http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=17973 Ok, love this crossover.  I subscribe to Tor.com, one of the providers of free ebooks,specifically science fiction and fantasy.  So when the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern popped up in the description, naturally I was curious! From “master of alternative history” Harry Turtledove comes “We Haven’t Got There Yet”, the story of one Mr. William Shakespeare who becomes enraged that someone has taken some of his characters and put them in a new play.  He winds up at a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Sounds great to me.  It is a short story, a single (long) web page.  So it won’t take forever to read it.  I just thought I’d post about it first before somebody beat me to it :)! UPDATE : Posted this, went to Twitter, found at least 6 people already forwarding the link.  Wow, this stuff moves fast.  When do these people clean the kitchen?

http://denofgeek.com/movies/221398/in_defence_of_jar_jar_binks.html “In Defense of Jar Jar Binks” is sure to hit a few hot buttons with the geek crowd.  Truthfully I would skip the article completely if not for the need to find the Shakespeare reference in it. If your geek pride is too strong to stomach the idea of somebody defending the place of Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars movies, let me get right to the Shakespeare – the author makes the argument that Jar Jar is the clown, and compares him to Lancelot the Clown from Merchant Of Venice.  The clown, he says, “provides useful commentary, lessons, and above all, laughs…” I don’t think anybody faults the movie for having a comic aspect.  It’s when it turns from dramatic to comic on the whole that there’s a problem.  The original movies had their comedy, after all.  But somewhere around Return Of the Jedi and the Eewoks, George Lucas decided that family-friendly cute-and-cuddly comedy was better box office gold than smart alec Han Solo and Chewbacca banter, apparently.

http://www.slate.com/id/2214106/ Although it seems a bit stale as far as celebrity news goes (apparently the video just dropped), Slate’s got an article up look at Britney Spears’ “controversial” album title “If You Seek Amy”(*) and how it’s actually a much older joke than perhaps even she realizes.  Dates back through a whole variety of bands that thought of the joke before her, one of whom even acknowledges getting it from James Joyce.  The article then goes on to show that, as always, Shakespeare said it first.  Only his is dirtier.   (*) If you seem to be having trouble figuring out the joke, it helps to realize that sometimes words sound like letters.  So “If you” = F U …  do I really have to <ahem> spell it out for you?

If you follow the Shakespeare keyword on Twitter long enough, you’ll see the same lines thrown around repeatedly.  The most popularly “retweeted” quote, by far, is this one: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. It’s the sort of line that you can just picture people seeing come across their chat window, saying “Whoa man, that’s deep”, and feeling the urge to forward it.  I suppose if this were a generation removed it might have looked a little something like this in your email inbox:

Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: OMG SO TRUE! (Fwd: Fwd: MUST READ (Fwd: Fwd: The Power Of Thinking… But really, isn’t it a bit simplistic?  It’s a little like the “there’s no universal right and wrong, that’s why people need God as a moral center” argument.  Are good and bad always subjective?  Is it possible to find something that you think is bad, that people will universally agree with?  (That is, of course, other than the argumentative morons who take the opposite side just because that’s their purpose in life…)

http://davidsonnews.net/2009/03/18/sonnets-book-battles-football-and-shakespeare/ Congratulations to 7th grader Ruth Swallow who won first prize in the literature portion of the North Carolina Reflections contest for … let me see if I get this right …  composing a “coronet” of seven sonnets, each linked by first/last lines.  So the last line of the first sonnet becomes the first line of the next. I have to say, I’ve written sonnets and I found it difficult.  To write a bunch of them, on a theme, with that particular requirement?  In seventh grade, which would make her, oh, about 13 years old is all that much more impressive.  Good job, Ruth! [Of course, as a Shakespearean I have to note that the first/last line thing confuses me – we all know that there’s a different number of syllables in the last line!] [UPDATE : Thanks to Bill for gently pointing out to me that it is the rhyme scheme, not the syllable count, that changes in the final couplet.  Don’t ask me where my brain was, I don’t exactly know. ]   Wait!  There’s more! Later in the article where it talks about a local school’s production of The Comedy Of Errors.  Though I’m not quite sure the point of this paragraph: “This is not your grandmother’s Shakespeare,” claims Ms. Gerdy. “It’s full of physical comedy and characters that bear striking resemblances to famous old “clowns” like Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers and the Keystone Cops.” First off, it was probably one of Shakespeare’s earlier efforts and thus the very definition of “grandmother’s” Shakespeare as compared to a later, younger generation.  And second, Ms. Gerdy then goes on to compare it to Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops, shows that only my grandmother would recognize :).