If you don’t personally have a Kindle yet, chances are you’ve seen somebody on the net raving about how they can’t live without theirs.  In theory it’s right up my alley – I like to read, I would read more if I could have a book in front of me more often, but I pretty much only get my content in audio or ebook form because I’m just not into carrying books around, and ordering new ones and waiting for them to be shipped to me.  With a Kindle, getting a new book is as easy, very literally, as saying “I want that book.”  It just shows up for you. I do not have one, no, but I have the next best thing – the freely available Kindle reader for my iPhone.  Yes, yes, I know that physically it’s not the same thing at all.  But if we get back to that idea of “I would read more if there were always a book in front of me”, then this fits the bill perfectly.  I can now get modern content, not just the public domain stuff, and have it available to me all the time on a device that I have with me anyway, all the time. Anyway.  In celebration of the launch of Kindle, Stephen King himself wrote a short story called UR.  Let’s get the review out of the way first – it’s a neat idea but a lousy story.  It is 100% product placement for the Kindle (I’m not kidding, there are characters saying things like “I love my Kindle I thought with features like these it would cost double what it did!”  Just like an infomercial).  And King’s normal depictions of reality that draw you in to the story are replaced with his own personal political leanings about the most recent political election.  He certainly phoned this one in. But, back to the idea.  The author’s kindle arrived mysteriously, and has this weird experimental feature that allows him to download books from alternate universes.  It doesn’t take him long to realize that he can tap into literature from worlds where Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, or Hemingway wrote a dozen more novels than he did, and so on.  The book refers to these parallel worlds as “URs”, hence the title. “What does UR mean?” I saw people ask in the forums.  Well, the author explains it in the story – it’s either a place in the Old Testament, or else a prefix meaning basic or primitive. At one point in my reading just now, King used the phrase “the ur-Hemingway.”  And then it hit me – could he have had the ur-Hamlet in mind the whole time?  Is that perhaps where he got the idea?  I wonder.  Early in the story the characters do a bit of exploration into alternate universe Shakespeare, but that doesn’t seem to be the main point of the story (the narrator character is more of a Hemingway type). I’m not done with the story yet, but that just sort of leapt out at me today.  I don’t often associate King with Shakespeare (except maybe when making Titus Andronicus jokes), so the idea that he got the premise of this latest story from Hamlet is amusing to me.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/stephon_marbury_embroils_celtics I love it when The Onion does it Shakespeare style.  “A Director Sets A Play In the Time and Place Shakespeare Intended” is still one of the great Onion stories of all time. When you throw in my Boston Celtics, well, then it’s comedy gold. "Weird thing is, he kept calling the other guys moors, which is just really messed up," the 12-time all-star said. "I mean, what is that, anyway? He didn’t say it like it was a good thing. If he plays good basketball he can do what he wants, but I’m not going to listen to anyone call me or my guys moors." All three men also commented that Marbury had at some point pulled each one of them aside and told them the other two had been "making the beast with two backs."

http://ask.metafilter.com/115818/Wanted-decent-nontraditional-Shakespeare-adaptations Over on Metafilter somebody’s asked for “interesting” adaptations of Shakespeare, either in book, film of play form.  The usual suspects are there, Kurosawa, Stoppard, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc… Here’s a few that were new to me: Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (I didn’t know he did a Hamlet?) A Thousand Clowns (1997, apparently King Lear?) Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet   … Wow, either it’s a short list or I’ve just seen a whole lot of Shakespeare adaptations. 🙂

A long long time ago I found Shakespeare in XML, by Jon Bosak, and I’ve quite literally carried it around with me ever since.  If you’re not a programming geek you may not know the value of XML, so let me try to explain.  XML is like a database inside a file – it is self describing of what’s in it.  So instead of this:

Act 1, Scene 1

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.
    FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO
BERNARDO
    Who’s there? You get something more like this: <Act> <Title>Act 1</Title> <Scene> <Title>Scene 1</Title> <Stagedir>Elsinore.  A platform before the castle … </Stagedir> <Speech> <Speaker> <Name>Bernardo</Name> </Speaker> <Line>Who’s there?</Line> </Speech> … Get the idea?  So if you’re a code geek you look at that and start seeing the logic you can apply, like “In Act #3 how many lines are there in all of the speeches spoken by Hamlet?” and it’s quite literally one or two lines of code. Anyway, I never found the Sonnets in XML.  There’s one or two out there as examples of how to do XML, but I never found the whole set of 154, and I wanted it. So I made it.  It’s very basic, but it does what I need.  If others find it useful and make enhancements I’d appreciate hearing about it. Enjoy!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/opinion/04dowd.html?_r=2&ref=opinion Fun story, full of Lear references, about how John McCain (the man who professed last year to not even knowing how to send e-mail) is now on Twitter.  Everybody is quite sure that it’s his people doing it, by the way, not him.  To be fair to the man, his long time injuries prevent him from sitting at a keyboard for extended periods. It is not a piece that is positive on Obama, in case you’d like to know that up front.  But it is hard to deny the facts (I am a supporter of Obama, not McCain) – there’s lots and lots and lots of wasteful spending still going on, now with Obama’s signature on it.   Can’t really argue that.  The best you can say to defend it is “Picking your battles.”   McCain’s entire argument seemed to be about trimming 7 billion dollars – from a 410 billion dollar bill.  Hopefully (and note I’m saying hopefully, not definitely!), Obama will pick some bigger battles to fight.