complete.

Today I’m wearing my Geek “mechanics” shirt, with the normal name patch over the left chest pocket reading “Geek.”  At work I’ve always gotten amused compliments, entirely from people who obviously know me and get it. Today I’m at the gas station filling up, and the attendant says, “Why does your shirt say Geek on it like that?” ….how do you answer that, briefly? I told him, “It’s a computer thing.”  I don’t expect he cared for a longer philosophical debate. UPDATE: Oops, I totally intended that post to go to my other, computer-specific blog.  I was going to delete this one for having no Shakespeare content, but then I figure it’s got Geek content, so it half counts 🙂

 http://www.scovillefilm.com/ I don’t know much about Alexander Abela’s Macbeth adaptation, Makibefo.  If I understand correctly, the director chose to make a silent film, focusing instead on the “language of pictures”, attempting to capture the essence of Shakespeare’s words entirely within the film’s imagery. He’s also working on (completed?) an Othello adaptation as well.

http://www.librarian.net/stax/2366/sarah-palin-vp-nominee/ I’m familiar with the story of Sarah Palin, Republican VP nominee, wanting to ban books from the library (go ahead and reread that a few times :)).  I had not yet seen anybody suggest a list of books that she wanted banned.  As mentioned in the post there’s no official confirmation that the included list is accurate, but it’s all we’ve got. Two Shakespeares show up on the list — Merchant of Venice (an odd choice, given that she belongs to a church that thinks Jews deserve terrorism), and Twelfth Night.   Why Twelfth Night, you think?  It can’t be  because of the cross dressing, as there’s several others that would fit that bill as well.  Identical twins?  Nope, others have that.  Shipwreck?  Hmmm… Maybe it’s the homo-erotic implications between Orsino and “Cesario”. Blah blah, politics, no proof, yadda yadda yadda, nutty democrats and leftwing liberals…  Fine.  I’ll make it a general Shakespeare question — if you were forging a list of books to ban, why would you pick Twelfth Night as one of them? [I’m thinking, by the way, that this election has to present the opportunity for at least a few Taming of the Shrew jokes.  I’ll keep an eye out…]   UPDATE:  Angela correctly points out that the list of books being circulated is bogus.  It is, in fact, a direct copy of the list at http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html, which is not comprehensive by its own admission.  It’s not to say that the “Palin tried to ban books” story has no truth, merely that the list in question is not accurate.

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/08/28/sukiyaki/index.html Come on, how often do you expect to see all those words strung together? Doesn’t seem at all interesting to me, but certainly something I couldn’t miss linking.